Of course, it’s slow, like his literature. He was an athlete, hence his passion for rhythm, for that kind of syntax that turned his literary muscle into precise, unbreakable music that didn’t walk the paths of speculation or spectacle. His books have been made into movies (El camino de los ingleses, directed by his compatriot and friend Antonio Banderas) because his flawless abyss-like writings are not content with indirect narratives, but rely on imagery like his basic Sacramento. (Galaxia Gutenberg), where a post-war priest, a real man from Malaga like him, was so influential in the female congregation, turning the confessional and pulpit into the scene of their sexual orgies. A grueling literature, cut like a knife, are images and facts added to a book that was recently released but barely distributed: The Crocodile’s Dream, where the deadly legacy crackles like pain. The losers of the Civil War took from the duels of the war. As in the books and in real life, there is nothing superfluous in what Antonio Soler said.
At the end of the book is the sentence: “I write all the words a man can leave behind.” I think it’s not just the character, but the author as well.
Yes, it’s kind of a mix between the personal and the character. I was 49 years old when I wrote this novel, and I was imagining a man about 20 years older than me with things going pretty badly. Now that I’m approaching that age, I see that maybe I’m in a rushed mood, but back then I wanted his life to be some kind of wasteland. Although the book is not very comprehensive and the words are a wonderful flood, I wanted to balance a life in this way. My style suffered like a constriction, got rid of embellishments, and I tried to get more to the heart of the story.
Does it have anything to do with the way you face your own life?
Yes, because I have characters who share my worldview. Definitely. The child protagonist, who cannot adapt to what A Story of Violence sees and does not know what his role is in this game that is life, is my point of view. This puzzled look was the look I had as a kid. There is a character in later novels that has something to do with me. Not necessarily the protagonist. For example, a high school in Sur contributed a lot to my youth. He is a man who approaches writing not just as a way of life, but as something vital. Literature helped me to adapt to society, to the world. It has been a vital element. This is the knowledge of myself and the knowledge of others.
Why do you write so deep?
This is a requirement. The main thing in literature is not what, but how. I always give an example: two people fall in love but their families clash and force them to separate. It could be a Venezuelan soap opera or it could be Romeo and Juliet. The main thing is how to tell and what will emerge about the human being. I was born into a Republican family in Malaga, which suffered heavy reprisals at the end of 1956, my father was at war. That’s what my grandma told me when I was a kid, and I don’t know if that adds to the surrounding weirdness that surrounds me. In the 60s you had to accept the regime, I remember the referendum to support Franco, and a neighbor said to my father: but how are you going to vote no! I also remember my father stamping Franco on the envelopes, punching him. Nobody said anything to me, but a priest would come to my house and ask why we didn’t go to church. My family was secular, and… all this was in keeping with the rooted desire to know where the family came from. My departure from my roots was double: natural and social as a child who didn’t understand much about adults, because my family was disconnected from those around us.
To what extent are your books your autobiography?
After my initial hesitations about finding my narrative space, I began to realize that I was the notary public of my family. The one that will record a series of people who have gone and done as I thought they deserved, leaving no word on what they did. They once told me: How well do you know the weak. And I replied: I am one of them.
What are the books that tell the past most faithfully?
Maybe it’s the name I’m calling now. Because this is set during the Civil War as my family and grandparents experienced it. There’s a lot of what my grandma told me. Dramatic episodes and adventures. Persecutions, executions. There’s also Sur, because she has a character very close to me and the world I’m going through. Sometimes, when talking to bourgeois friends, I get the feeling that they have failed to meet. Because they are talking about another world that I know, like tourists or people who have watched documentaries but have no real knowledge.
His books also have an aesthetic ambition, Apostles and assassins come to mind. What did he dedicate himself to in that book?
It was an act of demand and discipline, and I basically forced myself not to invent anything. Of course, if you don’t invent anything, it looks like you’re writing a history book. Hence the difficulty of keeping a novelist’s pulse. So I used descriptions of characters and environments, metaphors… but without inventing. Or at least I think that’s what I’m trying to do.
What are the consequences of written requests for you?
I demand not to accept as good what seems perishable to me, but to always give my all. I was a competitive athlete and I knew that whenever I went for a run, I couldn’t break the world record. But he ran as if he was going to break it. And this is the same attempt that prompted me to write. Always do my best and correct what I have done and do not accept something that is easily good, reconsider. An editor friend of mine told me that a girl who wanted to be an editor asked her about the job, and she told me that there are different types of writers: those who can touch something from the text, and writers that you can touch if you write. touch something, they all fall. And saying that, she told him about my books. Well… yes: that’s what I’m trying to do.
Well, now there are publishers who don’t show much interest in the book.
Yes that is right. There are cases when it is noticeable. The level of immediacy we live in has these things. Moreover, there seems to be a great upheaval on the literary scene.
Anyway, the crocodile’s dream is back. Tone is in most of his books. Was it on purpose?
Before I start writing any novel, I think a lot about what would be the most appropriate structure. With Crocodile’s Dream, it seemed to me the most in-your-character questioning about the weariness of a country tired of not thinking the war was over. When I wrote this in 2005, this seemed to be a matter of elders who had already experienced the war or were very close children of the war. Interestingly, 17 years later, all this is very much alive due to the political use of such a historical event as the Civil War. There is a big political mistake there. Not thinking the conflicts are over feeds with sectors that are hoped to disappear soon, but it doesn’t seem so at the moment.
What does that mean for this country today? That bad memory of winners and losers.
It seems like a huge burden to me because it does us a lot of harm as a society not to accept the obviously imperfect but very beneficial Transition as good. Don’t cover a historical event like the Civil War either. Because not doing so means that we still hold France responsible for the Napoleonic invasion or Italy for the Roman invasion. There are many countries that use the Spanish Crossing as an example. Why do we not notice this?
Mentioning people like brigade members in this book is one way of describing this country.
Yes, I believe this is one of the functions of literature. In fact, a reader asked me if a character was inspired by Jorge Semprún, but… I didn’t think of specific first and last names when writing it.
One of the characters invokes a lantern to illuminate the darkness of what he is describing.
Yes, but it’s pretty sarcastic, because he also says that when they were in the field and they turned on the lantern at night, they found sleeping birds and fired a single shot to kill them. And that’s what was done to people back then, wasn’t it? Of course he says: I’m not shooting, I’m just turning on the flashlight. That’s why I say it’s a cynical position. It is a way of washing hands. But the one who lights the flashlight is as responsible as the shooter.
Another says: “Everything was better before I was born.” It seems to be a sentence by Antonio Soler.
Yes (laughs). Yes, of course. This is part of my personal story. There’s one thing I’m thinking about: There was a certain decline in my family when I was born, or at least the idyllic world of my family broke a bit after I arrived.
How many of you are in the books you write?
One hundred percent. Even the characters I disagree with have a look of my own. Of course, I strive for no judgment or punishment, I try to have a Cervantine compassion with everyone. In the end, you are writing about someone else but from your own subjectivity.
There is a spring resurrection at the end of this book. Really?
Yes, at the end of the dark period of the dictatorship, with the advent of democracy, then the disenchantment, and then the normalization of democracy’s logical problems, there was some hope. Then we saw that there are extreme elements that deepen the conflict, but other than that, we can be moderately satisfied socially.