John Keats
Do you remember Nani? I’ve been asking this from the beginning because no one here remembers anything. We like Oblivion better than Lauren Bacall driving Humphrey Bogart crazy in To Have and Have Not. One day, Howard Hawks called Hemingway and told him he was going to make a great movie of one of his most mediocre stories. I don’t know if this is true or if it belongs to the long list of urban legends that proliferated during Hollywood’s best years. Maybe I like to imagine the author of The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Assassins drunkenly and foul-mouthed telling the brilliant director of Río Bravo to go to hell. The Al Nani trial begins on November 12, 1983. Some police arrest Santiago Corella Ruiz (El Nani). They accuse him of robbing a jewelry store. These police officers took him to an open field so he could tell them exactly where he had hidden the loot and weapons. It was never known where the prisoner went. The real robbers were caught. But the official version was always the same: Al Nani escaped and was never heard from again. Years later, those police officers were tried and convicted. However, Santiago Corella Ruiz is considered the first person to disappear in democracy. Anti-terrorism law was applied to the detainee. No less. A journalist named Olga Sanz from Daily 16’s Culture section covers the case of El Nani, who here in fiction takes the name José Luis González Pérez, aka El Nene. But this research soon led to one of the best “noir” novels I have read in a long time, and undoubtedly the best of all the novels Javier Valenzuela has published.
We are in the Madrid Movida years. Times of change in a country that preferred to forget rather than remember back then. This novel has the best of the classics, especially Dashiell Hammett, but at some moments it can resemble Raymond Chandler’s writings due to its twilight mood. I read Olga Sanz’s own description of herself: “She had a long, triangular face, like her own, and long, bushy eyebrows shaped like an inverted V.” In her book To Have and Have Not, she makes the comparison while looking in Lauren Bacall’s mirror. And look at how Hammett describes Detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: “Samuel Spade had a long, bony lower jaw, with a protruding V-shape beneath the more flexible V of his mouth.” There is no artifice or cardboard in Javier Valenzuela’s literary references. The same thing happens when Hammett “retells” the story of Flitcraft, which he also wrote in The Maltese Falcon. The man who leaves the office to eat and never returns to the office or to his family. It is a story prepared by Hammett based on the story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne under the name Wakefield in the 19th century, and according to Borges, it is the author’s best story and one of the best stories of universal literature. And these praises, of course, also extend to the heroes of those years, who were not as sweet as we are told. The transition was giving way to the new times of Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra. There is nothing there.
The most important thing in novels is time. We are already clear in the first line of Too Late to Understand: “This story begins on Saturday, May 5, 1984, when the Copa del Rey final between Athletic Club de Bilbao and Fútbol Club was held in Madrid. Barcelona.” How, then, it sometimes falls like an unbearable burden on the shoulders of its heroes. That twilight mood that good crime novels must have if they are not to become an exercise in derogatory pathos. It’s this burden that deprives the characters of things that perhaps had to do with security and uncertainty at some point in their lives. Just as he wrote about the photographer Ouka Leele, one of the most well-known artists of those years, who died in 2018: «But he, she, all of us were alive at the time when the story I told you happened. carefree. We believed ourselves to be invincible, almost infinite. I think this feeling is what we call youth. The story is told a few years later by Olga Sanz. And for this the author has a luxurious guest: the soundtrack of a generation. It begins with Los Marismeños and Paco de Lucía and ends with the bonus track Los amigos de misfriends son mis amigos, written by Objective Burma in 1989. The most emblematic musical themes of that time preface each of the chapters of this extraordinary novel that go far beyond. The noir genre itself adopts its most radical political profile. He says that the Crossing is not as sweet as it is made out to be and that the war is won by the victors. He does not shy away from the crisis of journalism right now: “Tell me something, boss. What good is journalism if it cannot tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
And I finish with two references that we cannot miss. First: Mique Beltrán’s gorgeous cover. Second: Antonio Vega and Nacha Pop’s unforgettable song Yesterday’s Girl will continue to be an unforgettable song. Javier Valenzuela takes the name of this novel from one of his verses, I hope you like it as much as I do. And of course: forty years later, Al Nani is still missing. Ah, the famous Crossing!