One of the funniest novels we will read this year is undoubtedly The Golden Horse (Alfaguara) by Sergio Ramírez (Masatepe, 1942), a Nicaraguan stripped of his nationality by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and who, therefore, received an avalanche of offers of passports from democratic governments throughout Latin America, such as the Colombian, the Ecuadorian and also the Spanish (“they can skin you but your country will not be taken from you even raw,” he said, upon accepting Spanish nationality). In Madrid, where he now lives, the 2018 Cervantes Prize winner speaks, in an office at his publisher, about his new novel, which begins with a Central European princess who escapes from the palace with a hairdresser obsessed with inventing the merry-go-round (horses) and some crazy characters who will end up in Latin America, where they will meet none other than Rubén Darío or the Emperor Maximilian.
This novel is very different from your others, don’t you think? There are people who win the Cervantes and dedicate themselves to making the same book they have always made.
I am very afraid of repetition, because repetition is exhaustion. The great challenge of a writer is to create a style, but not repeat oneself. And no matter how much one advances in age, I believe that you always have to have the capacity for wonder, for experimentation, to look for new things and not stay put, not be predictable. This issue of the politician-writer always weighs on me (he was Sandinista vice president), as if he had a certain obligation to adopt topics that have to do with the current reality of Nicaragua. But a writer must invent. Here I opened a different path, a double narrative, the story of a Central European princess, and that of the carousel – the merry-go-round with horses – in Europe and how it arrived in Nicaragua.
As we read, the tone, the register, even the genre changes… It begins as a Central European fable, then there are police parts, it ends as a Latin American historical novel with a dictator… and, in the background, that melody that played on the music box of the carousel.
Clear. They were polkas or waltzes at a centrifugal speed, turning and turning. This allows you to get on some stories and get off others, like children on the carousel, narrate in different ways, make that itinerary full of obstacles that arise along the way.
He puts it together with different pieces: first and third person narratives, documents, letters, manuals, theatrical language with notes… it is a postmodern novel, in some parts.
Yes, I am very attracted to what we call postmodern and that is as old as Tristam Shandy or Don Quixote, those daring forms that have no brakes.
Sometimes they even deny us what we have just read.
What some characters imagine others correct, there are beings that have only existed in the imagination of others, what seems to be real is suddenly changed, and someone imaginary can become real. The only thing I cannot violate is History or geography, certainly with borders as changing as the story.
It is a very playful novel, both because of the mechanisms through which the narrative runs and because specific games appear, cards, or the carousel itself.
The carousel is a game, yes, originally part of a war game, it was like a contest of armed knights.
There are nobles who lose everything at cards. Does the rocker exist?
Of course, I’m not a good player but there are regulations and everything. Also called tresillo, you can learn to play with what is in the novel, it is very old.
This is his only fully humorous novel.
Well, this is a, let’s say, irresponsible humor, it is always provoking the game. And this comes from the joy I have had writing the novel, having fun at every step with the infinite possibilities that invention has.
Why does she run away with a hairdresser?
A princess without fortune, from a fallen rural nobility, corresponds well to a hairdresser, right? I am very fond of Chekhovian characters, the secondary ones: a rural princess, a barber, a hat maker, a flyer delivery man who thinks he is the son of an emperor…
Within these different registers, there is that of sentimental comedy: the hairdresser leaves with a woman but keeps the old woman as his lover, there are some stolen jewels…
It is a sum of diverse genres. It has something of a serial or soap opera too, there are dialogues that are like radio, others like a script…
Was poisons documented?
Well, of course, I have always been fascinated by crimes committed with poison, because the other murders are very brutal, but poison is very subtle, and gives rise to conspiracy, secrecy, deception. It is the most novel weapon there can be. Well, in Russia they are still used, the new poisons of postmodernity. So Mr. Putin greatly respects tradition.
There is also a moment in the novel set in Maximilian’s Empire of Mexico, that historical episode that really seems like fiction.
Emperor Maximilian is this melancholic character who is going to die in a land so far away, seen in the romantic way of the 19th century in Europe, but the story that he left a son in Mexico, with an indigenous woman, is very popular from the Mexican perspective. because it repeats the line of Hernán Cortés’s miscegenation. Julio Sedano, secretary of Rubén Darío, believed himself to be the bastard son of the emperor and was so fanciful that he caused his own death because he was shot in Paris in 1917 as a spy for the Germans and, in reality, all he did was tell lies to them. It was Darío who told his friends: ‘Look, he looks just like Maximiliano’, because he really looked like him.
The trial to which they submit him…
I base myself on the real records. He was tried at the same time as Mata Hari, also sentenced to death.
There are some curious circuses that today would not pass the test of political correctness…
The ‘manhunt’, or pursuit of the Mexican, was a very true spectacle, it was performed in Coney Island. There were three hundred horsemen, men and women, who appeared galloping across the prairie, pursuing, amidst gunshots and screams of death, a broken Mexican, who was fleeing desperately in front of the cavalcade, stumbling. Finally they hunted him down with the lasso, dragged him to a pile of firewood, tied him to a post, and staged that they made him burn in the bonfire, which was obviously fake. The entrance ticket cost 25 cents, children half as much. This type of massive show typical of the United States was born here, with many extras, Buffalo Bill and the Indians. And then the other very common spectacle in Europe was that of human zoos, that of exhibiting tribes and inhabitants of a village, they attracted thousands of people in Berlin, Brussels, Paris… And then, apart, the houses with ghosts that They talk to the living. At that time spiritualism was taken very seriously.
We already have, in the Latin American part, a presidential chef who ends up setting up his restaurant, El Querubín.
Yes. I installed it during the time of General Zelaya, the last liberal dictator in Nicaragua.
That part is your dictator novel, right?
Well, yes, but the character was little relevant in the history of Nicaragua because he had power for a very short time. He is another secondary character that I turn into a central character and I feel him in the wooden horse.
You are the commissioner of Spain at FIL 2024. Can you tell us anything?
The bases are already defined. The theme is going to be the return trip, the two cultures, with tributes to the Spanish exiles in Mexico, who made their cultural life there. And then, incorporate the heritage of Latin American writers who live in Spain. That’s why the motto is ‘return trip’. And we will emphasize the diverse literatures that the country has, according to the various languages, because it is a journey of Catalans, Galicians, Basques…
Speaking of a round trip, I suppose you have not yet contemplated your return to Nicaragua.
It’s still part of the illusion, it serves my imagination for the moment.
He is not optimistic.
The truth is that one day it may happen that we return or it may happen that we stay. In any case, I already know that I live in two worlds and what I need is a place to live. I feel as good writing in Madrid as I do writing in Managua.
