His father, Dragon, is dead.
I talk to him every day.
What did they talk about today?
“Amela is interviewing me today”, I explained to her. “Give him a hug!”, he asked me. He was very cordial.
You do literature, right?
Literature is conversing with the dead.
What was the last thing they did together?
Review my latest novel.
What is it about?
A young dancer talks to her father, an old cobbler, on his last day and morning. They wake up together and he dies.
His father woke up on Easter Monday, sat down at the keyboard…
And his cat climbed onto his crown.
I saw the tweet…
Half an hour later he died of a heart attack.
The novel was foreboding…
He was my cobbler, but as a writer.
Did he get into writing?
As a child, she heard her typewriter, she hit it furiously: that sound was the cricket of the hearth, Gárgoris y Habidis wrote.
A magical history of Spain.. .
I lay at the foot of his desk with my sleeping bag, his typing lulled me every night, I fell asleep there…
The machine’s lullaby…
That typewriter belonged to his father, a journalist killed by Falangists just before the war began: a black and gold Underwood. The father, posthumous son, inherited it and started writing at the age of four.
It was early.
I was six years old and my father gave me Underwood: “Write, write!” he said.
They had great complicity, I sense.
Parents are full of secrets and children are full of lies. My father and I, no.
Thanks to literature?
Literature takes out old knots and gives them a beautiful ending. When you write you stir up the unconscious, redraw memories and console yourself. Literature is the only possible consolation.
What did the father say about his novel?
“You accompany me to a good death, I see.”
What epitaph did his father choose?
We’ll know when we open his will, which he used to tinker with. But first we have to resolve bureaucratic matters.
“Excuse me for not getting up.”
I was joking. He loved to exaggerate, like with the Japanese thing. “Writing consists of stopping, tempering and charging luck”, he affirmed. Without exaggeration you cannot write.
Nor live
“Nothing matters”, he also told me. And as a teenager I used to get angry: I cared a lot about everything! “Over the years you will agree with me”, he concluded. What if!
What other motto did he like to unsheath?
“And an inflexible voice shouts: on the way!”, he cried. He urged us to always move forward.
You portray yourself as a dancer in your story: why a dancer?
I was born with clubbed feet. To correct them, I was fitted with black, hideous orthopedic boots. One day I was released and I asked for some red ballet flats. i wanted to dance
And did he dance?
I danced classical ballet: it was my big dream. In the end the books won.
He wrote a book about the mother…
My mother, Caterina, died when I was nine years old. By writing I have been able to drink all the coffees that we could not share… My father and mother had separated when I was a very small baby.
Dragó mentions Caterina in his magical history of Spain…
They traveled a lot together. And I was conceived in the Philippines, cheered by a bottle of Asian liquor. I was born and they soon separated, but they always missed each other very much.
Yeah?
Yes, because they shared many complicities. If I think of one or the other today, I imagine them together. They are together now.
What would you like to teach your children?
Let them be creative, whatever they do. And don’t forget spirituality.
What is the best thing about your novel?
A woman goes to the port of Barcelona to receive the ship Semiramis, trusting that her love will return: she wears his photo hanging around her neck…
I?
Read it yourself. A writer wants nothing more than to be read.
What books would you recommend to a young girl to start reading?
My Family and Other Animals, by Durrell; The game of hailstones, from Hesse; Lady Chatterley’s lover, by Lawrence; Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy: because I couldn’t stop reading it, one afternoon I lost a boyfriend…
Do you regret it?
As a woman, I only regret spending so much time taking care of my children because it is time stolen from myself.
