Máximo or Máximo?
Maximum. When working at Channel 9 they encouraged me to change… “per fer country”.
He continued to be Màxim in Madrid, on Telecinco.
Until I got tired of hearing “Maxím”. And I never quite understood the word “fer country”.
His country is Paris, so he writes.
There has never been a more cosmopolitan and inclusive city than Paris in the 1920s.
He falls in love with her.
I have studied it in depth to set the love story of my novel.
With star appearances: Coco Chanel, Weissmuller, Hemingway, Monet…
And Kiki from Montparnasse.
I do not fall.
The most famous back of the 20th century! Man Ray photographed it and painted the two sinuous openings of the violin.
Oh yeah!
Muse, model and lover of many artists: from a poor birth, she opted for enjoyment and art, wine and the night.
The Roaring Twenties.
Paris attracted the most luminous and jovial spirits on the planet: Americans, Poles, Germans, Italians… After the Great War… life had to be taken advantage of.
Did they live well?
Poorly. They welcomed them in bars, because they were dazzling and insolent. They exchanged drama for joy, they got drunk on life, wine and drugs. They quoted Baudelaire: “You have to get drunk all the time to bear the weight of reality.”
Where they met?
In the bars of the Montparnasse neighborhood.
What street would you have lived on?
I would register in Paris in 1924! I would look out a window on the Rue de la Grande Chaumière: women came to be chosen by painters, photographers, sculptors: a model market, a meat market.
And if you travel to Paris today, where will you stay?
In a little hotel in the Odéon carrefour, with a small terrace for editors and writers.
Where does your fascination with Paris originate?
As a child, in the summers, the “aunts from France” came to town, emigrated sisters of my grandmother Irene. They brought an air of exoticism with their clothes, colors, makeup, chocolates… I aspired to get to know Paris.
And how did you get into journalism?
My grandmother Irene read… and in this way she covered up sadness, decorated her life. I read to see her read.
And his parents?
I had an absent father, he was between the truck and the bar. My mother and I feared him.
By?
…
Of.
My silence speaks for me. I am my mother’s son, and I stayed at home with her to protect her from my father. Mutual care.
How did your relationship with your father end?
He fell into a coma and we covered him with a suit of mine, one of the ones I wore on Telecinco on the nightly news…
Oh yes, I saw him there.
But my father revived, and we took him home shrouded. He lived three more years, now calmed down… and he asked me for forgiveness. “This request will be retroactive, right?” I told him.
What mark did your father leave on you?
I am insecure, I always feel guilty about this or that.
Is writing a way of knowing yourself?
I’m not looking for that, I just want to tell a good story well.
Journalism is that, too.
I enjoyed it a lot, but watching TV interrupted what I did at home with great pleasure: writing! And since there is a lot of waiting on TV, I wrote there too.
Do you detect any common thread in all your novels?
“I have realized that I put dwarves in all my novels,” confessed Rosa Montero. In mine there is always a violent father and a rarefied family.
Have you had references in writing?
A school teacher, Don Melchor… who today is a customer at my bookstore!
Beautiful… And in journalism?
Jesús Hermida, because he was from the town, just like me! But when I met him, he seemed excessively egotistical to me.
Like him, you made magazines…
Eleven years. After seven years of sitting at a table… And he tripped over everything: too many cameras, too many cables…
What did you learn there?
Ductility, I learned to adapt quickly to any matter.
Where is journalism in your life today?
It remains in the distant past, even though it hasn’t been that long since I left it.
Then he was briefly Minister of Culture: what mark did that leave on you?
No trace: it left me a scar.
And how do you fix it?
Air it out to the sun and the sea.
