Luis Landero returns to the novel with The Last Function (Tusquets). A book of unfulfilled dreams but with second chances. “Optimistic and luminous,” says the author of Late Age Games and National Literature Award winner in 2022. A book in which a man born with a prodigious voice, Tito Gil, apparently called to success, in love with art and dedicated even from a management office, he returns to the town of his childhood. There they still remember his performance as a child in the Miracle and Apotheosis of the Holy Girl Rosalba, the play that the neighbors performed collectively annually. And they propose to Tito that he resurrect her and direct it: they believe that a huge collective representation can attract tourism and save them from Spain being definitively emptied.
Life and theater intersect again and again in this novel in which a character assures that “we all have an actor inside us, we play various roles without even knowing it.” A novel that for Landero (Alburquerque, 1948) “is like a fairy tale, a story from One Thousand and One Nights, it has a folkloric tale tone.” In this interview he talks about theater and life, the real origin of Tito Gil and, above all, his writing and his literary world.
Is life pure theater?
That’s what the classics have always said. Each of us is several, we have several selves, several masks. And we take them off, we put them on and that’s how we deal with people. Woe to us if this were not theater. Fortunately it is theater and we modulate our character according to convenience. The art of coexistence is a bit of the art of theater.
I wouldn’t call it hypocrisy.
No no. Besides, a little hypocrisy doesn’t hurt anything in human relationships. If you went around saying what you really thought to everyone, this would be tremendous. Hypocrisy in some sense is the word, but a little theater is fine.
In the novel it is suggested that we all have an actor inside us.
We bring several actors, or at least one actor who plays several roles. We have the role of when we play lovers, when we try to seduce someone, when we are in public, when we are in private, when we are with our wife, when we are with another woman, when we are with friends, we graduate. I also believe that theater is born from the very mud of life.
What role or roles have Luis Landero played?
For example, right now, the one who is here is not the writer. The one here is a messenger from the writer. The writer does not leave the house, the writer does not give interviews, the writer is rather unsociable, he is silent, the writer is another. The writer does not relate to almost anyone, he lives his life. So, the one who comes here to talk to you now is another who talks about writing and who speaks the name of the writer. And if the writer heard me speak he wouldn’t like what I say too much. Then, I am already a loner and even a bit misanthropic. However, when I am in public, I am a kind person, a cordial person, even a fun person. But is that me? It’s me too.
The protagonists of the novel are above all people with frustrated dreams.
This is always told in novels, rare is the novel where the dreams of youth do not appear, the life projects that each one has and how when youth passes and one has to face reality and has to earn a living and He has to get married and have children, because it seems that the mandate is that, how those dreams are frustrated. And then the ghost of failure appears, of course. That’s usually the scheme. But this is life, human life, it is dreaming, dreaming when you are a teenager, when you are young, it is making projects, you believe you are eternal, a little less, and then you discover, as in Gil de Biedma’s poem, that the plot of life is another, and that you have to deal with life, deal with money, with making a living. You have to play another role.
And that failure, in the case of those who have wanted to be artists, does it have another epic?
When there is a great attempt there is no failure. Don Quixote makes great attempts and we would never call him a failure, even though he almost always loses all his battles. When there is a great attempt, when something is attempted, failure has a certain grandeur, it has a certain epic. Dignity. The problem is when dreams are betrayed, when we don’t try, due to laziness, fear, lack of courage, a lot of things, carelessness, forgetfulness. But when you try, as in the case of Tito Gil, who was inspired by a friend of mine, you don’t fail, because in failure you also bring glory. Sometimes there is glory in failure.
So Tito Gil is part of reality?
Yes, yesterday I was with him, his name is Ernesto Gil, that is, Tito Gil, and he is 85 years old. He was a student of mine at the Higher School of Dramatic Art, I met him in 1970 and he has a prodigious voice. Wonderful. He is a lawyer, he has an agency. He is an artist of extraordinary purity, elemental, romantic, like a teenager in love. And so it goes. It is true that he has not succeeded as much as he could have succeeded, but he does not care. Because he has dedicated himself to what he wanted to dedicate himself to, which is cultivating art. And I accompanied him with the guitar. We toured the United States, we were in New York, Washington, New Orleans…
So… you are the teacher who accompanies him in the novel?
Yes, yes, I am Galindo. In fact he was going to put me. But it seemed to me that I was going to go into a garden. I played the guitar, and in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of Lorca’s death, we toured the United States. Because I don’t know how, but he achieved things, for example through a Hispanic-North American Committee for the Diffusion of Culture. All that is true.
In the novel it seems wonderfully improbable.
I accompanied him and I played a guitar background for him and he recited Lorca, who was his poetic god, his lyrical god. And he knows all of Lorca by heart. And in fact, in some presentation of the novel I am going to take him and have him recite Lorca there. The germ of my protagonist is in that pure, unbribable artist, who is in love with art above all else and even if he achieves small things, those small things are worth it. I like that spiritual purity of the artist, who is a bit of a teenage artist. Success doesn’t matter a little. For him, success is doing what he likes to do.
There is a moment in the novel when someone talks about accepting the artist’s destiny. Did you accept it? Did you have any doubts?
Yes. When an artistic vocation grabs you by the throat you can’t leave it. I wrote my first poems when I was 14 or 15 years old. I fell in love with words. I remember that I fell in love with the word taciturn, which I heard once in a coffee shop. I had never heard it before. He must have been 15 years old. He wrote poems where the word taciturn was the guest star. And the other words were taciturn’s opening act. I knew already at that age that I was going to be a writer, above all. Even if I dedicated myself to something else, you had to earn a living, but I was a writer above all. I have never doubted it.
As a young man, did you consider, as one of the characters in the play, what style he would have and did you exhaustively review what those of Galdós, Baroja, Quevedo, Borges, Cervantes… were like?
Yes. At 20 years old, when I left poetry and switched to prose, I had my models and I wrote in the way of Valle Inclán, I wrote in the way of Borges, Cortázar, Baroja, García Márquez, Carpentier , to Rulfo’s. Until not long ago it was done in England, one of the rhetorical exercises was to write in the manner of. That teaches a lot. I would like to write with the flow with which Shakespeare writes, with the grace with which Cervantes writes, with the formal intuition with which Valle Inclán writes, with the stormy and tremendous spirit of Unamuno, to unite all these styles into one.
It takes time to define your style. Normally style is found when you find your world. Because the most difficult thing for a writer is to find your world. Know what you have to write. What only you can write, you and no one else but you, because it is your world, are your blind marks, as Freud said. That is hard. Flaubert said that finding one’s own world, a world of one’s own, is sometimes a matter of luck. And he gave the example of Cervantes, who almost at the twilight of his life found his great theme, which is Don Quixote, of course.
And what is your world?
My father is at the center of that world. He died when I was 16 years old. And he wanted me to be a lawyer, he didn’t want me to be a farmer because he was one. He had barely gone to school and he wanted me to be someone in life. I turned out badly, I didn’t like studying, he was a bit of a thug from Prospe. Then he died when he was 16 and I contracted a debt with him that I am still paying off. My father was a man who considered himself profoundly unsuccessful because he had good qualities, but life had not given him the opportunity to develop them. He considered himself a failed man who had achieved nothing in life. And that bitterness, that awareness of failure, is a bit of my theme.
There are many variants, but somehow I am always grinding the same grain. And in all my novels, which all have a family resemblance, the dreams of youth appear, what happens to those dreams, failure, what happens to failure, if there are second chances, what is the possible salvation through imposture …And above all the desire, the desire to be something, to do things and sometimes not be able to do them. Icarus trying to reach the sun, those of the Tower of Babel trying to build it, that desire, that ambition that exists in man that on the one hand makes us great and on the other hand makes us miserable.