If basilicas could speak, surely the Sacré-Coeur in Paris would greet Máximo Huerta (Utiel, 1971) for the many times the author has visited it, not out of a question of faith, but of bewilderment. “What the hell are two Valencian women doing portrayed in a mosaic?” He repeats himself again when he sees a couple of women dressed in the regional costume of the Valencian Community worshiping a Pantocrator. The group of journalists who are accompanying him these days in the French capital do not know how to give him an answer. Neither does the temple’s press team, nor the Maumejean family itself, who is behind such a colorful work.
For years the mystery has pursued him to the point of having become a fascination. “I haven’t said it out loud until now, because I knew I would end up putting it into a novel. That day has arrived. My new book, Paris woke up late (Planeta), is born from an obsession that still haunts me today.”
Although he has not drawn clear water on the matter, the winner of the Fernando Lara 2022 award has indeed arrived at the Moncada workshop where it is very likely that these fabrics were woven. “There was no color photography, so two models had to pose with those fabrics, the most expensive in Spain, by the way, and I play with that.”
In his story, he rescues Alice Humbert and Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, two protagonists of A Shop in Paris (2012), one of his most successful works and which will now make the leap to theater, although the writer and Former Minister of Culture is not involved in the project. “Kiki really existed. She was a model, singer and actress who became a muse and queen of Paris in the 1920s. I play in fiction, because one of the Valencian girls seems to me to be a mix of her and Concha Piquer. I liked to think that people prayed to Kiki,” admits Huerta a few hours before visiting the Café du Dôme, a meeting place for intellectuals and artists of the time, as recalled by the dozens of photographs that hang on its walls, including which, of course, does not lack Kiki’s face.
The other protagonist of the novel represents one of those many anonymous women who walked up and down the Boulevard de Montparnasse—also known as the meat market—so that artists could hire them as mannequins for a few francs. “The painter Moïse Kisling baptized them as the new prostitutes, but they were not necessarily that.” Even today, some of the studios of those painters that preserve so many secrets from that time remain in the surrounding area.
The interwar Paris that the author reflects was “intense and unprecedented. It is the time of women’s liberation. When the men went to the trenches, they took their positions and enjoyed privileges that they were not willing to lose. They begin to impose their rules and fashion is a good reflection of this. They take off their corsets, opt for baggy clothes and cut their hair garçon style.” It is no coincidence that Coco Chanel herself sneaks into the plot, as well as other celebrities who coincided in that crazy Paris, such as Man Ray, who had a relationship with Kiki.
“It was a very productive love. She stars in many of her most famous photographs, such as Ingres’ Violin, with which the actress’s back, converted into an instrument, passed down to posterity. “They shared six years of love in which he decided not to have children. This is a topic I am interested in talking about. Throughout the novel I try to capture the frustration of motherhood from different perspectives. They instilled in you that if you were not a mother, you were not a complete woman. And this led to many disappointments that still exist today. There are aspects in which society, unfortunately, has not advanced as much.”
The 1924 Olympics, which are now one hundred years old, and which inspired the film Chariots of Fire, by Hugh Hudson, are also part of Huerta’s plot. “The Games as we know them today were born there. For the first time, a logo, a stadium for the occasion and an Olympic village were created, to which female athletes were not invited because they said they were the temptation of their peers. The world was staring at Paris and its people did nothing but take advantage of it and invite the rest to dance,” he concludes.
