Eduardo Mendoza has now turned 81 years old and, with good judgment, does what he wants. In fact, he always did. In other times he embarked on literary adventures of colossal ambition and dazzling results, such as The City of Wonders, in which he invested eleven years and much effort. The fatigue was so great that, halfway through writing, to temporarily relieve self-demand, he wrote in a few days The Mystery of the Haunted Crypt (1979), the inaugural piece of a detective narrative that combines generic parody with crazy humor and social criticism and of customs.
Since then, Mendoza has alternated these two creative lines, giving rise to the theory of the two-faced author, responsible, on the one hand, for some of the great novels of the last quarter of the 20th century – The Truth About the Savolta Case (1975), The city ??of prodigies (1986) or A light comedy (1996) – and, on the other, the so-called minor novels. I say bad calls because, although their inspiration is different, the author’s personal talent also illuminates them.
The last few years have been prodigal in this type of works. After cat fight. Madrid 1936, with a more modest format and tone, which earned him the Planeta Prize in 2011, Mendoza has linked five detective plots. Two of them starring Ceferino, the majareta, lumpen and Cervantino investigator born in The Mystery…, titled The Entanglement of the Stock Market and Life (2012) and The Secret of the Lost Model (2015). And three others starring Rufo Batalla, a dilettante from a higher social background, abducted by a Nordic prince in his global adventures: The King Receives (2018), The Yin and Yang Negotiation (2019) and Transshipment in Moscow ( 2021).
With Rufo Batalla’s trilogy completed, but without abandoning the field of detective parody, Mendoza publishes next Wednesday Three Enigmas for the Organization, where he deploys no less than nine secret agents, employees of an improbable official entity (founded in 1944 under the umbrella of the fearsome Minister of the Navy Salvador Moreno Fernández), but clandestine and anonymous, which against all odds and forgotten in institutional limbo remains operational today.
The contemporary vocation of this novel is evident from its first line, “Barcelona, ??spring of the year 2022”, to the heading of its epilogue, dated months later, in the “second week of October”. Which allows Mendoza to direct his acid gaze on the Barcelona of the present, full of tourists (“which God sends us as a test”), dehydrated by the drought, chained to social networks and sensitive to the gay and trans world “in accordance with The spirit of the times”. In other words, “a city programmed to meet the expectations of an ignorant mass, previously manipulated by shameless publicity.”
However, the profile of its new secret agents seems anchored in yesterday. Everything in the Organization refers to its miserable founding stage. Starting with the economic scarcity – agents must cover part of the labor expenses, or borrow a whaling harpoon from the Maritime Museum, given their meager arsenal – and continuing with technological poverty – the use of mobile phones or credit cards is not allowed. credit, in the absence of photos, watercolors are ordered, trips are made in overcrowded taxis or regular buses. And then continuing with the dapper boss, with an old-fashioned official verb, and his abysmal team of subordinates, rebaptized with names more appropriate to the underworld than to the State: Pocorrabo (depressed because he could not renew his alias), Buscabrega (“sometimes, it is as if my brain would be empty”), the Hunchback (who visits a beauty salon and fantasizes about being the Incredible Hulk), etc.
This select troop, of moving innocence, is faced with a triple enigma, with locations in its headquarters in Eixample, a hotel on the Rambla, the luxury yacht marina in the Barcelona port or some wasteland in the suburbs. The absurdity – “Miss, record it in the minutes and, at the end of the session, burn the minutes,” the boss orders his secretary –, clumsiness and also fortune preside over the adventures of such investigators, in a convoluted and , despite everything, satisfactorily resolved.
Now, as in other works by the author, what is important is not so much that culmination of the intrigue but the path that is followed until reaching it, traced by Mendoza with the trademark resources of the house: a hilarious humor, an ability to combine the various idiomatic registers of its creatures, the associations of concepts that repel each other – when referring, for example, to “prestigious brothels” such as “The Astonishment of Damascus” or “Xoxo de Luxe” – and an unfettered freedom, which we believed was already deceased in the era of cancellation.
As a counterpoint, among so many jokes there are paragraphs with moderately thoughtful vital reflections. But humor prevails in this novel with an uninhibited and expressive line, which could be framed, if Mendoza were a painter, in a hypothetical informalist stage. Written to have fun and to entertain, the new work by the Barcelona author will not be familiar to those nostalgic for his most ambitious titles. But it continues to reflect the talents of an always active and jovial Mendoza, who knows, like Calderón de la Barca, that “not everything he entertains is lightness.” And, in addition to knowing it, he continues to prove it book by book.
Eduardo Mendoza Three enigmas for the Seix Barral Organization 408 pages 21.90 euros
