Do you listen to music when you walk?
It inspires me and dispels sadness.
What are you listening to now?
Looped On the wire, by Iván Ferreiro.
What does the letter say?
“We may have to give up in the end.”
And why do you write?
Because there is someone on the other side. Give me some friends and I’ll start writing to them.
Write to communicate.
For me I don’t write. I write a story in a WhatsApp group of seven friends.
What do you intend to achieve?
Let no one get bored. Amplify life.
Did you always want to write?
I wrote two novels when I was 16, by hand, in notebooks. I dreamed of being a forward for Real Madrid and tried a career as a tennis player.
What prevented him?
That he won and didn’t enjoy it.
I do not understand why not.
When I was eleven years old I defeated a man. Palizon… From my father’s car I saw the man collect the balls from the ground in a tube… before the eyes of his son and his wife.
Did you feel sorry?
I empathize too much with my rival, that is, I am no good at competing.
What is it for?
To cut a text. In that I am unbeatable.
Is writing cutting?
Take a text of three thousand words, let’s leave it at a thousand: mine will be better!
That would have to be seen.
Being a journalist trains expressive economy. “Sorry that my article is long, I haven’t had time” (to cut it, of course): Julio Camba said it to the director of ABC.
Camba: your literary model?
Reading him I knew that you can explain a gloomy reality with lightness and humor, or a joke with serious language.
What deserves to become a column?
A hairstyle fashion or other customary detail. It will be written for future historians! But not the statement of a politician. I hate to comment on that!
He dedicates his latest novel to his sister…
He has supported my emotional bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy of the couple in the novel?
It was almost written fiction… and my breakup coincided with its final stretch.
Did reality permeate your fiction?
In a novel, truth matters more than reality, Hemingway said. And the real emotions are there.
A message comes on the phone, look at it.
Sorry… Oh, what good news! Gallimard wants to translate my novel. I tell you this because I love sharing good news.
And I’m glad.
I would call my mother now, but we are in this interview. Then.
What is there of your mother in you?
My mother stopped leading the life she wanted to raise me, when she was 18, and then my sister.
What life would your mother have led?
As a doctor. But he has been happy raising us. Then he took the exams and today he is a nursing assistant in a hospital.
My respects.
She wants more than anything for me to be well. And for my part, everything I do in my life, everything!, I do for my mother.
What life lesson do you find more relevant than any other?
Kindness! Kindness is the hater’s kryptonite: be kind to him, because he will annoy a lot. He needs it.
What is love?
Love is not being afraid to tell the person you love that you see ghosts.
Absolute trust, I understand.
A true love is one that is far above the passing lovers that your partner or yourself sleep with.
Unless it happens that your partner – or you – falls in love with a third party, right?
Of course, of course. I remember that scene of Woody Allen saying to his partner: “How? That you stay to live with him? We could go that far! “He left you!”
Are there ghosts, Jabois?
It’s beautiful that there are people who believe in ghosts (scammers excepted, that is). And surely one day science will demonstrate what we do not understand today.
I read in your book “God is a comedian”.
He is, and he has problems with the limits of humor: remember how he lets Abraham prepare the sacrificial altar for his son Jacob… until he stops him at the last second, ha, ha… The Bible is overflowing with such incidents.
“What do you want more than your life?”
That’s what the couple in my fiction wonders…
And what would you answer?
To my son Manu.
What would you want your relationship to be like?
Fun. May Manu be able to say one day what I heard from his mother, Ana Biempica, from his father, with a tear, the day he died: “It’s just that… I liked him so much!”
