What made him a writer?
A walk and a room.
Explain the walk to me.
It’s the summer of 1990, I’m ten years old and I’m walking around Gijón holding my father’s hand…
The lustrous abbey.
We see booths, groups, bustle… I inquire with my gaze. My father explains to me: “Relax, son, they are writers”.
Account!
My father was reading Vázquez Montalbán, the third edition of Semana Negra de Gijón was being celebrated. In July it will be the 37th edition… and I will direct it! What things…
He was shocked to see writers.
Already at home, I approached my father’s electric typewriter… and wrote my first paragraph.
And until today?
A dozen published books: I trust they are in the room.
which room
The one I mentioned before: there was a “book room” at home. They lived there. I would go in, look at them, touch them…
And today his books live there?
I hope! From my grandfather, a voracious newspaper reader, I learned that reality is understood through words. And that led me to journalism.
Writing, what obligation does it entail?
You can’t write in Spanish without first having read Don Quixote, it seems to me.
What is your favorite passage?
Sancho, on Barataria Island, writes to his wife. I am surprised by the modernity of Cervantes, surprising! We are watching the show of a writer having fun.
The first novel·list.
And he almost sold out the genre he was inventing!
What is the great teaching?
That fiction lies, but does not deceive.
Why does fiction not deceive?
Because they are lies loaded with truth. Fiction orders the chaotic reality to make it intelligible to us.
And what are we talking about?
We explain to each other who we are and what the world is.
Is literature the true teacher?
It is false that “you cannot learn history in a novel”. It’s the other way around! You only learn history if it is told to you like a novel.
He has convinced me.
Fiction is very powerful: it infiltrates people’s minds and thus changes thousands, millions of lives.
And everyone aspires to sneak their tale.
Focus on the Spanish Inquisition: after colonizing America, it banned the reading of novels in the New World.
What was the danger of novels?
They competed with the only true story, the Gospel.
The inquisitors were exaggerating.
Or not We never underestimate fiction! There is nothing more subversive than a book. This is why the author of Lazarillo is masked: he knows that he is creating too many enemies.
What last story do you tell us?
I was captivated by the history of Palau Barolo: it appears in my novel La otra orilla.
Palau Barolo?
A skyscraper that rises on Avenida de Mayo in the city of Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 1923.
It has completed a century, then.
And it was then the tallest building in South America, with a lighthouse at the top… and a very literary architecture.
Why literary?
It was erected in homage to the Divine Comedy of the poet Dante Aligheri.
Patriarch of Italian letters!
The work of two Italians settled in Argentina: the textile billionaire Luis Barolo and the architect Mario Palanti. They dreamed of guarding the remains of Dant!
A mausoleum skyscraper?
They saw the skyscraper as a modern cathedral. And they saw that the Great War was destroying Europe… And they decided to save it!
Save Europe by saving literature?
Yes, and to found another Italy, another Europe, in America… through culture, literature… In other words, through fiction.
So powerful, he told me…
He created Hell: there is no hell in the Bible, hell is a fiction of Dante. And that’s what hell is like today for everyone!
Good example of the power of fiction.
The Palau Barolo fits the Divine Comedy: three parts (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise); hundred meters (one hundred cantos of the poem); twenty-two floors (each stanza)…
Were they able to bring Dant there, finally?
Palanti went to Italy to look for them, but Dante’s ashes are still in Ravenna, although Florence prepared another tomb for him, which has always remained empty.
Dant stayed on this shore of the Atlantic.
Let us now stay with poetry, which captures the human essence beneath the masks of identities.