A neighborhood movie blockbuster who ends up in a brothel. A Falangist who traffics and enriches himself with objects confiscated from the Reds. A crippled young man who, in order to get his brother out of prison, has just become a guerrilla. A former communist who ends up joining the police, where he will act as a great torturer. A university professor who, without ever getting involved in politics, is purged and finds himself without a job… all these characters make up the mosaic that makes up Castillos de fuego, the new novel by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón (Zaragoza, 1960) –to the sale next Wednesday–, a choral portrait of Madrid between the years 1939 and 1945.
Why this specific period?
I write more about the Transition, which is my time, but to understand it you have to know what Francoism was. The six years after the war have not attracted the attention of many writers, at least not telling stories of people from the regime and the resistance at the same time. There are novels about the maquis, something by Almudena Grandes and Francisco Umbral. And yet, those are the most atrocious years in the history of Spain in peace: hunger, violence, repression, executions and uncertainty about what was going to happen in the coming years. Everything was going to depend on what happened in Europe, in the world war.
You have said that your literary theme is the epic of the middle class. At this time the middle class was lower than ever.
Yes, eating chestnuts with nothing else to put in their mouths. It is a very impoverished class, it was being formed during the years of the republic and suffered a setback. What I like is telling stories of ordinary people. Nobody is prepared to endure all that persecution, repression… They are characters who don’t know if they can be heroes or even if they want to be. I flee from the epic, because the epic is the poetry of war.
It is a choral novel but was there a more powerful initial character?
The first character that appears, Valentín, along with Eloy, is the one that supports the whole story. Valentín is inspired by the decorated commissioner Conesa, very important in the Transition, a torturer who during the war had been a member of the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU) and was one of those who facilitated the arrest of the Thirteen Roses and many people from communist youth.
Valentin is capable of the greatest despicableness to get himself forgiven for that communist past…
In that it is quite similar to Conesa. She first betrays her classmates and then enters the police force.
He has chosen many very different stories.
Yes, because, added together, they present a panorama of what life was like in those years: the professor on file, the woman whose life falls down a slope when she becomes pregnant, the boy (Eloy) who, when his brother is sentenced to death, enters a dynamic that makes him end up in the maquis… Telling all those specific stories I aspire to tell everyone’s life, as I did in El día de mañana with Barcelona de la Transición.
Classic echoes resonate: cainism, betrayal…
Great novels are similar to classic stories. Here there is a Cain and an Abel, the betrayal of the protected towards his protector… are recurring elements in the narrative. And there is a Madrid of yesteryear, which gives everything a Galdosian aroma, because many things happen in the Chamberí neighborhood.
How has it been documented?
I read many books, I have gone to newspaper libraries, I have traveled to see archives… My imagination is limited and I need to feed myself with real stories.
Night clubs appear, songs, movies…
El Pasapoga was the most luxurious cabaret in Europe, and it was in Madrid, an impoverished city. The victors were not so badly off.
There are cameos (and something else) by José Antonio (his corpse), Franco, Serrano Suñer, Dionisio Ridruejo…
Ridruejo is the wayward of the system, he appears in a scene even reading his poems, they are going to banish him. His adventures influence other Falangists, because some came close to power and others were ousted.
Maite can’t sleep because of the shots from the executions…
That was true. The shots on the walls of the Almudena cemetery could be heard throughout the neighborhood and in many places. They were shot at dawn, and people counted the shots to find out how many had died, the volley was heard and then the 12 or 13 coups de grace. We are talking about a time when Franco shot more than 50,000 people, in times of peace. He was establishing a regime of extermination and the people of Madrid noticed it daily.
There is also a touch of Martín Gaite, because of how it reflects the post-war customs of love, courtships…
Love was the only spigot they had to survive. In such dire times, young people still fall in love and have sex.
Rosalía reads Dickens aloud in English class.
Foreign languages ??were suspect. When Cristina goes to English, there is a prudish neighbor who asks her ‘and for what?’. The only language that could be studied in an honorable way was German, because it was considered that Germany was going to dominate the world, and everyone got into it because they believed that it was going to be the language of the future.
There is a scene with the Nobel Prize winner Jacinto Benavente…
I have taken that from the press of the time. He read a text of his that was going to be released and there he denounced, on stage, the mistreatment he had suffered on the Republican side. He was a very devious man, first he was a Republican believing that he favored him and then, to save his skin, clearly a Francoist. He was not an example of dignity and integrity.
And the Villa Petra brothel?
I have made it up. But the thing about the girl who ends up pregnant and sends the child to town with her parents while she makes a living in brothels was a classic of the time.
It is not a Manichaean work. The Francoists are very cruel but we also see Republicans murdering.
The ones we might think are the good guys, because they are defending the republic, committing authentic brutalities, settling scores for revenge. On Franco’s side, there are people whose profession consists of looting public money, parasitizing the assets of Republicans who have been left without an owner. At the same time, there are people who try to do good, from her perspective, like Revilla’s wife, although even she, in reality, what she does is kidnap children to give them up for adoption. She says that she does it ‘for the good of the child’, so she keeps them away from ‘the bad influence’ of her red parents.
There are mass scenes, like parades with the caudillo.
Fascisms are very photogenic. I begin the novel with the transfer of the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, on the third anniversary of his assassination, some pilgrims traveled from Alicante to El Escorial, they carried him on their shoulders, with a whole liturgy, exchanges of weapons and those things. Centuries of the Falange arrived from all over Spain to take turns every few miles, convinced they were contributing to something historic. Everyone wanted to carry it, at least its two kilometers, it was their Olympic torch.
It’s hard to identify with any of the characters…
It is that you cannot, of course, it is very difficult with the male characters, who are the ones who have mounted the war. However, with women yes, they are the ones who suffer from it and are very positive, they adopt heroic attitudes to fix what others have messed up. One dreams of going across the river in a small boat to Portugal. No one believes they deserve a fate like that, to live in a horrible time where happiness is impossible.
There is a touch of a spy novel.
In the part of the communist resistance. I put authentic characters there, like Jesús Monzón, Heriberto Quiñones, Gabriel León Trilla –whose wife, Lidia Kúper, I once interviewed for La Vanguardia–, who was not a victim of Francoism, as her grandchildren believed, but was ordered to kill by the committee communist party headquarters. Quiñones was left a quadriplegic with torture in prison, before being shot.
There are very strong scenes here.
When I wrote the script for Las trece rosas I was able to see how horrible those tortures were. There was no respect for human life. There were no political rivals but enemies to exterminate, inferior beings. If the world war had lasted a few more years, Franco would have shot tens of thousands more Republicans because his idea was physical annihilation.
All, winners and losers, are deeply involved in crime.
Power distributed import licenses, permits to open businesses… The closer you were to power, the more ability to earn money you had. La Vanguardia of those years informs you every day of the people arrested for the crime of taxes, the black market, those who have not paid the taxes to sell some chickens or some eggs. Those who had the protection of the regime were never tried for it. And keep in mind that guns were everywhere, a lot of people had them and they shot each other. This is one of my most violent novels.
And how did you get that?
It is an intrinsic violence, with or without weapons, nobody does what they want, everyone is forced or oppressed, sometimes it manifests itself in shootings and sometimes it is metaphysical violence.
There will be those who think, paraphrasing Isaac Rosa, that of ‘another damn novel about the civil war’…
And yet, when watching a series like Peaky Blinders, no one says: ‘Jo, violence in Ireland again, how old is it’, right? If you want to tell a story of violence that doesn’t sound false at any stage of the Spanish 20th century, this is the time when there are weapons, revenge, grudges… It is the most violent stage of the Spanish 20th century.