He embarked for the first time when he was very young, because his father was a representative of Lloyd’s of London insurance in Cádiz and had access to “those wonderful trips.” Mauricio Wiesenthal fell in love with the sea as a child and when he couldn’t get on one of those dream ocean liners “he traveled with his imagination.”
After much storytelling and much reading, he became a writer and now, at 80 years old, he has embarked again to narrate his memories in The Queens of the Sea (Acantilado), a delight of a book that sails through all the seas, through India. , through New York, through Africa… Places where he arrived on the Queen Mary, the Andrea Doria, the Galileo Galilei, the Azur, the Canberra, the Queen Elizabeth and many other of those ships of yesteryear in which, together with His wife, Sarah, met kings, princesses, film artists, renowned writers, painters…
In a long conversation with La Vanguardia, Wiesenthal shares his memories of the Barcelona where he was born, the Cádiz where he grew up and Freiburg and Cambridge, the two cities where he was educated. He talks about the ships that set sail in winter for the Caribbean, about the captain’s table, about the speakeasies of New York in the 1920s, about his teachers, Stefan Zweig and Ernest Hemingway, about Ithaca, that place to return to. that it is not really a place” and countless other things.
He remembers that when he was studying at Cambridge he saw J. B. Priestley’s play Time and the Conways, a play “in which the playwright plays with time. “This allows us to see life in a surprising way and it is exactly what I wanted to convey to The Queens of the Sea, a temporal swing that gives the stories an even more amazing air.”
Wiesenthal is an expert in pre-Columbian culture and is also a great conversationalist, one thing leads to another and, although there are countless issues that interest him, he cannot help but be passionate about the topic of the Spanish conquest, which “was not as terrible as some people believe.” “They have painted but quite the opposite.”
“These indigenous people who are so fashionable are actually racists. The Spanish discovered America and that was the best time for the continent because they brought the Renaissance, the clock, the compass, the printing press and gunpowder, which was used to open roads, for wars too, but above all to open roads. The compass to navigate. The printing press to publish books. And we also brought universities to America so that the people could learn and thereby become free and gain dignity,” he says.
And he adds vehemently that “we have also been lucky that other peoples came to conquer us, people like the Phoenicians who brought the olive tree and the vine, the potter’s wheel, the iron forge, the alphabet, geometry and arithmetic. The things we learned thanks to the Phoenicians. Therefore, the idea of ??contempt for others is nothing more than a racist idea.”
And he continues: “The Romans brought us the most beautiful things. What would we be if the Romans had conquered us? Some Iberians pigeonholed under some stone bastions”, he asks himself and answers himself immediately.
And it sparks with the idea of ??the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, of decolonizing the museums: “This man must not know about exchange, he must have been born in a place where people live off kilometer zero, but if Spain had not conquered America we would not eat nor tomatoes nor potatoes that the Americans brought us.”
“These indigenous people talk about the cruelty of the conquest as if it were our thing when it happened centuries ago, but there are also descendants of Spaniards who (fortunately) carry Spanish names and what they are doing is giving these poor people a complex who must feel like the children of an executioner when in reality being called Gómez, Pérez or López is equivalent to considering oneself civilized people, Creoles who had houses where boys were studied and educated.”
“Indigenism is a false caricature made by some gentlemen who are nostalgic for blood purity. “We are all children of a mixture and it seems that these people are ashamed of having mixed with others,” he adds.
The writer cannot help but compare the two conquests of America, that of the North by the English and that of the South by the Latins. “They are very different because what the English did is exploitation. When the English have an idea they say, let’s see how we can exploit this, on the other hand, the Latins, the Spanish, do not think about exploiting it, what occurs to them is to communicate, share a world of pleasure and also exchange, you give me an idea. potato and I give you a horse. That is the Latin world. Ours is that joyful world that Latin civilization taught us, it is humanism. The other is the world of exploitation, which is very useful, very practical, because with exploitation you always win,” he says,
And he quotes another of his teachers, Nietzsche, who said “I am so used to losing that when I won I wonder if I had cheated.” “We lost. We lost the colonies and the indigenous people gained freedom, law, universities, justice and commerce. And I get the feeling that maybe those who won had cheated.”
