I am addicted to articles by Miquel Alberola from El PaÃs, each one has its weaknesses. He is possibly one of the journalists who best masters a demanding genre, which demands a great capacity for observation and analysis. Furthermore, he is an excellent disciple of Manuel Vicent in the use of metaphors; These resources are present in the work that he has just published, “Cròniques des de Madrid. A journalist at the Court” (Drassana).
It is a diary from the years in which this Valencian journalist was banished to Madrid, where he had the privilege of observing from up close the change of cycle in La Corona and, also, in Spanish politics. Where, moreover, he has been able, like other authors he admires, such as Pla, Gaziel or AzorÃn, to verify that Madrid is, as Joan Fuster would say, “the measure of all things”.
I remember the day you told me you were going to Madrid. Your face conveyed many sensations, and not positive ones.
I was very scared. I was over 50 years old and it meant leaving my family, friends, my ecosystem. It was starting almost from scratch in Madrid on a visit, but it was another thing to work in that jungle.
What worried you the most? The job? The life change?
Working there didn’t bother me. What made me uneasy was leaving everything, as I told you.
In addition, you leave when there is a change in the political cycle here in the Valencian Community. You had devoted many articles, many years, to denouncing the climate of corruption that had settled in the Valencian institutions.
It was frustrating, because a cycle change was coming that I would have liked to live and tell. After 20 years of scandal-ridden PP, an interesting time was coming. I was left with the desire, because I lived it from a distance.
Was writing a diary a therapeutic solution?
Indeed. In Madrid I didn’t even have a television. I dedicated myself at night to writing the diary so as not to fall into a depression, which allowed me to recompose my universe, my points of view without being subject to rules. With that material I gathered I could have done an essay, but it would have been less personal.
A diary is also an essay. And there are great dieters who are, at the same time, great essayists.
Yes, but the essay requires other rules from you, and I think an essay would have been less candid on my part. I wanted my book to be the clinical picture of a provincial journalist within the clinical picture of an era.
Has it been a literary or journalistic exercise?
I already catch a time when the websites have their mouths open waiting for you to send them everything quickly. Now we make vacuum-packed news, without atmosphere. That missing context is the one that best explains a piece of news. But, about your question, journalism has been the literary genre of the 20th century, now I don’t know what it is. But yes, the diary is literature, because literature is what heals you; journalism makes you nervous.
Gaziel, Josep Plà , AzorÃn, have written notes on Madrid. You talk a lot about AzorÃn in your book. Has it had a balsamic effect?
AzorÃn transmits a lot of serenity to me, he is a defibrillator, with that short, syncopated syntax; he is a kind of ascetic. He achieves what some musicians achieve, which is to heal himself by playing an instrument. AzorÃn gave me that serenity.
The cited authors agree in their diaries to make a sincere effort to understand Madrid.
There is an effort to adapt on my part, because the conditions are different from my city: it gets dark later, the sun rises later, the atmosphere is terribly dry and Madrid is an uninterrupted agglomeration that does not stop growing. Madrid can reach Gandia.
In your notes you descend into the bowels of the city, the subway.
To get to know a city well, you cannot stay on the surface, you must go to its intestines. The Metro explains Madrid to you, the enthusiasm, the doubts of the people, and how they return home with disappointed expectations.
Paraphrasing Joan Fuster, is Madrid as a center of political and economic power the measure of all things?
Right now it is the measure of all things. Spain, until the 1990s, had two capitals: an administrative one, Madrid, and a dynamic, cultural and commercial one, Barcelona. That broke with the arrival of Aznar, who managed to make Madrid the center of the world, especially Latin America. Barcelona has entered into decline, due to the efforts of some and their own.
Will radial Spain with a center in Madrid be able to absorb all the resources of the periphery?
The configuration of Spain, currently, is that we are an area for leisure, for the beach, for an industrial estate, because the effective center of decisions is Madrid.
You live a change of cycle in La Corona. How will history judge the Emeritus King?
The Emeritus has two faces to history. One, the King who helps build democracy, by influence or because he understands that he had no other way out. Another part is 23F, in which he, with his participation, achieved credit that he did not have, because he came from the Franco regime. But people have discovered that behind that sympathy and good-naturedness there was a lot of rubbish, of corruption. That he used his position to do shady deals. What is clear is that when he dies he will be acquitted, because death is always acquittal.
Is the fact that the Emeritus continues to visit Spain a problem for your son?
For his son it is a problem. Because the father has jeopardized the continuity of the son at the helm of La Corona. The facts are already known, with that killing of elephants and dear included when Spain was close to the abyss. The Crown survives thanks to the fact that the Emeritus was separated and to the extent that he wants to continue coming and being in the showcase is a problem for Felipe VI. It is a toxic element for La Corona.
Will Felipe VI manage to recover the complicities broken by his father with Spanish society?
As soon as he was proclaimed King, he launched a program of measures to make the Crown more transparent, foster proximity, be exemplary, and he is, unlike his father, a serious man who grew up studying the Constitution. The pending challenge for him is to connect with youth.
And will he manage to recover broken bridges with Catalonia? His speech on October 3 is still very present.
That was not his best moment. He intervenes because Mariano Rajoy fails to defuse that conflict, because the former president did what he knew best: do nothing. If he had been involved in politics, he would have negotiated with Catalonia, he would have saved the King from having to go out and make a tough speech, legitimizing Rajoy’s policy of failure. Now Catalonia is for Felipe VI what the Basque Country was for his father.
Enric Juliana says that working in Madrid is a necessary way to fully understand power in Spain.
As Ayuso says, “Madrid is Spain”. We see it here, the parties are towed by the slogans and arguments of Madrid. It is the great center for the dissemination of behaviors, policies, everything, it helps you understand that in addition to being the “breakwater of the Spains” as Machado said, it is the nation’s theater of operations, the stage on which all the ills of Spain.
You also experienced a moment of emergency for new political options…
And it was a time of missed opportunities. Because a center-right alternative is configured, which was Cs, which if it had agreed with the PSOE, which Podemos prevented, would have displaced the PP from power, which would have been forced to purge all corruption. What happened in Catalonia would not have happened, or not in the same way, with a PSOE executive and Cs.
Can a journalist take early retirement or retire from journalism?
The journalist, like the ex-smoker or ex-alcoholic, no, it is for life, there is no redemption. You can walk away from the job, but you still see the world in article format.
I have read to you that this new digital journalism does not excite you.
One of the dangerous things that happens to journalism now is that we don’t control distribution. Can you imagine what Mercadona would be like if it didn’t control distribution? It would be his failure. All that world that we knew hierarchical, ordered, everything goes through a pipe of bulk journalism in which the truth, lies, insults, hoaxes circulate, and thus it is difficult for journalism to be educational, formative.
And what can we boomers who are still dedicated to this trade do?
Pre-retirement?
