On the eve of elections – the municipal elections of May 2011 –, many squares in Spain, with the epicenter in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, became an agora of indignation that had been brewing with special emphasis since the outbreak of the crisis – brutal – of 2008. Although far from revolutions, something from those protests germinated and influenced the history of recent years. We can, for example. Party without which possibly nothing would be as it is today in Spanish politics.
A decade after those events – which we know as 15-M –, David Becerra, professor of Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid, published the book After the Event. The return of the political in Spanish literature after 15-M. Becerra’s thesis was to say that, with 15-M, the Spanish novel had recovered ideology after many years in which it only reflected politics through individual conflict, not as a collective issue. After 15-M, individual conflict is an expression of the contradictions and political-ideological conflicts of their time. From the literature of the self to the literature of the we.
This introduction is useful to approach The Fall of the Empire, the debut as a novelist of the journalist Javier Gallego (Madrid, 1975), a novel that takes place precisely in the three days that go from Friday the 13th to Sunday the 15th of May 2011. A novel that During those three days, it follows a group of friends who are in their thirties and if they agree on something, it is, above all, that they have reached that age, amply prepared, with a feeling of defeat ruling their lives. Because of the precariousness of their jobs, because they still live with their parents or in rooms in shared apartments, because of absent and/or conflictive family relationships, because of romantic relationships destined for fleeting or failure…
They survive this scenario between Peterpanism (“We have not left adolescence. They have not left us and we have not tried either”), nihilism (“live at night, die during the day”), nostalgia (“I feel nostalgia for what has not yet ended and what will never happen”) and copious doses of narcotics of all kinds (“chemistry is the only way to withstand physics”). And only some of them (like Salva, the photographer who has just returned from Greece where he has experienced the protests against the cuts imposed by the EU and the IMF) show, beyond the addiction to partying and hedonism, something similar to a political consciousness that requires a response.
With all these elements, Javier Gallego builds the portrait of a generation – between their lives, their thoughts, their comings and goings, their encounters, their escapes… so that they are the ones who show us their disenchantment and their anger. All in a long weekend, from party to party, from line to line, from trip to trip, from drink to drink… with surprise meetings and unforeseen events, with secondary actors seeking prominence (a police officer, a father dedicated to politics …). With time accelerating and the feeling that something is escaping them accelerates (“what a waste, what a waste of lives, how could we have wasted so much”). And as the party ends, as the collapse advances, the 15-M of the indignant approaches. Like a decoration. Or as a scenario into which he entered. Or not. It will depend on each one.
The author’s merit is to capture us in the story of this fall through those voices that follow one another without pause, that tell us but often also reflect. Story of lives that rush as if there was no remedy. A story, too, filled with references, musical, cinematographic… And a Madrid that is nothing like that of tourists. A city that is for its protagonists – Amalia, Jaco, Leo, Juan, Caín, Salva… – a precipice, a bonfire. Maybe, just maybe, salvation.
And returning to David Becerra’s essay, let the reader decide if it is a story of the I, or of the we.
