“Very little is said about suicide, because this pain and guilt remains among the people who surround the dead, but it is a mistake not to speak, because then the people who remain are separated. These invisible walls remain made of silence, no one dares to talk about these things,” says Ramon Mas (Sant Julià de Vilatorta, 1982). The writer (and editor of Males Herbes with Ricard Planas) has just published Els murs invisibles (L’Altra Editorial, in Spanish, The invisible walls, in Temas de Hoy), his most personal novel, in which he shares the story lived with his friend Raül Izquierdo and who takes us to Sucre de Vic, a meeting point in the mid-nineties for skaters from the region.
“More than skate culture, music, hardcore and punk also prevailed. Skateboarding gives us the place, the territory, but cultural identity goes further, acquiring common cultural references and politicization, you don’t just stay with the aesthetics or the sport, but it expands,” explains Mas, who went to He stopped there at the age of 15 and formed what would become his chosen family. They met every afternoon to skate, a group of young people and teenagers frowned upon by the right-thinking society of Vic that “says everything without saying anything, judges without a word, but you know that they are judging you. “All that is a weight, it is the fog.” They form their community, they make their fanzines, their music groups and they organize concerts, and they skate and they are: “It is true that it is very linked to adolescence, let’s see that you don’t like everything that will come when you get older, which is everything is gray and everything is the same. Not wanting to be like others means trying to find a community, an identity, something that differentiates you from that great gray mass. You see that you don’t like adults and you seek to be part of something and that is when these strong bonds are created that are your group or your youth subculture. And it is beautiful.” The urban tribes, as they said at the time, “are like secret societies, they are visible to everyone, everyone sees that there are full of kids skating in the square, but no one really understands them, no one knows what their meaning is.” culture, its references, its ideas, its common identity, and that can help you a lot in this screwed-up age in which you feel so helpless and so far away from the world.”
Mas has dedicated four intense years directly to the novel, but he had had it in him for twenty: “The thing is that in previous novels of mine like Afores or Estigmes (both in Edicions of 1984) this book is already in the background, suicide was constantly coming out in my books, accidentally. I have known for many years that this is the story I had to write. Now there is distance and I can explain it without judgment, without remorse, without open wounds.” The scar remains, of course: “It has been twenty years of trying to understand, of trying to respect the decision of the person around you who decides to die, of trying to live with it naturally, without hiding it, without silencing it, being able to speak as openly as possible. may be possible. It is a tribute to my friend, like a pending account. Try to keep him alive, make sure he doesn’t disappear, make sure someone else knows him, knows this story, try to make it last. It is a gesture of friendship.”
And now that you have freed yourself from this reckoning with the past, what? “Now I will write genre, which is what I should have done all my life. I’m writing science fiction, part drama, part family, part human relationships, which is what I had always wanted to do, but someone always had to commit suicide. “I have been able to write this book, and it is here where I have learned to talk about human relationships, where I have learned to talk about strong feelings.”
Reading it “you see the character who has always survived until he gets tired of continuing to fight. He is lawful. I could see the colors of the tapestry, but I hadn’t been able to move away enough to see the entire drawing,” explains Mas, who has not written a book about suicide: “It’s a very bad topic, suicide is always equated with Mental illness. There are many reasons why people commit suicide and they are treated very badly. Furthermore, the problems are always for the living, who are left with a very strong feeling of guilt, remorse and many unanswered questions.”
It is also the narrative of suddenly entering adulthood, of growing up without becoming what you had always rejected: “It goes from my fifteen to twenty-two years, but above all there are three weeks in which the bubble bursts: the life is over. adolescence, people work, couples form, I study abroad… the end of the adolescent utopia. And you say, shit, we can’t avoid adult life, you’re going headlong.” But you have to move forward: “You keep going and life drags you down, you have children and everything puts you in its place, but it is very important not to completely decontextualize yourself, not to disengage.”
Catalan version, here