Pedro Almodóvar wanted to be a writer since he was a child. In 1979, before exploding in the cinema with Pepi, Luci, Bom and other ordinary girls, he would create an explosive literary character, the porn photonovel actress Patty Diphusa. An exuberant woman with endless adventures with sex and drugs, very much in keeping with the Movida. But Almodóvar has written much more. In the room next to his office at the production company El Deseo, he keeps more than a hundred unpublished stories. Some are no longer: he now publishes The Last Dream (Reservoir books), which covers stories from the late sixties to today and which, he says, are the closest thing to an autobiography that he is going to write.
Among them, the five pages that were born the day after the death of his mother and that give the book its title. And stories like The Visit, a previous one, decades before, of Bad Education. And stories where the life of Juana la Loca changes or unites, in every way, Barabbas with Jesus. And reflections on cinema and literature, visits to Chavela Vargas and even memories of New York and even of… an empty day, in which Almodóvar (Calzada de Calatrava, 1949) admits that he has become a solitary expert and that he something happens that he would never have believed when he was young: he gets bored.
Faced with the explosive Patty Diphusa, in his new book he acknowledges that in the new millennium he has turned his gaze towards himself, creating an almost opposite character, darker and more melancholic. What has been the turning point?
The passage of time itself. And it coincides with the death of my mother just at the turn of the millennium. I would have changed anyway, as I’ve always tried to change from film to film, but age does make my stories darker and more intimate. The type of life I led in the 70s was choral, always surrounded by people, having a lot of fun. At that time I was also writing, although I don’t know where I got the time, to be honest, because I also worked at Telefónica. Well, at Telefónica I took the opportunity to write. My life has changed a lot from the 80s to the 2000s. The life I lead now is almost the opposite, much lonelier, I see friends but much less.
Has your literature evolved the same?
I have always written. The first stories were in an intermediate zone between the religious education I received and the fact that I later stayed in my parents’ town for two or three years until I went to Madrid. They are first-time stories in how I feel and in style, but they change radically in 1978. The dictator dies and in Spain it took us two years to react. With the UCD government there is a day when you suddenly go out into the street and stop being afraid. And there came a decade in which we greatly enjoyed all the freedoms.
The artists who grew up at that time acted with complete freedom, because there was still no market and no one thought about it. Now young boys who have to write a poem, a book or a movie find that they have to be competing from that moment on, and it’s terrible when you’re training. In that decade, despite the fact that there was a coup, I made six films, some that many people now tell me I couldn’t have made, like Darkness.
Because now no?
Because of this thing that has appeared to my surprise and that of many people, that Catholic sensibility that has become a kind of law and everything that goes against it is a kind of crime. Like when Rita Maestre went out in a bra at the University and was judged for having hurt the sensibilities of Catholics. The ultra-Catholic has decided to speak and be heard, and he also has a party that amplifies what he says and that is a huge difference with the decade of the 80s.
In the prologue to ‘The Last Dream’ he says that now he is more insecure and afraid. To what?
It is not a political fear but a biological one. In the dictatorship fear could be cut, it was part of the atmosphere in which you lived, you could tell when you stepped on the street. And there was the silence of the families. I had a class conscience and I had a social conscience because being born in a town and in a family with a certain precariousness immediately places you in which class you belong. And I still belong to that class, even though I have money now. Rural areas establish this difference very quickly.
Now, the current moment, as always when there are social problems, is very prone to populism, which is with all its might trying to make us afraid. And I am not willing to recover that fear that I felt during the dictatorship, no matter what.
But then there are the contingencies of life itself. I have already lived much more than half of my life and that affects me when it comes to living, telling the stories and what kind of characters appear in them. I have not changed since I arrived in Madrid at the age of 18, I already had the same determination, I absolutely knew what I wanted to do, although I had no idea if it was possible because I was not born in the family or in the right place. I wanted to enroll in the film school, but they had closed it. But that determination that I had not only served as a push, as a guide, but also marked a path for me and all the dangers that exist in the adventure of living intensely, having that determination gradually freed me from them.
He talks about his arrival in Madrid and precisely his story ‘Life and death of Miguel’, which is a kind of Benjamin Button, responds, he says, to his need to escape the rural world.
I hope that in my town they don’t bother, but from a very young age my feeling was of being some kind of alien. I was born in a place where I do not belong, I am very small, I do not have the strength to become independent, but I know that I am going to stay here just as long as I can say I am leaving. Madrid for me represented the city of culture, where I had to go. I still had to wait for my adolescence until I finished High School and it’s the only time I really argued with my parents and got really hard.
I said that I was going to Madrid. Among other things, because my father had already found me a job in a bank and it was the last thing he wanted. But also he had the feeling that he really would have killed me if he had left me there. By starvation. It was a clear feeling. Since I was a minor, my father told me that if he left me he would send me to the Civil Guard. I told him that he was going to have to send it to me. They saw me so firm that they gave in.
‘Life and death of Miguel’ is a literally existential story.
I don’t look back much in general. When I reread it, I remembered perfectly where she was, in the backyard of the house, writing on an Olivetti that my mother had given me, with a skinned rabbit hanging next to it. And I knew that then I wanted to tell life in reverse. But what I see today is the absolute need to get out of there and, above all, I am surprised to read it because of its reflection on time and the futility of things and people. Suddenly people disappear, you don’t see them again and it’s as if you never met them.
Among the stories he has included are the five pages about the day after his mother’s death. From her, she says that she learned the difference between fiction and reality and how reality needs fiction to be more liveable.
I didn’t realize it at the time it was happening. It was the beginning of the 60s or the end of the 50s, Spanish families had to emigrate either within the country or abroad. We had some relatives working on an irrigation plan and we went there looking to improve the situation. We lived in a precarious way, although at nine years old one does not feel that precariousness as a misfortune, but as almost a kind of exoticism.
We fell into a street that wasn’t really a street, it was like those towns in the west, where houses rise up, an area of ​​slates. The ground was more than uneven and they were mud houses made on the fly. It was the poorest street in the town. My mother, always very willing, began to read the letters that arrived to the illiterate neighbors and I was a witness and there were times that I would see the letters over her shoulder and I realized that she was improvising and that she was bringing out characters from the family and things that did not appear in the letter.
Very serious despite being a child I told her: ‘Mom, but how can you say those things, but if they are not written, you are making it up? And she told me: ‘But have you seen how happy they have been?’ Much later I realized that really, and it happens to me when I write, that it never becomes documentary, fiction always sneaks in. He always finds a crack. It is the first lesson my mother gave me, that you also have to integrate some fiction into life itself to make it more livable. Which is not lying or fantasizing either. Everyone watches fiction every day of their lives, in one way or another.
He assures that the three greatest influences in your life are the patios from La Mancha with the women among the lace making and the criticism of the neighbors, the explosion of life of the Movida and religious education. What have they left you?
Religious upbringing above all very quickly turned me into something I was destined to be: an atheist. Very atrocious things happened at school, continuous abuse, with classmates. Being internal was like living a Big Brother to the beast. We all knew and told each other everything and I was horrified. And that when I entered the school, since they promoted the faith so much, I thought that it could be a solution. Despite being so small, I was already questioning what we are doing here, why we have come, what awaits us, where we are going.
But when I saw so many outrages in my first year, I no longer believed in God. Fortunately there were other things that made up for the stay, such as the great ritual, in which all religions are very rich and the Catholic one is very rich. And they chose me because I had what they call the white voice as a soloist in the choir. Then he would pass the time singing wonderful masses by Brahms. First I was with the Salesians and then with the Franciscans. The worst were the Salesians because they were there day and night. And consciously or not, I was trying to misrepresent everything that I had been taught.
In what sense?
If I wrote a story about Christ and Barabbas I would say the exact opposite of what they told me. And the story The visit is a story of revenge against them, what happens is that the character ends up being the victim. But in the early years of writing what he was trying to do was not transgress, because being a transgressor is a moral term. They have called it to me many times, but I have never wanted to transgress any rule, because that is thinking about good things and bad things.
What I did have in mind was to distort and say the opposite of what I had been told, and if I talk about Crazy Juana I mix her with Hamlet and Sleeping Beauty because that was what amused me. I didn’t know if I felt resentment, but I did feel that they had done me wrong and from the small power that having a typewriter and writing stories gives you, I took revenge for that, but I got over it soon.
When I get to 1977 religion is no longer a problem, I start living other things, I soon forgot them. Although every time I read in the newspaper the problems with the church with the issue of abuse and the number of lawsuits that there are and that nothing continues to happen, I get a kind of fury. The Ombudsman, Gabilondo, believes that the Church will help him, and it will never do so. In my school there was a big predator and there was a scandal and the punishment was to send him to another school with 17-year-old boys instead of ten. I am outraged to see the absolute inaction of those who rule in the church. In Spain men are very shy and very modest and admitting something like that makes you very ashamed, but it was the daily bread.
Do the last stories in your book have something self-critical, like when you say that you have become a solitary expert?
A lot of the work I do I have to do alone. The confinement was a continuation of what I usually did, and in fact I worked a lot. It is true that especially in this century I have gradually isolated myself, I have not yet become a misanthrope, because I go to the movies a lot, to the theater too, even to see movies that I don’t like afterwards. It’s a ritual and I didn’t want to skip it, even though it seems that the theaters are already a matter of twilight and I’m going to be the last spectator they’re going to have. But it is true that I have been isolating myself, I think a little more than is advisable, what happens is that I have been doing it and choosing it by myself.
It is not the ideal situation, because I am generally working but at times like the ones we have just gone through, such as Easter, I have a very hard time. Everyone leaves and I am absolutely alone in Madrid and then the streets are overflowing with tourists. And this does, and it is something that I did not count on because I am very modest and I do not like to talk about myself, that in the latest films I have to take myself as a reference, the muse is me. It is something that I did not just like at all. But if I write something foreign and I don’t like it, then I put my hand back inside my bowels and see what I find.
