Gabriel Aristu and Adriana Zuber lived a love story in Spain in the sixties. The matter was cut short, he went to the United States, where he became a high bank executive, and she stayed in the dictatorship and became a teacher of plastic arts. Fifty years later, they meet again in a way that shocks the reader of No te veré morir (Seix Barral) – the new novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 1956), in which these characters live – an intense emotion. The author of Beltenebros (1989), The Polish Horseman (1991) or La noche de los tiempos (2009) answers this newspaper by phone after returning from the vet with his little dog.
And boring melodrama.
Everything is very concentrated, it is a story reduced to the fundamental elements, the clash or encounter between two characters. She is as naked as I can get. I tend to be expansive, to compose symphonies and here I came up with a chamber piece.
What was the trigger?
A story I was told a few years ago about a reunion after a long time. I was given few details, but I was impressed. I started to write a story but I was possessed, I wrote frantically, everything took shape and things came out like a poem.
Every reader can feel identified with these truncated loves.
When we talk about love passion, we talk about instantaneity, something that comes and goes. But I found it attractive to show a passion that lasts a lifetime and continues to affect quite old people. Literature has little explored these passions, this sensuality.
The characters in romance novels are usually younger, yes.
They have been young, and when they look at each other they see the face they have now and that of youth. I saw Adriana’s gaze in the poet I d, whom I met in Montevideo. I was surprised that such an old, stooped woman looked completely young, not worn by time or anything, with the same strength and radiance that she might have had thirty years ago. She, who was Onetti’s lover, aroused my admiration, that look has remained engraved in my head forever. And the title of this novel comes from a verse of his.
There is a secondary appearance character, Julio, who has been severely punished by life: a traffic accident, a traumatic separation…
I have seen cases of men completely shattered by a cruel separation. He is accused of something he does not know what it is and does not recover from it. A wound may never heal.
He facilitates the meeting that is the axis of the novel.
I like mediating characters, I am a reader of Conrad and Faulkner and they have these character-witnesses, catalysts of history. In our life, sometimes people who will not even know are of fundamental importance.
We see Falla, Pau Casals, the National Orchestra…
The protagonist and his father will visit Pau Casals, this comes from a photo I had seen of the musician in Prades, wearing espadrilles. The novel is musical, in theme and form. I am inspired by Bach’s cello suites, with their incessant continuity. I saw it as the movements of a string quartet, with each part closed in on itself and changing points of view.
Parenthood is another very present topic…
He is captive to his father’s pain. Loyalty to the father imprisons him. One theme is how the suffering and trauma of parents can be inherited, this has been seen a lot in Jewish families, in children of Holocaust survivors.
There are dreamlike scenes…
‘If I’m here and I’m seeing you and talking to you, this must be a dream’. That was the first sentence I wrote. Dreams are arbitrary, but far more effective than conscious memory. In a dream you find a loved one who died, with chilling details. I lost my father many years ago, but sometimes I dream about him and in the dream I find things about him that I had forgotten, like his voice, the way he was, his hair, or I hug him and smell his scent . This is very powerful.
Do you write your dreams?
Sometimes. They attract my attention, but without any interest in psychoanalysis or surrealism, although I do in neuroscience, which unravels the mechanisms of dreams and their symbolic capacity: in a dream a story or an experience is synthesized ; in this there is a poetic element that attracts me a lot.
Gabriel’s father is a complex figure, someone who is with the nationals in the war, who is a good person and lives split.
He is a divided man, a cultured monarchist who was about to be shot and who, after his people won, is horrified by the crimes and measures of the victors. The only thing he wants is to save his children, whom he enrolls in the British Council, and sends Gabriel to England, to escape from the darkness that has devastated him. He is like one of those liberals of the thirties overcome by horror.
The idea of ??Spain in the novel is that of a place to run away from, today it continues to be done, but only for economic reasons.
Imagine what the culture shock must have been after arriving in the USA from Franco’s Madrid and encountering the California of psychedelia and rock’n’roll. Eduardo Mendoza has explained very well his landing in New York in the early seventies, it was like a journey through time, an awakening.
Adriana reprimands him for never taking the step.
What could have been and was not gives much literary play. People are very complicated, you never get to know anyone. I explore the difference between a masculine sentimentality (more novelistic, but less concrete and true) and a feminine one (‘if you loved me so much why didn’t you call me?’), this makes the difference. It’s an exciting field. What are they like, how do they see each other, how do they remember each other? He is sure to remember things that were not as he evoked them: did he spend the whole night with her? The memory is creating flattering or consoling fictions.
There is sickness and old age, sometimes crudely, but it is nothing degrading or unworthy, but even sensual.
Yes. Literature, good literature, is compassionate towards people. The exclusively cruel look rarely makes for a good novel. Fiction tells the world from the point of view of specific people, and in every moment of life, there is passion, beauty and, without a doubt, dignity. Novels recognize this right to dignity even in the least acceptable characters, because nothing is black or white, ideologies simplify, but the novel warns you that, ep!, every person is a worthy world of respect
Practice a fusion of tenses, with scenes that are both past and present.
This is how the human mind works. When they meet after half a century of not having seen each other, they are irresistibly bringing together two times so far away, they live them simultaneously. You only see strangers as old; in couples or old acquaintances you also see the face you remember, this has great beauty, because that face is also there, every face is a palimpsest. My mother is over 90 years old, but when I talk to her on the phone I hear her young voice.
There are cameos by Lorca and other characters from the cultural world…
It is an obsession of mine, the silver age of Spanish culture, from the first decades of the 20th century, that ambition for modernity, at the same time, literary and political, related to an educational project, going out into the world and recovering the popular through from the vanguard This includes Ramón y Cajal, Negrín, architects, painters, Buñuel, Falla, Lorca… the fusion between what is popular and what is tremendously cosmopolitan. Gabriel Aristu’s father believed that he lived in this country, which was completely devastated by the war, as if an atomic bomb had fallen there and sent them all to death or exile.
