A shady but very active secret state organization, based in Barcelona’s Eixample, is the protagonist of Tres enigmas para la Organización (Seix Barral), the new novel by Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, ??1943) – on sale from d’ahir–, in which the nine agents of the aforementioned entity will have to solve the mysterious murder of a hotel guest on La Rambla, among other murky affairs that reflect today’s society in a maddened sense of humor. The writer – who sometimes laughs when recalling some occurrences in the book – receives this newspaper in a hotel very close to the agency’s headquarters, the exact address of which he prefers not to reveal because “it is a house where I still go because one of my doctors is there”.
On April 10, 2021, he told this newspaper that he had stopped writing novels. Won’t it be like some politicians?
And like the bullfighters. When I stated that, I meant it. But I didn’t know what to do at home, I was bored, and what I wanted to do was write. Total, that I started writing for myself, not knowing if I would finish it. I took the detective novel model to make a parody of it. Now the detective books are very collective, those lone wolves of Raymond Chandler are over, then came the detective couple and now we see the district police station in full, right down to the point where they find a dismembered corpse, it they start investigating and we immediately forget about it because what happens inside that family is much more interesting than the crime.
This is his novel with more terrifying women.
Yes. You will find here all the cliche characters, which I use and abuse: the shock girl, a harpooner, a mobster, a Japanese…
It also pays homage to the world of taxis, with that character who drives one and wants to join the Organization, but they don’t let him.
When I was a taxi driver for a long time, I realized that in my childhood there had been a very important character on the radio, Taxi Key, a taxi driver detective, which is completely absurd if you think about it a little. For me it is a reference, I was waiting for Saturday to listen to the program of Ràdio Barcelona.
It is a very contemporary novel, it integrates new technologies, streaming platforms, phone apps…
Everything, but seen from the outside. In the Organization, they are prohibited from using these things. Unwittingly, I may have painted the portrait of my generation: these characters whose agency has been created by Francoism, who survive we don’t quite know why in a world they don’t know, but they continue to stick their noses where no one else he asks them, they are useless and do not want to have contact via mobile phone so that they are not located.
There are interactions between agents and then with the outside world…
They come in and out, and they are also their home, each one has a life as a character in a novel, but then at home he is a poor wretch, as it happens to all of us.
You too?
Of course! He’s interviewing me here as supposedly a respected writer, but then I get home and they say: “Listen, I told you to go buy chickpeas”, “oh, I forgot”… And no they forgive you because you have the Cervantes prize.
It deals with the world of immigration.
Barcelona, ??like all cities, has changed its DNA. The people of Barcelona are like the Indians of a reservation and all the other things are already colonization. And I like it that way, it seems to me a good way to renew. Barcelona is an open city, as it has always been, and as they all are, except for one very disgusting one, which has no mixes. Maybe there aren’t many foreign workers in North Korea… There are those who come to Barcelona to look for work, those who come because they have retired and are looking for the climate and good food, young people bored of their homes who are here they have more fun… All these people are what make the city and I wanted them to come out.
A key character is a prostitute. Did you ever think about holding back because of what is politically correct?
No, not that. What I do try to do is to be very respectful. I was more afraid of the hunchback. But there is a moment when you think: lost for lost, the blanket around your neck. And I narrate the story of the hunchback, which is like a story within a novel. And if the hunchback collective is offended, we will ask for forgiveness. They have disappeared, but many were seen before.
There is a sentence that I have underlined: “Time passes with incredible speed and if one has been able to enrich one’s understanding with substantial readings, instructive journeys and serene reflections, in the end one receives the reward of the wise, which consists in verifying that everything that he has learned it is useless, that all experience is late and that all life is a vulgarity without palliatives”. Do you subscribe?
Without a doubt, it is the pure truth! But to reach this conclusion you have to have studied a lot, you can’t go through everything without more or less, you have to get there after having put in the effort.
One of the agents has to reconcile and takes the teenage son on some missions.
The boy has to do his homework and the condition is that, despite all the adventures that happen, he does his homework in his notebook.
This is quite modern, taking the child away.
do you know Crime novels and serials usually start very well, but by the third or fourth title they start to take things very seriously. It happened to me reading Jo Nesbo and others, at the beginning you find powerful quarters, all the strength of Scandinavian noir, but after a while the author starts to engage with the characters and wants you to take it all seriously Then I look for another author who is starting and has not yet reached this degree of melichism.
You were an interpreter in international organizations and worked with great leaders (you translated the meeting between Reagan and Felipe González, for example). Are there any of those experiences in this novel? Maybe he thought, with everything he saw, that he could have been a secret agent?
On the contrary, there you realize that the intelligence services are nonsense. Its main function is to justify its existence. I dealt with many spies…
And this?
In that UN, it was the era of the cold war, the delegations, like the Russian one, were full of spies who had nothing to do and, for example, photocopied the plans of a fighter plane that were published in Newsweek magazine because, of course, it was impossible for them to gain access to the plane’s factory. It’s not like James Bond movies. The secret services are very human: great things are discovered because, for example, someone pees and forgets the wallet with microfilms in the toilet. This is how it actually happens, it’s all pretty ridiculous.
In the novel there is a priest from Barcelona who nervously awaits the Pope’s visit to his parish.
How silly, right? And, to extract information from the priest, the Asian-looking secret agent tells him that he is a Shintoist, but that he wants to convert to Catholicism and raises questions of theological weight in the conversations. I’ve been very fond of religious subjects, it’s my secret vice, I’ve read a lot of Saint Augustine: it amazes me how, if you want to define and explain philosophically something impossible, a very funny Byzantine prose emerges.
Are we leaving anything important out?
Important? If you mean this book, I’m sure not.
