Malaga The author, a journalist instrumental in the Transition and master of thrillers, this week returned to their hometown with a new book under his arm, ‘Clubs’, and spoke of melancholy and political.
Juan Madrid (Malaga, 1947), author of half a hundred novels (some, as days are numbered, have been adapted to the big screen) and many scripts, fundamental journalist during the Transition in magazines such as Cambio 16, a former member of the PC and teaching at several institutions in Europe and America, is an accomplice conversationalist, an honest comparable to that of Catullus. And it’s being kind, warm, rich in gestures.
- Has already surpassed the melancholy?
-No. If he did, it would be official. I have written 50 books and I did not succeed. Clubs, which predates the last one came out, Goodbye, princess, speaks precisely to my relationship with melancholy. One begins to realize the melancholy when you also realize that you need memory. And that happens from the 32 or 33 years when you discover that you have a past. But yes, there is a sadness in all my novels. What happens is that this is a special melancholy: the bars at night are a metaphor for the prodigious decade that followed the death of senior military Galician, from 1975 to 1985, we experienced an amazing way in all cities this country. It is true that there was a move to Madrid, but I noted a similar story in Malaga, Seville, in Albacete, in Cáceres. As if he had broken the dam wall.
“But it now seems that the marshes have become.
-The monument to the ethic that was the resistance to Franco is now a perfect stranger. He missed. And that was the mechanism that pushed me to be a journalist first and a writer then: I started writing novels, in fact, when I realized that she had lost everything. In 1980 I published my first novel and now I realized that it was creating the unique discourse that has crystallized now on Transition, democracy, the king, prince and princesses, all a fairy tale that was absolutely false brewing at that time. There were two or three exits: become official, joined the group of organic intellectuals to aspire to lead a Cervantes Institute or tell that story. I had a privileged position because he was a journalist. And I did.
- What post-Franco joined the first group of writers?
“From that first generation, we took the first novels in the early 80′s, most came from the struggle against Franco. We suffered the fascist paw, not only us but our families. For us, the literature has been a kind of atonement. Perhaps witnessing what has happened is as you can stand the fact that we now want the movie otherwise. Going down into the sewers. Almost involuntarily I became a singer of the sewers, because the lower depths are very connected with the high offices.
- Could provide so anything that came after that?
“No, it was impossible to foretell the multiple betrayals of the PC, the PSOE. The oligarchy that had held power during the Franco regime was responsible for buying the necessary people to do everything his way. Sometimes, the actors left the paper. And one was an actor who made acojonante general de la Rovere, who was Adolfo Suarez. He played a role that was not his own and became the left. There was a breakdown of the script. But what happened with the PC was more than expected by this oligarchy. That was how the transition happened, however much historians and journalists are still moving in a false world, in official discourse far removed from reality. So when I decided to write novels I wanted to tell all that he could not have before. All my novels are, at bottom, a kind of revenge. I have not brought in the charm, but disenchantment. I always knew what was Stalinism and always declare myself an anti-Stalinist. For me the end of the transition was not that the band won the elections of Seville, an unscrupulous people who took the country as in Hammett’s Red Harvest. They did it with the others, who are even worse.
- Do you think, before the death of Franco, Spain could become a unique case when it was gone?
“I was aware of the danger. Always, historically, where bourgeois democracy has used its usual resources, such as elections, against the will of the army, he intervened. The most obvious example is the Spanish Republic. When it fails ideological control, arms act. In 1974, when Don Juan de Borbon joined the Democratic Board, on which were the Christian Democrats, Satrústegui, the PSOE, the PC and the system was in a compromising position because they had agreed to set up after the death of Franco a government of national reconciliation and call a referendum to choose between republic or monarchy. There was even respondents who said that 70% of the population wanted a republic. So Franco, who had designed the Transition between 1946 and 1947, decided to seek out those who will ensure the continuity of the system. And in Seville found a people who were properly paid and feted in exchange for commitments not to form a Popular Front, knowing that a Popular Front would win the election. I think that, even accepting that the PSOE was left, it would happen again today. At that, one wonders whether it is possible to write the same thing we’ve ever written, as Pratolini said about Auschwitz. It is an ethical decision. We live in Plato’s cave, the largest deception and better prepared than it has ever concocted. In my last paper at the PCs in 1979, said he had to abandon all political positions and tell people the truth about what had happened. We had a corrupt regime by definition.
“But many writers have stopped writing it the same.
“Yes. Here and in Latin America. As Mario Vargas Llosa, who is a sellout. What happens is that Vargas Llosa writes like the gods. Better than Garcia Marquez, who is left, and Carlos Fuentes, another sold.
“In Clubs buenismo charge against, in a tone even Nietzsche.
“Yes, among my many failings I am having read Nietzsche, but not my favorite. I have always believed in the obligation of owning one’s own destiny, as in Treasure Island, Stevenson. The problem is that to achieve this you must kill the father. The pity is that after no one picked up the baton Nietzsche. Capitalism has created an enormous mediocrity. Anything other than a worthless commodity.
- When is healed melancholy write a history book on science program?
“I got ya. It is not finished dissertation on political change and social structure that is very flamboyant but is about peasant struggles in nineteenth-century Andalusia. That story is of general strikes in Jerez in 1883, which I believe is the only time in history that a group of peasants assaulted a city. They called epidemic of hunger. To justify the brutal repression with which they responded, the Civil Guard made up a pamphlet about a revolutionary organization in the First International was called the Black Hand, was going to burn alive the whole bourgeoisie. Something similar is happening now with terrorism. The former dictators did not need evidence, but the bourgeoisie has always needed. The book came with that title, La Mano Negra.
- What about the accession of Bergamin and Sastre left wing nationalists after the Transition?
“I know a lot Sastre. I have a great affection. But do not share his political history, even though we left the organization. His defense of what he calls the Basques, ETA and all that, I do not accept. But I can not help keep this baby. I met him when I was 17 and was Alfaguara buttons. She kept the books sent to him by Camilo Jose Cela, who was my boss. Cela was paid by the regime to try to persuade the dissidents, and sent books to Ayala, a Tailor. He helped me a lot, but I went away when all of the ETA and his wife was involved in an attack. Bergamin also helped me a lot, especially to write. When I met him, I went to a Brazilian and he did not take his eye off him. He died bankrupt. I think the transition was very unfair to him, especially since contributed greatly to the culture since college. It’s a shame, but the university was much better under Franco than now. Sastre and Bergamin two writers are like the crown of a pine. Not like Ayala, who is lousy. The only merit of Ayala is having been a Republican and have loved the King. And having eaten a whole pig, when he was 80 years. I saw it.
- What remains of his childhood in the Plaza de Viedma?
-It is everything. I have not come out of these alleys. Intellectually and emotionally. Ibn Battuta As I said, ‘I have never left the courtyard full of orange from my house in Granada’. I’m still around and through the city I see life.
