Pedro died at 54 years old. He was a white rhinoceros that arrived two decades ago at the Barcelona Zoo from the Rioleón Safari Park. Extinct in the wild, there are only two living specimens of the subspecies that inhabited North Africa and just a handful of those in the south. We jump 440 years into the past: a female Asian rhinoceros arrives in Madrid as a gift for Philip II and is installed in a corral of the San Martín convent, where the Plaza de Callao is today. Look very close to Abada Street and look at the plaque: a rhinoceros. Abada is the transcription that the Portuguese gave to the Malay word 'badaq', which the natives of present-day Indonesia used for the robust pachyderm.
In Badaq (Plaza y Janés), a novel that denounces greed, religious fanaticism and the destruction of nature by man, Carlos Bardem (Madrid, 1963) uses the literary formula of the fable – the pachyderm will be one of the voices main points of the plot – to put ourselves as a species in front of the mirror: “In any process of conquest and colonization, the first thing is to put the conquered in a position of inferiority. That is what has happened since man was man with respect to nature. I play what it would be like if animals judged us to come to the conclusion that the world is shouting at us that we cannot continue living without respecting what surrounds us.”
In the era that he covers in his novel, the end of the 16th century, others were stabbed very easily and entire populations were devastated in the name of God, the king or greed. Seeing what is happening right now in Palestine, it almost seems appropriate to reflect on the extent to which we have evolved. “I don't remember the author, but it is a phrase that I always repeat: inside each of us lives a Hitler and a Mozart and our mission in life is to drown our Hitler and feed our Mozart. Human beings are capable of the best and the worst. I believe that history is a dialectic, it is a history of conflict and confrontation. "Sometimes this conflict generates objective advances such as human rights and other times we witness carnage like the one we are witnessing in Gaza with the approval of supposedly democratic governments."
Carlos has a degree in History and a deeply cultured man. During the talk he quotes Hegel, Trotsky, Saint Thomas, Gramsci, Cioran, Descartes, Slavoj Zizek... The latter coined the term "hypertrophy of the ethical." “Capitalism has managed to turn us into hyperethical beings: through individual behaviors that capitalism itself encourages and makes business – they sell you the electric bike, the cloth bag, the sustainable organic food – the individual becomes aware of their individuality and forgets the collective struggles when we have to face this as a species; It is a collective challenge. It is very good that on an individual level you try to minimize your carbon footprint, moderate your consumption habits, move by sustainable means of transportation, etc. But that's not enough. Environmentalism, the fight against the climate emergency, is a political fight. The big polluters are big governments and big corporations, so the most ecological thing you can do is vote for political parties that have a serious commitment to solving this problem.”
Bardem says that age has made him understand that the main revolution that humanity needs is the one that will promote environmentalism: “At university, concerned about the class struggle, I thought that saving the whales was a thing for the bourgeois and dilettantes. . After collaborating with Greenpeace in several campaigns I realized how wrong I was: the most profound and radical criticism of the system in which we live; "We cannot continue living in an economic model based on consumption and depleting resources from an already depleted planet."
In the era that he covers in his novel, the end of the 16th century, others were stabbed very easily and entire populations were devastated in the name of God, the king or greed. Seeing what is happening right now in Palestine, it almost seems appropriate to reflect on the extent to which we have evolved. “I don't remember the author, but it is a phrase that I always repeat: inside each of us lives a Hitler and a Mozart and that our mission in life is to drown our Hitler and feed our Mozart. Human beings are capable of the best and the worst. I believe that history is a dialectic, it is a history of conflict and confrontation. "Sometimes this conflict generates objective advances such as human rights and other times we witness carnage like the one we are witnessing in Gaza with the approval of supposedly democratic governments."
The writer dedicates this novel to his nephews, Leo and Luna (children of his brother Javier and Penélope Cruz), with hope placed in the new generations: “For them I am 'uncle brother' because my brother and I call each other that (laughs). I really enjoy them. I think they are two or three years away from being able to read Badaq; When the time comes, I trust you will enjoy it. We had a great time together and if there is eco-anxiety, I bet on eco-hope: young people come with a different mental structure and our responsibility is to help them complete a change and find a solution.”
Carlos Bardem is in double congratulations: if The Chosen One reached very high audience levels on Netflix, the second season of 30 Coins, by Álex de la Iglesia, is about to premiere on HBO Max. In the first he is an evangelical pastor; in the second, a narcosatanic cardinal. He surmises whether being an atheist has given him an advantage in being able to act without prejudice, ending up concluding that if in both series, without any connection between them, the last name is Cruz, this symbol has an unavoidable weight in the collective unconscious.
