“When the political party is the communist and its object is to act against the legal order (...), for me the act is more serious than a homicide, committed, perhaps, in passionate circumstances, which make the attitude of the criminal more questionable. ”. It is part of a letter from the then civil governor of Barcelona, Tomás Garicano Goñi, to the abbot of Montserrat, Cassià M. Just, who had denounced the torture of some detainees. It can be read in the last novel by Eduard Márquez, 1969 (Navona/L’Altra), in which the writer portrays, based on documents and testimonies, the beginning of the end of Francoism.
Eleven years ago Márquez (Barcelona, 1960) published L'últim dia abans de demà (Empúries, 2011), and then he felt that he was at the end of a road, that he could not go beyond purging the style and, consequently, , stopped writing. He opted for fallow, for reading a lot, until he found an objective: to fictionalize the transition process, from 1969 to 1980.
“It is a resentment that I have had for perhaps 25 years. I really wanted to talk about what I experienced up close, the defeat that the transition represented for many people, the frustration of many collective and individual illusions. The idea of the semi-failed revolt, because it is not a total failure either, as a narrative theme is very powerful”, explains the author, who does not deny that many parallels can be found with the current moment.
It wasn't easy and he twice abandoned the project, which first had to be a choral novel, "in the style of Dickens or Franzen, which basically is the same thread," he says. “I studied everything, John Dos Passos, Camilo José Cela, Grace Metalious, Luis Romero”, and it didn't work for him. “With La novel de Ferrara, by Giorgio Bassani, I saw that instead of taking a mold and inserting reality, a different form can be applied to each thing, whether it is a story, long novels, short novels, in the first person or in the third person. . It was so apparent that he hadn't seen it." With Scurati, Enzensberger, Alexiévich, or Laurent Binet –on the recommendation of Vicenç Pagès–, he finds that he can add documentation, testimonies, fiction and a metaliterary voice, and he writes pages and pages and works side by side with his editor, Eugènia Broggi, in full pandemic. But he does not find the key until he realizes that he is the one left over. The maximum clearance. "Removing the artifact made life float with all its energy," he acknowledges.
In the book we find, together with oral voices from the entire spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left, leaflets, letters, manuals to resist torture or to avoid the dangers in hiding, Franco's speeches, laws, police reports of all kinds - with profuse transcriptions of all the graffiti, with colors and sizes–, political propaganda... And it goes through the occupation of the rector's office of the University of Barcelona, the State of Exception, Franco's succession speech to Juan Carlos: that of the “ tied and well tied”.
A novel in which the author completely disappears: each word responds either to documents or to people who have spoken with him, not an ounce of fiction.
Catalan version, here
