Challenging political power is something Fernando Vallejo's readers are used to. His books and his speeches are often suffused with a large dose of explosive fury, which he uses to single out those who corrupt the system. He already did it in Memorias de un hijueputa and repeats it again in La conjura contra Porky (Alfaguara), recently arrived in bookstores. But, this time, the winner of the Rómulo Gallegos award narrates his ennui and his eagerness to overthrow Colombian and religious institutions from a very different point of view: that of his own death.
How did this book come about?
Like all of mine, due to unemployment.
Shooting yourself in the Metropolitan Basilica of Medellín is a start that some may call provocative. Is it a preview of the tone and what the reader will find throughout the work?
It can, yes, but they are wrong. I am not looking to provoke anyone. Those who officiate inside the basilica that you say are the ones who provoke me with their blatant lies about God and Christ. God does not exist, and if he exists it is as if he did not exist because he is useless. And Christ did not exist. And in the absence of a Christ, outside the New Testament there are twenty, all mythical, and in it there are three, merged into one, also non-existent, which is the one we pray to today: the one in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. ; that of the gospel of John; and that of Paul's epistles. And I remove the "san" from all these presumed saints because they did not exist either. In my book The Whore of Babylon I explain fully what I am telling her about her career here because she does not give an interview for more.
What is the protagonist's sentence?
His condemnation is life, from which Death frees him, as is the case with all mortals.
What is a Porky?
A Porky is every president of Colombia: any harmful clown son of his mother like the one we have there now, and what's his name? I always get tangled up with the names of these disgusting people.
And Colombia? With what adjectives would you define it and why?
In The Conspiracy Against Porky it is defined as follows: "Colombia daughter of a bitch, daughter of Spain." And the why has been said by the history of both countries countless times with irrefutable arguments.
He said at the Bogotá book fair that its purpose is to unmask "public parasites that with their legalism and bureaucracies, with their obstacles and their taxes rob us and are suffocating us, not letting us breathe." When did you start with that purpose?
Around the age of seven, when I had the use of reason and made my first communion and chewed the host. The host could not be chewed? Well, I chewed it. And look at how good the Church and Colombia are to me: the one hasn't excommunicated me yet, and the other hasn't killed me yet.
In its pages, he makes evident his concern that the country has more and more candidates for the presidency. He says that "hide whores are coming in and out of the Palacio de Nariño"
Exact. It is a truth that all Colombians know: some enter and others leave. As for the "hideputa" don Quixote taught me. How well Cervantes wrote! And what a beautiful creation of that hidalgo with a clean heart but a dirty tongue. Don Quixote loved to insult.
Mothers don't fare much better…what's wrong with them?
Today we are eight billion. Does it seem like a little problem to you that they stop?
Just as dotted are Pope Francis and the Vatican, which he defines as a "criminal enterprise"
And not just the Vatican: the entire Catholic Church, plus the Protestant and Orthodox, that is, Christianity in its entirety, is the biggest scam and criminal enterprise that history has ever known.
Man is born bad and society makes him worse, he says in his book. What is he based on?
Well, in personal experience. In the many decades that I have lived.
Bad enough to want "the third world war and the first and last nuclear that will end everyone"?
Yes very bad. It's even worse. It's the scariest thing evolution has produced.
Not even the universities are spared. He describes them as "scam centers" and encourages parents to get their children out of there
Exact. Scam hubs. And there are plenty of explanations: the universities glow in the dark. We must put an end to them and add to the extermination of religions and homelands.
With music he delights more. Why was Cuco Sánchez's ideal for putting together a funeral theater?
For the great love that I have always had for that Mexican singer, only comparable to the hatred that I have for Bach.
Death is a subject on which he reflects in several of his books. Pure interest and curiosity, or would you say bordering on obsession?
What can a dead person write about that is not about Death? That the living write novels so that they win the million dollars of the Planet Prize.
Is there that notebook in which you write down the dead? If so... What was the last one you wrote down? And the first?
I wrote down the last one just today, a few hours ago: Heriberto Fiorillo, the organizer of the Festival of the Arts in Barranquilla, a very hot Colombian city, with climate and sex. I don't know what the first one was because when I started the notebook I already had a lot of deaths that I had to take out for months, with great effort, from my memory. I inaugurated it with about five hundred and today I am at five thousand. Five thousand who, since they knew me, could have testified to my posterity. They let them lose! Humanity has no vocation as a biographer.
Some judged him harsh with his criticism of the management of the pandemic. What would you have done differently?
I am an imposter. I dedicate myself to unmasking impostors of all kinds. In fact, the science of imposturology was founded by me. Throughout the pandemic there were eight hundred million infected and only twenty million deaths attributed to covid, but in the first year there were no vaccines. If the virus was so deadly, why didn't it kill half of humanity in the first year? And lots of vaccinated people continue to get infected and reinfected because covid vaccines don't work. The vaccine that does work, and is free, is the natural immunity that most of the world's population acquires with each yearly flu. Humanity has survived Judeo-Christianity and Islam, it will not survive a flu!
Finish the sentence. In an ideal world...
In an ideal world, there is no life. Life is a nightmare of matter.
