What made you a writer?
A walk and a room.
Tell me about the ride.
In the summer of 1990, I am ten years old and I am walking hand in hand with my father through Gijón...
Clear bay
We see booths, groups, hustle and bustle... I look inquiringly. My father explains to me: “Don't worry, son, they are writers.”
Careful!
My father read Vázquez Montalbán, the third edition of the Black Week in Gijón was celebrated. In July it will be the 37th edition... and I direct it! What things.
He was shocked to see writers.
Once at home I went to my father's electric typewriter... and wrote my first paragraph.
And until today?
A dozen published books: I trust they are in the room.
What room?
I mentioned it before: there was a “book room” at home. They lived there. I came in, looked at them, touched them...
And today his books live there?
Wait! From my grandfather, a voracious newspaper reader, I learned that reality is understood thanks to words. And that led me towards journalism.
Writing, what obligation does it entail?
You can't write in Spanish without first having read Don Quixote, in my opinion.
What is your favorite passage?
Sancho, on the Insula Barataria, writes to his wife. I am surprised by the modernity of Cervantes, amazing! We attend the spectacle of a writer having fun.
The first novelist.
And he almost exhausted the genre he invented!
What is the great teaching?
That fiction lies, but it does not deceive.
Why doesn't fiction deceive?
Because they are lies loaded with truth. Fiction orders the chaotic reality to make it intelligible to us.
And what do we tell each other?
We tell ourselves who we are and what the world is.
Is literature the true teacher?
It is false that “you can't learn history in a novel.” It's the other way around! You only learn history if it is told to you like a novel.
He has convinced me.
Fiction is very powerful: it infiltrates people's minds and thus modifies thousands, millions of lives.
And each one aspires to tell their story.
There the Spanish Inquisition: when colonizing America, it prohibited the reading of novels in the New World.
What was the danger of novels?
They competed with the only true story, the Gospel.
The inquisitors exaggerated.
Or not. Let's never underestimate fiction! Nothing more subversive than a book. That is why the author of Lazarillo masks himself: he knows that he creates too many enemies.
What last story do you tell us?
I have been captivated by the history of the Barolo Palace: it appears in my novel The Other Shore.
Barolo Palace?
A skyscraper that stands on Avenida de Mayo in the city of Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 1923.
It has turned a century, then.
And it was then the tallest building in South America, with a lighthouse on its top... and very literary architecture.
Why literary?
It was built in homage to the Divine Comedy of the poet Dante Aligheri.
Patriarch of Italian letters!
Work of two Italians living in Argentina: the textile billionaire Luis Barolo and the architect Mario Palanti. They dreamed of keeping Dante's remains there!
A skyscraper mausoleum?
They saw the skyscraper as a modern cathedral. And they saw that the Great War was destroying Europe... and they decided to save it!
Save Europe by saving its literature?
Yes, and found another Italy, another Europe, on the other shore... through culture, literature... That is, through fiction.
So powerful, he told me...
He created Hell: hell does not appear in the Bible, hell is a fiction of Dante. And that's what hell is like today for everyone!
Good example of the power of fiction.
The Barolo Palace conforms to the Divine Comedy: three parts (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise); one hundred meters (one hundred songs of the poem); twenty-two floors (each stanza)...
Could they finally put Dante there?
Mario Palanti went to Italy to look for them, but Dante's ashes remain in Ravenna, although Florence prepared another tomb for Dante, one that has always been empty.
Dante stayed on this shore.
Let us stay with poetry, which captures the essence of humanity under the masks of identities.
