An investigative journalist named Nacho Orovio, doubtful but rigorous, lonely (he is displaced in a city that is not his), observant and sentimental, stars in Los inculpados, the first novel (with a very high dose of reportage) by Ignacio Orovio (Barcelona, 1968). , editor-in-chief of the A Fondo section of La Vanguardia. The work is inspired by the author's real experience, who covered the terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid. Alternating the chapters in which the journalist appears and those focused on the Islamists' environment, a vibrant plot, with cameos by judges, prosecutors, lawyers, politicians and other well-known characters, the reader will reach the end with the feeling of having understood the question. Most importantly: why. Orovio – one of the guests of the next BCNegra – attends to this (his) diary of his in a Barcelona cafeteria.
What percentage of fiction is there?
Neither all of my part is the reliable truth nor all of the Moroccan character's part is invented. 70% of what happens to the journalist is faithful to the agenda of those days, the rest are real situations coupled to the plot, let's say there is editing work.
The narrator journalist is traumatized by the 11-M attacks. Did it happen to you too?
They were traumatic events. I lived very close to the Atocha station, a colleague, Dagoberto Escorcia, called me because he had heard it on the radio and I went there immediately. It was a moment of chaos, I was a few meters from the broken train, there were very difficult situations, people bleeding... A boy came out of the train with blood running down his face because his eardrum had burst, I approached him and told him I asked three stupid questions, after which I asked him if he needed help. The hardest thing was, as the hours went by, the field hospital that was set up near the tracks, in the Daoíz y Velarde sports center, where wounded people were arriving and, right under my nose, a man died who had been injured. doing a cardiac massage. That has a very strong emotional impact, even if he has not suffered a trauma. That first day I spent hours without being able to do anything, standing there, with dead people around me. What are you doing? Do you start writing there in the middle? Are you returning to the editorial office?
There will be readers who may believe that it is a non-fiction book.
It's that all my part drinks from real events. The visit to the mosque at that time, for example, was not made by me but by a colleague, I went later, but...
He very meticulously reconstructs details of the environment, for example in that mosque but also in the parlor and other places.
I took notes, pointing out details that were not useful for journalistic chronicles, but that have now helped me a lot.
The structure is clockwork.
I am aware of my limitations and a powerful plot was the basis for the story to advance, I was very careful in how the pieces fit together.
The narrator is very human, he shows his doubts: if he had arrived at this house earlier, the competitor would have published something else...
That was like that, you saw things published by others that you had not thought of or, on the contrary, you had a brilliant idea that everyone did. It was a moment of great tension, I had been in Madrid for three or four years as a judicial correspondent, I did not have the same sources as other colleagues with 20 or 30 years of experience.
His detective-journalist responds to several traits of the archetype: a workaholic, he never says no to an invitation to a bar.
That's pretty much it. In Madrid, if you come from outside, you are like an exile but at the same time everyone is willing to have a beer. In my last two months there, I went out every day. In that, it is an unbeatable city.
It describes at a level of detail the mechanisms of the trade: the sources, the police, the headlines, the differences between working for the web and for print...
The story of the police, Rocío, who is not called that, is quite reliable. She is a thermometer of what happened: the police, judges and prosecutors, who are mostly conservative, put their duty before their own political ideology, they realized that the Aznar government was dosing information to reach the elections in first position, and it went wrong because those levels of the State allowed it to emerge that it was not an ETA attack but an Islamist one.
While the editorial staff composes the biographies of all the dead, the fictional Orovio imagines that they are writing his own: 'Reporter fallen in the line of duty due to another explosion'...
I hate the first person in a newspaper article. The reader doesn't care what they tell you, but rather the content. As a journalist, I consider myself an instrument, not a protagonist. In the novel, there is another tone, it is not so much about explaining how I work, but rather about narrating how journalism works, the miseries and greatness of the job.
The book generates in the reader empathy towards the marginalization suffered by Muslim emigrants: from relationships with the opposite sex to the looks or comments they receive...
I am neither Moroccan nor Muslim and I was worried about being able to convey that, it is the most important thing this book could aspire to: make the reader feel like an emigrant, the uprooting that going to Iraq can make you, for example. I base it on real testimonies from people who interacted with the terrorists. That closeness affected them, generated doubts, and made it difficult for them to relate to, for example, their roommates or mosque mates. The dilemma of doubting whether your friend is a murderer. That was the main challenge I had when writing.
Reflect the internal conflict...
After 9/11 in the US, everything became two-color, any suspect was labeled as guilty, but I was interested in the nuances, the grays, the people who were close to the terrorists and who had only a suspicion and put them first. friendship above that. I know that this existed in the orbit of the Madrid command.
Pilar, the Spanish girlfriend of one of the suspects, is a great character.
She is the partner of Ismael, the protagonist, and the opposite of racism, she is inspired by a real person.
The book precisely has quite a few scenes of intimacy, from those set in brothels to the dates with young girls who come from a different background and are not at all used to it, they are like teenagers in adult bodies, or the moments in the clubs... Where does all that come from?
Strips of experiences, things that you know in first person. I know the incompetence that people from that world suffered when confronting a girl they liked. These are things that don't appear in the news, because they aren't, but in a novel it's something else.
How do you feel when you see images of the war in Gaza or Ukraine?
When you see the atrocities that Israel is committing, just like those that Hamas did in the kibbutz, you think that you have already seen those images, in Atocha, which are the same. It moves me a lot.
Has any book particularly influenced you?
I was greatly impacted by the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid, a master of nuance who makes us understand how a Muslim can come to understand the horror of others crashing planes into the Twin Towers in New York.
