Gabriel Aristu and Adriana Zuber lived a love story in Spain in the sixties. The thing was cut short, he went to the United States, where he became a senior bank executive, and she stayed in the dictatorship and became a professor of plastic arts. Fifty years later, they meet again in such a way that the reader of I will not see you die (Seix Barral) –the new novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 1956), where these characters live– is overcome with intense emotion. The author of Beltenebros (1989), The Polish Horseman (1991) or The Night of Time (2009) answers this newspaper by phone after returning from the vet with his dog.
It is a melodrama.
Everything is very concentrated, it is a story reduced to its fundamental elements, the clash or encounter between two characters. It's the most stripped-down I've been able to do. I tend to be expansive, to compose symphonies and here a chamber piece has come out.
What was the trigger?
A story they told me a few years ago, of a reunion after a long time. They gave me few details, but I was impressed. I started to write a story but I was possessed, I wrote hastily, everything took shape and things came out as a poem comes out.
In the matter of truncated love, every reader can feel identified.
When one speaks of love passion, one speaks of instantaneousness, of something that comes and goes. But it seemed attractive to me to show a passion that lasts a lifetime and continues to affect people quite old. Literature has little explored those passions, that sensuality.
The characters in love novels are usually younger, yes.
They have been young, and when they look at each other they see the face they have now and the face of youth. I saw Adriana's look in the poet Id, whom I met in Montevideo. I was surprised that such an old woman, bent over, had a completely young look, not worn by time or anything, with the same strength and brilliance that she could have had thirty years ago. She, who was Onetti's lover, aroused my admiration, that look has stuck in my head forever. And the title of this novel comes from a verse of his.
There is an apparently secondary character, Julio, who has been hit hard by life: a traffic accident, a traumatic separation...
I have seen cases of men completely destroyed by a cruel separation. He is accused of something he doesn't know what it is and he doesn't recover. A wound may never heal.
He promotes the meeting that is the axis of the novel.
I like those mediating characters, I am a reader of Conrad and Faulkner and they have those witness-characters, catalysts of history. In our lives, sometimes people who don't even know it are of fundamental importance.
We see Falla, Pau Casals, the National Orchestra...
The protagonist goes with his father to visit Pau Casals, that comes from a photo that I had seen of the musician in Prades, with espadrilles. The novel is musical, in theme and form. I am inspired by Bach's cello suites, with their incessant continuity. I saw it as the movements of a string quartet, with each part closed in on itself and changing points of view.
Paternity is another very present topic...
He is a captive of his father's pain. His loyalty to his father imprisons him. One issue is how the suffering and trauma of parents can be inherited, that has been seen a lot in Jewish families, in children of Holocaust survivors.
There are dream scenes...
'If I'm here and I'm seeing you and talking to you, this must be a dream.' That was the first sentence I wrote. Dreams are arbitrary but much more effective than conscious memory. In a dream you find a loved one who died, with shocking details. I lost my father many years ago but sometimes I dream of him and there I find things about him that I had forgotten, like his voice, the way it was, his hair, or I give him a hug and notice the smell of him. he. That is very powerful.
Do you write your dreams?
Sometimes. They call my attention a lot but without any interest in psychoanalysis or surrealism, although I do in neuroscience, which unravels the mechanisms of dreams and their symbolic capacity: in a dream a story or an experience is synthesized, there is an element in it poetic that attracts me a lot.
Gabriel's father is a complex figure, someone who is with the nationals in the war, who is a good person and lives divided.
He is a divided man, a cultured monarchist who was on the verge of being shot and who, upon winning his own, is horrified by the crimes and measures of the victors. The only thing he wants is to save his children, whom he enrolls in the British Council and sends Gabriel to England, to flee from that darkness that has devastated him. He's like one of those 1930s liberals overcome by horror.
The idea of Spain in the novel is that of a place to flee from, today it continues to be done but only for economic reasons.
Imagine what the culture shock must have been like when you arrived in the US from Franco's Madrid and found yourself in the California of psychedelia and rock'n'roll. Eduardo Mendoza has recounted very well his landing in New York in the early 70s, it was like a trip back in time, an awakening.
Adriana reproaches him for never taking the step.
What could have been and was not gives much literary play. People are very complicated, no one ever knows. I explore the difference between a masculine sentimentality (more novel but less concrete and true) and a feminine one ('if you loved me so much, why didn't you call me?'), that makes the difference. It is an exciting field. What are they like, how do they see each other, how do they remember each other? He is sure he remembers things that were not as he evoked them: did he spend the whole night with her? Memory elaborates flattering or consoling fictions.
There is sickness and old age, crudely at times, but it is nothing demeaning or undignified, even sensual.
Well of course. Literature, the good one, is compassionate towards people. The exclusively cruel gaze rarely makes for a good novel. Fiction tells the world from the point of view of specific people, and in every moment of life, there is passion, beauty and, of course, dignity. The novels recognize that right to dignity even in the least acceptable characters, because nothing is black or white, ideologies simplify but the novel warns you that, mind you, each person is a world worthy of respect.
Practice a fusion of times, with scenes that are both past and present.
The human mind works like this. When they meet after half a century of not having seen each other, they are inevitably joining two times so far away, they live them simultaneously. You only see old strangers, in couples or old acquaintances you also see the face you remember, that has great beauty, because that face is also there, every face is a palimpsest. My mother is over 90 years old, but when I talk to her on the phone I hear her young voice.
There are cameos by Lorca and other characters from the cultural world...
It is an obsession of mine, the silver age of Spanish culture, which occurs in the first decades of the 20th century, that ambition for modernity, aesthetic, literary and political at the same time, related to an educational project, to go out into the world and recover from the popular through the avant-garde. That includes Ramón y Cajal, Negrín, architects, painters, Buñuel, Falla, Lorca... that fusion between what is popular and what is tremendously cosmopolitan. Gabriel Aristu's father believed he lived in that country, which was totally devastated by the war, as if an atomic bomb had fallen, sending them all to death or exile.
