It's not just Disney with its Charm. Colombia has in its literary writers a spearhead that arouses international interest in a country that will be the guest this year at the Liber fair, to be held from October 5 to 7 in Barcelona. Santiago Gamboa (Bogotá, 1965) is one of the best examples: in his latest work, Colombian Psycho (Alfaguara), he rhythmically portrays the jolts that the Colombian soul and citizen receive, a cocktail in the form of a crime novel that has everything : blood, literature, sex, music, parties, substances... and metaliterary or philosophical reflections. This is the second case of prosecutor Edilson Jutsiñamuy, who is unofficially helped by his friend, freelance journalist Julieta Lezama. The author answers this diary by phone from his summer home on the outskirts of Rome.
How harsh are Colombian prisons? Is it so easy to pass messages and all kinds of products to inmates?
Are you kidding? There are kidnappings that are planned in prisons and not only that: the kidnapped are taken to prison, where they are hidden. On this basis, the following I tell you is totally credible. They also take people to jail to be killed there and then they are bitten and thrown down the pipes. Everything goes in and out there! One of the things that the new Colombian government has planned is to turn prisons into something different. The police in charge of them are among the most corrupt in the world, they are the guardians of hell.
This structure is more sophisticated than that of The night will be long (2019).
I wanted a slightly more ambitious book, to also think about literature within the novel. Arthur Conan Doyle is not the same as Patricia Highsmith or Leonardo Padura, two very sophisticated authors for me.
One of the characters is the writer Santiago Gamboa.
That was an interesting element, to confuse and enrich. I wanted him to be a writer, but it seemed unbelievable to me to invent one that does not exist, as was done so many times in the 60s, due to the influence of El quartet de Alejandría: that is what happens in Hopscotch, Tres tristes tigres... I first thought of one of my colleagues: Héctor Abad Faciolince, Mario Mendoza… When I understood that not very pleasant things were going to happen to him, I put myself in, something very new for this type of novel.
It also serves to recover old characters...
This is my 11th novel, I have built a small human gallery, and I liked the idea of rescuing characters from other books, like those film directors who have a group of actors they always work with because they understand each other well.
Do you live in the same house as the Santiago Gamboa of the book?
My library is that library, and I have the same dedicated books. But the house is a building in Bogotá that obsesses me and that appears in another novel of mine, Una casa en Bogotá (2014). In my childhood I saw her continuously, from the park, I felt that she was watching the whole group of children. It was from a Spanish family that lived in Mexico, we never saw people inside, no one going in or out, but some nights I thought I saw a light. Years later, it was put up for sale, so I made an appointment to see it and finally walked into it after four decades of looking at it, I immediately felt that this was my literary home. By the way, it's still empty.
How have your main characters, the prosecutor and the journalist, changed?
Prosecutor Jutsiñamuy is the same, an older man, lonely, thoughtful, very focused on his work, who in this case has an affair in Panama. Julieta delves into her personal crisis, with her relationship with the writer Gamboa, but she faces more dangerous things than she did before her and her life is in more danger, she is on the verge of being killed. Here we talk about the so-called false positives, the 6,402 civilians killed, without any trial, by the Colombian army.
Under the presidential mandate of Álvaro Uribe.
With his two governments and his authoritarian policy, he turned Colombia into a black novel country. Uribe launched campaigns against the press, he has 270 processes for massacre, direct assassinations, paramilitarism... his legal and procedural situation is extremely complicated. With Gustavo Petro, Colombia has returned to the enthusiasm prior to the peace plebiscite, but we cannot cover the sun with one hand. It is terrible because Uribe continues to be supported by many Colombians.
Or by Vargas Llosa.
I have never understood that, I only know that it is badly advised with regard to Colombia. I am sure that if he knew the reality of Uribe, what he has in his closet hidden from him, as we know in Colombia, my goodness, he would not do these things. Those of us who admire the work of Vargas Llosa so much turn a deaf ear to his political approaches, to his support for Bolsonaro or Keiko Fujimori, his political misguidance is tremendously evident and in Colombia it hurts us a lot.
Another issue that touches is the unfolding.
Not only of the writer but of an entire society like the Colombian one, it is as if he had several personalities that hate each other and that one is the enemy of the other. García Márquez said a very schizophrenic phrase: every Colombian is an enemy country. Many Spanish writers, like Rosa Montero, do not understand that Colombia is so violent when the people are so kind and cultured, gosh, how is it possible. There's a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme. Economic, territorial and political control has always been in the hands of 2,000 families, it has not been a democratic state but an oligarchic state, it is just beginning now because finally the political leaders resemble the people, until now an oligarchy has ruled that has not hesitated to resort to violence to maintain their privileges and control of the state, and a counter-oligarchy, the guerrillas, who have also committed many crimes.
Johanna, Julieta's assistant, is a former guerrilla.
A demobilized I reflect the strong class divisions, what we call the strata. By the way of speaking and dressing, with someone's greeting, you can make a whole economic and social treaty of the person, just by saying hello, you can recognize if you are from the left or the right... There are surnames that, by themselves alone, they make the bank grant you a loan. The demobilized are also recognized, they call you 'comrade', they preserve their narrative, they are slightly different people, they are undergoing a process, they have complied with peace much more than the State.
It is curious to see the multiple ways in which they are reinserted...
They are very enterprising. Some make a beer called La Roja, others organize trekking routes through where they had been kidnapped...
One part happens in Panama.
It's important, it's where the banking is, the famous secret accounts. It belonged to Colombia until 1904, it is a territory that is and is not.
The title, a clear tribute to Bret Easton Ellis?
I read American Psycho in 1992 or 1993, it made a huge impression on me, I remember reading it in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, which I covered as a journalist, and I was more impressed by that novel I was reading than the bombs that were falling on Sarajevo, at that point! Caramba! Ellis mercilessly makes a critical and brutal dissection of his world.
There is a profusion of cocktails and breakfasts.
Colombia is the land of breakfasts, you know, people get up at five in the morning, the most expensive time for radio is between 6 and 8, when everyone is sitting in a car in traffic . Everyone has business breakfasts. In Spain it starts at 9 and to a Colombian that seems incomprehensible, very late. In the universities there are classes at 7 in the morning.
Alcohol dependencies, femme fatales, are they a concession to the classic black novel?
Rather there is a strict documentation work. The mechanics of the crime are exact, there are people who have been chopped like calves. There are the pique houses, which is where they cut people into pieces, to make it easier to take them away later. You show that to your enemy, those torture houses with the bodies, and you scare him. It is the same as when, in the Carpathians, impaled corpses were left to terrify the enemy.
He arrives at a surprising precision: he says that the beheadings are not Colombian.
Colombia has gone on a lot about cruelty but it hasn't reached certain levels with beheading, usually Mexican, like once they left a car parked on a corner with 18 heads in bags. In Colombia there is a little more modesty, in Mexico they come from the Aztecs and the Revolution. But in Colombia, cartels and paramilitaries have used logging chainsaws to chop off arms and legs for information. Something genuinely Colombian is also the flannel cut, born in the 50s, which consists of cutting someone's neck and sticking out their tongue through that slit as a tie.
Why is the researcher a journalist?
Because, in my country, the real detectives are the journalists. Justice is late and those who risk their lives on a daily basis and make the best-supported complaints are the journalists. That's why the press here is so powerful. Many presidents have been journalists before. It is easier to get an appointment with a minister than with the director of a media outlet. A newspaper director is like a Bourbon, a minister is anyone.
