Recently fulfilled?
Sixty-five years old, yes.
Well carried out.
I strengthen my immune system as much as I can.
As?
If I'm in Asturias, I swim in the sea. All year. In Madrid, cold water.
It's the key?
And I drink ginger tea, very antioxidant. And I meditate: thus serene my mind.
Since when do you take such care of yourself?
My mother gave me macrobiotic food since I was a child, it was one of the first in Spain.
What else does?
Live as long as I can in a hut of an Asturian meadow, with six horses in freedom. One of the horses is Catalan.
Catalan?
It's called Almíbar, it's old: abandoned after an eviction, my wife, Sandra, saw it in a report in La Vanguardia. And we came for him. He Now he lives like God!
How peaceful it must be to be there...
Sandra communicates without words with the six horses. That silence gives me peace. This is life! And we miss it.
Do we live with too much noise?
If you walk, walk! If you eat, eat! Full attention. To live is to be attentive.
You pay attention to your family history.
The novel in Melina: it starts with the phrase that my grandfather blurted out when my mother was born...
Repeat it to me.
“Take a rope and drown it.”
Take a rope and drown her?
That's exactly what he said.
How gross! Why did she say it?
Out of hopelessness more than brutality. Life was very hard in the 1930s among the miners of Asturias. It was 1934 and my grandfather and other communists were planning to take Oviedo with explosives.
The revolution of Asturias.
My grandfather needed a man and he didn't see a future for that newborn girl...
How did that girl do?
He got ahead... without great paternal affection. Like so many women who were ultimately able to live their own lives.
Sexist parents?
Revolutionary men outside the home and sexists at home. The credit went to suffragist feminists like Clara Campoamor... or like so many teachers.
Did they help their mother?
Melina's childhood is that of my mother: she found attention in a teacher. Let's value the education that saves so many lives.
They deserve gratitude and recognition.
I remember Doña Ana, a teacher who taught me to read with love and patience.
What other passions dominate Melina's story?
The reaffirmation of one's own identity and love: they are permanent forces and continue to operate, they are the human condition.
Is your mother alive?
He lives, and so does my father. My mother's life purpose has always been for everyone around her to be the best they can be.
She has been attentive to that: important.
To do the right thing and learn. In my novel my mother recognizes her own childhood. My mother saw the bodies of murdered republicans in the cemetery...
Uf...
I tell how a woman dissatisfied with her low self-esteem from her origins overcomes it and, supported by some people, manages to be an independent and strong woman.
Who did you rely on?
In that teacher who told him and also in the guisanderas: women who treasured culinary recipes and offered themselves to families who could pay them to cook.
We find his recipes in his novel...
Various recipes. And black market women also helped my mother: they hustled and traded to raise her children.
What does your mother say today?
He insisted to me that “I have been very happy with your father.” My father was a pastor, but he studied by correspondence and prospered, willful and always very curious.
Did his mother finally get his father's affection?
Yes, over the years: my grandfather, whom I met, was a wonderful person, despite his hard life. He participated in the taking of Oviedo: Josep Pla recounted in a chronicle the stench of the sewers burst by the revolutionary dynamiters.
And the Republic later repressed them.
He sent General Francisco Franco, yes. That reappears at the end of my novel... An ending that amuses my friend Víctor Manuel.
The Asturian singer?
If wonderful. At the end there is a dialogue that he calls “implausible”…
Can you explain it to me?
No! Read it. The novel has given my mother happiness, and that fills me. And I have immortalized her and my grandfather: it is the power of fiction! And I have allowed myself.
