I have no idea what to say. That I am delighted with life. When this man who is the Minister of Culture called me to tell me that a sworn judge was awarding me the Cervantes prize, I was a little shocked, a little embarrassed, about being an octogenarian... And suddenly I said to myself: 'Well that's good, it made my day'. Today I will go to sleep calmer than many other days when I go to bed a poor wretch", jokes Luis Mateo Díez (Villablino, 1942) in one of the solemn rooms of the RAE in which he occupies the minuscule ele armchair . And he continues: "Forgive me for saying nonsense, I appreciate a certain sense of humor that reduces the solemnity of things to a certain triviality".
And the solemnity is that Díez has since yesterday the Cervantes, the biggest award in Spanish literature, which is awarded by the Ministry of Culture and is endowed with 125,000 euros. An award for a career in which he has escaped fashions to build an entire universe, the imaginary kingdom of Celama, a rural and humorous world full of stories within other stories, of emigrants and ghosts, travelers and strangers, of dreams which are omens and characters who cheat death again and again. A triumph of imagination and the precise language with which he has examined the human condition.
The award jury, which included previous winners such as Cristina Peri Rossi and the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, emphasized that Díez is "one of the great storytellers of the Castilian language, heir to the Cervantes spirit, writer in the face of any adversity, creator of imaginary worlds and territories”. And the author of La fuente de la edad or the recent Celama (un recuento) (Alfaguara), who already had all the imaginable national prizes in his record, recalled torrentially and amusingly that he lived his childhood in a territory "where tradition was kept alive through the orality of popular cultures, there were neighborhood institutions and I am a child of those gatherings", although he separated customs from tradition: "There is nothing more universal than tradition" . And he assured that "all my work, from the beginning, builds a common universe, a unitary geography. A kind of nameless province in the north-west of the peninsula. But nothing to do with my personal province: I don't walk on realistic paths, but imaginary ones. Borges said that the true condition of art is unreality".
In this sense, he assured that "for a long time I have been a man who has sold his soul to the devil". "For me, the writing, the invention, the creation of fictions, the imaginary life, that other point of parallel reality that is not here but next to it, but that you have to take a step to enter through the 'art... since I've realized that for me the imaginary is more important than the real. I live much more what I write than what I live. For an octogenarian, you can say, at this point, what other alternatives do you have? But the experience that writing is living is the spring of my existence. Currently I write much more than I live", he smiled.
And he concluded "that today I am a much better writer than ever. And what I am doing and will do until the pot is gone, which may be the day after tomorrow, will have more lucidity and commitment than everything I have written. Of the gentleman who writes I can give you the best news: my best novels have not yet been published or I will write them. But the knight who lives is in a realm of defeat that is sad to see. At eighty years old you realize that your body is heavy. Get up in the morning? I don't want to discourage anyone. There is no greater misfortune than growing old. And one more thing: life is uncomfortable, but it's worth it. Oh, and happiness doesn't exist. Happiness is peace of mind."
