"There is very little talk about suicide, because there is this pain and this guilt among the people who surround the deceased, but it is a mistake not to talk about it, because then the people who remain are separated. There are these invisible walls made of silence, nobody dares to talk about these things", says Ramon Mas (Sant Julià de Vilatorta, 1982). The writer (and editor of Males Herbes with Ricard Planas) has just published Els murs invisibles (L'Altra Editorial, in Spanish at Temas de Hoy), his most personal novel, in which he delves into history shared with his friend Raül Izquierdo and which takes us to Sucre de Vic, a meeting point in the mid-nineties for skateboarders in the region.
"More than skate culture, that too, music, hardcore and punk took precedence. Skateboarding gives us the place, the territory, but the cultural identity goes further, acquiring common cultural references and politicization, you don't just stay with the aesthetics or the sport, but it expands", explains Mas, who went there at the age of 15 and formed what would become his chosen family. They met there every afternoon to skate, a group of young people and teenagers frowned upon by Vic's well-meaning society that "says everything without saying anything, judges without a word, but you know you are being judged. All this is a burden, it is the fog”. They form their community, make their fanzines, their music groups and organize concerts, and they skate and are there: "It's true that it's very linked to adolescence, let's see if you don't like everything that will come when you get older, that everything is gray and everything is the same. Not wanting to be like the others happens to try to find a community, an identity, something that differentiates you from that big gray mass. You see that adults don't like you and you look to be part of something and that's when these strong bonds are created that are your gang or your youth subculture. And it's beautiful." The urban tribes, as it was said at the time, "are like secret societies, they are in everyone's sight, everyone sees that there are a lot of kids skating in the square, but nobody really understands them, nobody knows what it is their culture, their references, their ideas, their common identity, and this can help you a lot in this crazy age where you feel so helpless and so far from the world”.
But he has devoted four intense years directly to the novel, but he had been carrying it inside for twenty years: "It is that in my previous novels such as Afores or Stigmes (both in Edicions de 1984) there is already this background book, suicide kept coming up in all the books, unintentionally. For many years I knew that this was the story I had to write. Now there is enough distance and I can explain it without judgments, without regrets, without open wounds". The scar remains, yes: "It's been twenty years of trying to understand, of trying to respect the decision of the person around you who decides to die, of trying to live with it naturally, without hiding it, without keeping quiet ho, being able to talk about it as openly as possible. It is the tribute to my friend, like a pending account. Trying to keep him alive, not to disappear, for someone else to know him, to know this story, to try to make it last. It's a gesture of friendship."
And now that he has freed himself from this reckoning with the past, what? "Now I will write genre, which is what I should have done all my life. I'm writing sci-fi with part drama, part family, part human relations, which is what I always wanted to do, but someone always had to kill themselves. I was able to write this book, and this is where I learned to talk about human relationships, where I learned to talk about strong feelings."
Reading it "you see the character who has always been surviving and at one point he gets tired of continuing to fight. It is legal. I could see the colors of the tapestry, but I hadn't been able to look away enough to see the whole picture", explains Mas, who has not written a book about suicide: "It's a very murky subject, suicide is always equated with mental illness There are many reasons why people commit suicide and they are treated very badly. In addition, the problems are always for the living, who are left with a very strong sense of guilt, remorse and many unanswered questions."
It is also the narrative of suddenly entering maturity, of growing up without becoming what you had always rejected: "It goes from my fifteen to twenty-two years old, but mostly it is three weeks in which burst the bubble: adolescence is over, people run, couples form, I study abroad... the end of the teenage utopia. And you say, shit, we can't avoid adult life, you're going headfirst." But you have to move forward: "You are pulling and life is dragging you, you have children and everything is putting you in place, but it is very important not to decontextualize yourself completely, not to detach yourself".
