Just completed?
Sixty-five years, yes.
well behaved
I strengthen my immune system as much as I can.
With?
If I'm in Asturias, I bathe in the sea. The whole year. In Madrid, cold water.
Is it the key?
And I drink ginger tea, very antioxidant. And I meditate: this is how I settle my mind.
Since when do you care so much?
My mother fed me macrobiotic food as a child, she was one of the first here.
what else do you do
To live as long as I can in a field in an Asturian meadow, with six free horses. One of the horses is Catalan.
Catalan?
His name is Almíbar, he is old: abandoned after an eviction, my wife, Sandra, saw him in a La Vanguardia report. Now live like God!
How pleasant it must be to live there...
Sandra communicates wordlessly with the six horses. That silence gives me peace. That's 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 attend to your family history.
The novel in Melina: it starts with what my grandfather said when my mother was born...
what did he say
“Take a rope and drown it.”
Grab a rope and drown?
That's exactly what he said.
What a beast! Why did he say that?
Out of hopelessness more than bestiality. Life was very hard in the thirties 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 male child and saw no future for that newborn girl...
How did that girl do?
He pushed on… without much paternal affection. Like so many women who were finally able to live their own lives.
Sexist parents?
Revolutionary men outside the house and sexists at home. The credit went to suffragist feminists like Clara Campoamor... or like so many teachers in schools.
Did they help their mother?
Melina's childhood is my mother's: she found attention in a teacher. We value education, which saves so many lives!
They deserve gratitude and recognition.
I remember Miss Ana, who taught me to read with affection and patience.
What other passions dominate Melina's story?
The reaffirmation of one's 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. Mother's purpose in life has always been to make everyone around her as well as possible.
She has been paying attention to this: it is important!
To do the right thing and learn. In the novel the mother recognizes her own childhood. She saw in the cemetery the corpses of murdered republicans…
Uf...
I explain how a non-conformist woman with her poor self-esteem of origin overcomes herself, and with the support of certain people, she becomes an independent and strong woman.
Who did you have support from?
Of that teacher you mentioned and also of the guisanderas: women who treasured culinary recipes and offered them to families who could afford to cook them.
We find recipes in his novel...
Various recipes. And they also helped my mother outlaw women: they shopped and traded to raise their children.
What does your mother say today?
He insisted that "I was very happy with your father". The father was a pastor, but he studied by correspondence and prospered, self-willed and always very curious.
Did the mother get her father's affection, finally?
Yes, over the years: my grandfather, who I knew, was a formidable person, despite his hard life. He participated in the capture of Oviedo: Josep Pla explained in a chronicle the stench of the sewers burst by the revolutionary dynamiters.
And the Republic repressed them afterwards.
General Francisco Franco sent there, yes. Which reappears at the end of the novel... An ending that amuses my friend Víctor Manuel.
The Asturian singer?
Yes, wonderful. There is a dialogue at the end that he calls "unbelievable".
Can you explain it to me?
No! read it The novel has brought happiness to my mother, and that fills me. And I have immortalized them, her and my grandfather: it is the power of fiction! And I allowed myself to.
