Fernando Vallejo accumulates a soft, cadentious, close voice. Almost unexpected. It could be a perfect voice for the things of the soul if it did not contain a very high dose of lucidity and intellectual dynamite. Articulate disappointments with a fierce fang. Raw certainties about the contemporary world, about his country (Colombia) and about the human species. Fernando Vallejo (Medellín, 1942) demolishes with a single phrase hypocrisies of all cuts and clothing. But he is a citizen of exquisite education who believes in the end of the human species and loves dogs above all things .

Each of his literary books (he has also published biographies, scientific and linguistic books) has an important desensitizing burden attached. He is the author of memorable pieces such as La virgen de los sicarios or El desbarrancadero . Family, religion, Colombia, politics and injustice are some of the issues in which the dentellada nails.

After 47 years outside his native country, in March 2018 he left Mexico to return to Colombia after the death of his partner, the set designer David Antón, with whom he lived almost half a century. In absolute solitude he has raised his last published novel, Memories of a motherfucker , published by Alfaguara, a district against the political class and what happens in the world , with all the contempt of a writing endowed with the best disturbance, of everything language can be unusual when words are burned.

After so many years outside of Colombia, but not without Colombia, how did you like or dislike the return? I had no choice. Given the circumstances in which I lived after the last earthquake and the successive death of my friend David, who helped me live there for 47 years, if I stayed in Mexico I would die very soon and could not leave our dog orphan ' Brusca ', who is with me today. She is the only reason I have to continue living. And the lack of a revolver, which when the day comes some charitable soul will get me. Its 'Memoirs of a Humblepump' abounds in the tradition of literature against tyrants that weighed so much on part of literature written in Latin America during the twentieth century , In what way is your book is or escapes from that canon? No this. If I were to occupy the position of the one that says "I" in my book, I would kill tens of thousands of Colombians in a gunsmith. Or hundreds of thousands. Even two or three million. But not because then the country would be hopelessly lost and I wasting my time. But why do I speak of Colombia if humanity has no salvation! So why keep writing, why not wait no longer? I do not write to save humanity but to expose the rascals. And those are those who do not stand still: they continue with their hypocrisy by cheating. There are some adjustments of accounts, such as those perpetrated against several presidents of the Republic of Colombia, and also against García Márquez, among others. Who is left standing in this book? No one. And García Márquez was a bad writer. His most famous book begins by saying that in Macondo the world was so recent that things had to be named by pointing them out. And he is saying it in one of the few languages ​​of civilization that Toynbee spoke about! Right in the 'Quijote'. And the book begins with this: "Many years later, Colonel Aureliano Buendía ...". If he was a colonel, then in the country of Macondo there was a military hierarchy, and for it to appear in the history of humnity millennia was needed. And if the colonel had a name and surname, then it was not necessary to point it with his finger. Gabito was a fool, understood this word with the semantic load he has in Mexico. The Latin American 'boom' left notable novels about tyrants, that same literary phenomenon (the 'boom') from which he feels so remote. Is there a reconciliation? My novel is not about a tyrant: the one who says in it I am a saint. Don't you see that I love animals immensely? If it were for me, I would shoot the slaughterers, the butchers and the restaurant men who sell meat. It would end livestock, pig industry, poultry industry, hunting and fishing in the rivers and in the sea. He would burn the butchers, the traces and the churches, and from the infamous religion of Christ he would not leave a trace. The Christ we have today is one armed by the Catholic sect (name that the Church of Rome preserves so far), one of the 20 Christian sects that were in 320 when he climbed into the car of Constantine's triumph and to power and repressed to the others, and you are each with his Christ, all non-existent, legendary, and all after the year 100. Before that nobody can prove that there was Christianity. And the Christ that remained, the one we know in the West and whom I detest, did not have a single word of compassion for animals. He insulted as Lenin or as Fidel Castro with animal names: he called the Pharisees snakes, Herod Antipas fox, and said that the pearls should not be thrown to the pigs. I throw consecrated hosts to these poor little animals, my neighbor, my brothers. 'Brusca', my dog, sleeps with me, and thanks to the fact that I hug her when I feel like it, I can fall asleep. 'Hijueputa', in the field of Spanish, is the same insult as praise ... Also in Spain? He did not know. In Colombia, yes and there we say, for example, to ponder someone's intelligence: "What a smart girl!" Languages ​​are crazy. Everybody. And do not speak Spanish, who was born in Spain. He's a crazy old man, a hyperloco, a megaloco. How they want me to walk! Who am I the worst tyrants today? Maduro, Putin, the spawn of North Korea, the Saudi kings, the Ayatollahs ... Did the tyrannies in Latin America disappear or did they just change the mask? in the tyranny of Maduro in Venezuela and in that of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to sit in the nineteenth century. There you have a time travel machine. Better than the one that Wells invented. What has literature saved him from, if he saves something? From boredom. And of myself and the emptiness of my life, which I have filled in large part with books, foreign or own, and with boys. The memory of one and the other remains, but irony is also part of this book, as an exercise in cynicism or skepticism? Irony belongs not only to literature, but also to the language of life. One way among many to say things. And I am not cynical or skeptical: I am optimistic. This is going to end. And very soon. My life and that of the planet. For the ecological disaster or for a nuclear war. How many are the nuclear warheads in the world? Twenty thousand counting those of the United States, Russia, China, England, France, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and India? Twenty thousand? Or a little more? Put him twenty-one thousand. What a joy! It will be a fireworks party. Like those of Medellín on December 24 in the middle of the night, at 12, when the Child God was born. This Child has already grown and is dying together with God. Blasphemy is another of his most recognizable 'resources'. The Church is one of its targets (I remember 'The whore of Babylon'). When did I become aware of that rejection? When I fully acquired the use of reason, at age 12, that is, when I chewed my first host: unleavened bread, tasteless, bobalicón. Pouf! I walked away from the colmulgadero and spit it out. Injustice and stupidity are also a cause for battle in his writing. When half humanity, not counting the academics of the language, sits down to watch twenty-two adult children kicking a ball, we can qualify it of stupidity? And what injustice greater than reproduction, to take out a being who is at peace in the peace of nothingness to bring him to the horror of life and the horror of death? Is literature of moral intention interested in me? What interests me today is morality, but not that of the infamous Semitic religions, namely Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism, nor that of the others, but mine, which says: "Do not reproduce, do not you have the right, and respect animals, who are your neighbor. " What if. They are people like you and me, individuals with unique memories, unrepeatable by more turns that the worlds give. As for literature, it has nothing to do with morals. And much less the catechisms and the devotionals. My books yes. And there can be no more moral in the world than mine, the only one possible. Blessed is the Spanish language in which I am speaking! But not thinking because I no longer think, I digress dragged by chaos. Or do you think that of Judeo-Christianity is moral? Read the Leviticus and you will see. There you will find Yahweh, who made the world in six days, excited by the smell of the roast of the animals that sacrifice him. It is made to me that Yahweh did not need to be roasted. Given his omnipotence He could digest it raw. What is the most cowardly literature for you? Nor does literature have to do with bravery. Borges, for example, and according to his statement, not my opinion, was a coward. Is literature a political experience? Politics is despicable: personal ambitions disguised as altruism. Look at those mequetrefes that you have as heads of political parties. To Pablo Iglesias, for example, who names the coalition of parties headed by "United we can". Why in feminine? In Spanish "united", as in this case, it only means women. "United," on the other hand, means both men and women. This fool cannot violate in a similar way a thousand-year-old language. That he dedicate himself better to changing the human genome to see without instead producing outrageous and ambitious and liars of politics produces honorable people. Did he reconcile with Spain? When in a meeting of those of European Union bureaucrats paid with millions they voted to get a visa for Colombians to enter their countries, Mariano Rajoy, the representative of Spain as vice president who was then of Aznar, abstained. They gave us the visa, that six Colombian writers and a painter we already saw coming from time ago and for that reason we had sent a letter to the Spanish government warning him that if he allowed them to put it we would never return to Spain. Of the seven we signed [also Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Mutis, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Darío Jaramillo, William Ospina and the painter Fernando Botero] only I kept his word and I have never returned nor will I return. The others returned. Among them the Gabito.What is the most unbearable terror for you? To die asphyxiated in a coffin or in a plane that falls to the bottom of the sea, or leave my dog ​​'Brusca' orphaned. When I picked her up in the street, in Mexico, lost five years ago, I did giving up the blessing of dying while she lived. In those I am. Now I don't even know how this is going to end. The matter is very difficult. Another one for which I have no solution. Nor have I ever been able to understand gravity or light. Not even the spacetime of Einstein marijuana. And the most pressing problem of this historic moment? With the ecological disaster and the nuclear arsenal of which I spoke I feel that we are one step away from the end of History. Can you imagine the planet Earth without historians? So many wars and infamies made, who will tell them? In this increasingly technological and robotic society, what place do critical thinking and art occupy? None. In addition they no longer exist. The little good there was finished. Down here there was no stone on stone nor will there be a bird singing. Do you consider yourself an uncomfortable author? For those who are offended with my optimism. Do you keep playing the piano? Crushing it, as we said in the conservatory.

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