QUESTION How is it going?

ANSWER With a whiskey, good.

Q. Has writing this book relieved you?

R. The book [ The worst part (Ariel)] is not about me, or my sorrows, or my sufferings. It is about her, about her life, about the importance she had in the things we did together. It is not a meditation on my pains. They leave because if I hadn't died I wouldn't have written the book.

Q. He says that they lived an "old-fashioned courtship."

A. Yes, because I am very old - he says with sneer.

It reads in the book: "We were boyfriends, always boyfriends, those of a lifetime, those of 'go, hang you', 'no, you first'" .. And he says now, last Monday at the Hotel Iberostar Las Letras Gran Vía: "Love is unusual in all lives. I had had romantic relationships before, but with it a new era began. I had never had the degree of complicity or collaboration. Suddenly I discovered what it meant to be in love. We formed a perfect tandem. Like Benedetti's verse, we were much more than two. "

Fernando Savater and Sara Torres lived 35 years together. They met like this: between class and class, that young professor drank a wine with a bag of chips at the University of Zorroaga (San Sebastián). She was approached by a student "dressed in black with white touches. She had a punk haircut, with points shot up, origin of the nickname Rocket Hair." She snapped at him: "I've been in your class. And I didn't like anything!"

Until March 18, 2015, in which Sara died in a San Sebastian hospital after having challenged a brain tumor "of the most aggressive variety" for nine months. He was 59 years old.

Since then, the Professor of Philosophy has taken refuge in what he calls his "playful routines . But they don't know how before. It's like when you're cracked and you've lost your sense of taste. You want to eat, you're hungry, but you don't know anything ".

Q. Have you written quickly or in spurts?

A. I have devoted more time than other books, which I have always done in one go, in four or five months, and this has lasted four years. I have abandoned it, I have recovered it and sometimes, yes, in spurts.

Q. In the book he says that he respected his silences, his intimate plots.

A. She had painful areas in her life, especially related to her childhood, with poverty. And that made her suffer. At first you are more invasive. But when I saw that it hurt, I left it. My main mission while I was with her is that she be happy, as much as possible that she be happy. To find out about three cotilleries I was not going to have a hard time.

"He wore the mother's last names because his parents were not married and I don't think they frequented too much. He was probably born on the island of Gran Canaria, in a neighborhood or village near the capital ... His mother was sensual and cool girl (...) He must have done a lot of work (among them, hostess girl), "Savater wrote in The worst part (Ariel).

Fernando Savater with his wife, Sara Torres.

Sara Torres was behind the founding of the film magazine Nosferatu , of the Fantastic Film and Terror Week of San Sebastián, teaching Aesthetics at the University of Zorroaga in Basque. "He taught Euskera, even. He played shovel very well. Everyone took it as the typical Basque. He was very strong, he liked the mountain ... People said that when Basque genes came out ... And I I laughed"

Q. It seems he had a strong character.

R. Strong? It was fierce.

Q. And it was in the vicinity of ETA.

R. He was at ETA. But at the time of the dictatorship. When democracy arrived it was passed to ... Then he saw what he had of totalitarianism. He discovered it before me.

And then he went on to have an escort. "They tried to attack her a couple of times in the street," the book reads. "She was more reachable, because I was traveling." Account now Savater. "I blessed the arrival of the mobile phone because I had so many coins in my pocket that I fell."

P. Mario Onaindía, "who had known the Beast inside," said: "You think that the ETAs are like the green ones."

A. I believed then [in the Franco regime] that, well, they are young boys, they have their ideas and that can be redirected towards radical progressivism ... And of course ...

P. "Mandatory nationalism."

A. We were not only against ETA [with the Enough Ya Movement], but against nationalism being mandatory in the Basque Country.

Q. How much will it cost to heal?

A. There is no violence but it is ... It depends. If you do nothing, it just won't heal, it will increase. Nationalism is to take advantage of one and annoy the neighbor, and that nobody stops doing unless it costs him dearly. Look in Catalonia. If what is expensive there is to be anti-nationalist, most people will become nationalist if only for convenience.

Q. In the last Diada the attendance dropped a lot.

A. People get bored, get tired of even doing things wrong, and let's not say things right. But there is the teaching that is what it is, the manipulated media ... Everything remains exactly the same. And from there it will not come out that people leave constitutionalist. If one does not fight against nationalism, nationalism wins because it is the easiest.

Q. Now with the impending sentence of the process, everything could be found.

R. Or not. In the Basque Country, the accomplices believed that if they put the National Bureau of Batasuna in jail ... They put them in jail and after 15 days only families remembered them. And what did begin was the end of ETA. And in the process, the same. The sentence must be what it is, it must be complied with and unless they find accomplices in the Government that pardon and such and such ... When people see that for doing things that is paid, they think twice. It only acts in impunity.

Q. Will there be elections?

R. Until yesterday [on Sunday] they seemed safe, today I see it more in the air.

Q. Will you vote?

A. I have always voted. I have spent so many years without voting that it seems wrong not to vote.

P. Like abstention grows.

A. Politicians have not agreed but people have not.

Q. UPyD?

A. I keep paying my UPyD quotes every month.

Q. And now?

A. I have definitely retired. Until then I had something left to do, remember it, but after that service I have nothing more to do. Now survive vegetarian. Pull myself. I reread, I watch old movies, I bathe in La Concha when I can ...

Q. What do you reread?

R. Pío Baroja, who is skeptical and critical ... Old police novels ...

Q. There, too, Lions live here. Trip to the lairs of the great writers (Debate).

A. It is the book we were writing when she stayed in terrible conditions. I brought him what he was doing badly. This is what it is.

In the book he rescues some verses from Karmelo C. Iribarren: "Life goes on - they say - / but it's not always true./ Sometimes life doesn't go on./ Sometimes only days go by." "When I saw them I said 'this is my thing'".

P. It is reproached that it was not at the height of the disease.

A. I was wrong. I panicked, seeing that I lost her, that I couldn't help her ... And everything I did was counterproductive. I fell apart completely, that's the truth. I wish I had been firm, but ... Maybe I would have been if it had happened to me, but I didn't know how to be with her.

Q. The book could well have been titled Thank you, like the poem you wrote and read in the wake: “It is a simple / plural word, such as sea or sky, / that does not improve / nor does it widen / with the additions ...

A. Yes, I thought about it. And also Sara's book, but it sounded very biblical.

Q. You have undressed a lot.

A. It is not a provocative book but it only makes sense if you are going to tell it with sincerity, without big fists.

In it they appear, and as a complement to Mira where. Reasoned autobiography (Taurus), here and there, striking stages of his life, such as when he recounts: "Taking advantage of the beautiful boys I have always liked, I decided to change the sidewalk and become a homosexual predator to show my disdain for the eternal feminine . I roamed every night for the locals of the Madrid de la Movida (...) although I kept chasing women when they didn't shy away from me too much. There were someday with three erotic encounters -incontronations- of various kinds. "

He also recognizes that "I drank and ate like a Basque of comics, I signed up for all the drugs that were available to me - except those that were injected - (...) I have always drank because of the effects of alcohol and I hardly notice the taste of what I take. "

Q. What will you do now?

A. I go home to rest before going to dinner with some friends, I will listen to music ...

Savater (short sleeve shirt, navel pants, black suspenders and shoes, 72 years) has arrived this morning from Paris, to see horses, to buy Le petit ami by Paul Léautaud.

R. I will put Barbara, the French singer Sara liked so much. When I was with her I didn't listen to her, I ignored Sara, and now ...

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • culture
  • literature
  • Philosophy
  • ETA
  • Catalonia
  • Politics
  • Basque Country

TendènciesRosa Ribas: "The whole world fits in a neighborhood"

Literature Ian McEwan: "Utopia always ends badly, they become paranoid"

The Paper SphereJavier Calvo: "Here there is sex, drugs and Nazis"