Interview "Nationalism is a firework, it will not weigh in the history of Catalonia"
'The yin and yang business' "In the Transition all politicians were heroes capable of overcoming their differences"
'The king receives' "These are not memories in disguise"
Criticism A historic smile
Sometimes Eduardo Mendoza likes to write standing up on an old high desk.
He leaves the house and walks a few meters to his small study: just a bookcase, a desk with a
red
vintage
lamp
that his wife gave him, a black umbrella hanging on the wall and that desk from another era that is no longer manufactured. .
In this sober space, try to keep an office schedule: «It is good to maintain a certain distance, discipline and order.
Although it is useless to me ».
Typical Mendoza irony.
The same pragmatic mischief as one of his longest-running characters: Rufo Batalla, the lovable scoundrel (although he has softened with age) who, like the author's alter ego, has starred in a trilogy about modern Spain.
With
Transfer to Moscow
(Seix Barral), Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943) takes Batalla to the years of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, to an Olympic Barcelona and to the year 2000, the symbolic closing of a century.
At the end of the book, a mature Rufus describes himself as "a son of the twentieth century" and feels "prosaic."
Does the same thing happen to you? It is a reflection I made at the end of the trilogy.
For aesthetic reasons, it ends in 2000. Although it is nonsense that is not justified and goes against all logic, the turn of the century is important.
I was almost 50 years old and, yes, I am a man of the 20th century.
My attitude in the 21st century is that of I am here invited to a party that is not mine.
I should do the same as Rufo and retire. If the 19th century was that of ideologies and the 20th that of wars and nuclear threats, the 21st? It is a completely different century.
Ideologies were born in the XIX century, in the XX they were put into practice with really disastrous effects and today they only drag on in name.
Anarchism, capitalism, socialism ... are from the 19th century.
No one can say I believe in communism or capitalism.
We are more pragmatic, the economy is different and globalization has done a lot.
The center of the world is no longer Europe or the United States but China and the emerging countries.
I don't know what will come out, but let someone else write it. It describes a few years in which Europe was confused between the USSR and the United States, determined to build a political and economic union.
With Brexit and the management of the pandemic, how is that union? The pandemic is going to be a laboratory test that adds to the crisis of 2010, where the enormous difference between the countries of the north and the south was highlighted .
Sometimes we forget history: Europe has been a continuous war.
Not to mention all his conquests in Africa and America Let's leave Europe alone, it is good that we lose the limelight and that the Brazilians and Chinese come and rule for a couple of centuries. And Spain?
In this international context, he says that "as usual he was traveling on another train, at another speed and on another track."
Is the phrase still valid? Spain is a very strange country within Europe.
When everyone goes one way, Spain goes another.
When everyone is making scientific revolutions, Spain gets into wars of religion and the Inquisition goes ahead and cancels any progress.
He goes on his own and always on the wrong path.
However, it is one of the countries where people live better. After the Transition, it now portrays the first decades of democracy but draws disillusionment among the citizens.
Has this disillusionment gotten worse? It has been one of the great failures of this century.
What we have is not bad if we compare it with other times or countries.
The disappointment comes from thinking that we have achieved so much in a very short time. Everything fell apart due to corruption: it was the epidemic that Spain suffered.
And it has had an impact among citizens: everyone is equal or I will not pay my taxes because everyone steals.
There is corruption in all countries but as systematic as here Write about the happy years of waste and how the Olympics changed Barcelona.
Did this dream of Pasqual Maragall's social democracy come true? Behind the Olympics there was a general idea of what a modern city should be, what to conserve and what to change.
Instead now they are making patches and botches.
And it happens everywhere.
At that time there was a great city project: to open Barcelona to the sea and to stop being a post-industrial city.
Many thought that it would be a tremendous expense and that only empty spaces and facilities would remain.
I was very skeptical.
It turned out that, miraculously, due to a combination of factors such as low cost flights, Barcelona became a world reference.
And now it shows a lot: it is an empty city because one of its functions was to welcome people who came to bathe and drink a jug. In the book, he already points out how the Catalan mercantile society begins to defend a "utopian independence." aside this phenomenon.
At that time it existed but in a different way, almost like a dream and it didn't go beyond there.
The reasons were above all economic: how well it would be for us if we did not have to be subjected to an I don't know what. Each one makes his enemy good.
On the other hand, there has always been great misunderstanding.
We are many Catalans in the middle, collecting balls from a tennis match. How do you see the situation now, after the last elections? I don't see it.
And I have the feeling that nobody sees it, including the protagonists themselves.
We have reached a frozen situation that there is no way to solve. After the closing of this trilogy on Francoism, Transition and Democracy, do you think that in Spain there is a problem with the word homeland? Yes, and the title of the novel by Fernando Aramburu no leaves room for doubt.
In the name of the homeland, of all the homelands, because there are five or six and which one is worse ... tremendous things have been done in Spain.
I lived for a time in the United States and for many years in London.
There the homeland is something else, it fills them with pride.
I do not know what it's worst.
The English have gone to Brexit to shoot themselves in the foot for the homeland.
For me the country is synonymous with go, come on, don't sell me a motorcycle, but they believe it.
Maybe our skepticism is not so bad.
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