Ignacio Martínez de Pisón: "Realist writers are out of date"

Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, portrayed in Barcelona.Albert Garcia

They were both too young to have that baby.

So they were on their way to Portugal for an abortion when they had a car accident.

The boy's father died in the crash, and she did not make it to Portugal.

The decade was that of the seventies - the end - and what happened to it next?

Ignacio Martínez de Pisón (Zaragoza, 59 years old) reconstructs the world to which that young mother was exposed, in a Spain “in which the mark of the Inquisition could still be felt”, to imagine a possible end that is at the same time one of the paths that history could take, and the closest thing to "a little Greek tragedy" that has ever written.

End of season

(Seix Barral) is a family story, but one in which only two fit: mother and son.

And it is also a history of Spain.

The history of a Spain that seems very far away, is just around the corner.

"The first thing I thought was that she would flee her city, because it was a small city and she could not avoid being judged twice: for being a single mother and for having wanted to have an abortion," says the writer.

That is how the character of Rosa was born, the owner of the

La Florida

, Iván's mother, the boy who will soon discover that he could never have met his father, because if they had not had the accident, he would not be in the world would be him.

"Rosa's is a story of escape, she escapes from a toxic environment, breaks ties, tries to sidestep the past, without thinking then that it doesn't matter what you do because the past always reaches you," says Pisón, who believes that to this must be added the condition of a learning novel because "that is for Iván."

Because the story has two principles.

One in the late seventies, when the accident occurred, and another in the late nineties, when Iván began to want to separate from his mother.

It's not just that they live together, it's that they even sleep together and, as Mabel, Rosa's partner at the campsite, says, they're always touching.

She does not say it with bad intentions, but with the intention that her friend will let her son breathe, who will soon rebel, leaving the institute and the

, and going to work in one of the nuclear power plants in Tarragona.

"Rosa's is an absorbing love, and has something incestuous, because Iván looks so much like her father that she reminds her all the time," says the writer.

So it is as if it has come back to life.

Without being Martínez de Pisón "very

", as he himself admits, only a few, in which he spent the night when "he was traveling through Europe with friends, as a young man", decided that this provisional way of life would be the least provisional for his protagonists because "it works as a metaphor for their own lives."

The foundations are shaky, but the appeal is greater.

"The colored fabrics of the tents are contrasted with the walls of the ocher houses of Plasencia - the city from which the mother comes - and the red buildings of Toulouse, the place where Iván could have a chance", says the author of

, who does not believe that

can become, like that, a series.

"There are not so many characters, it would be a movie," he says.

The Netflix virus

And when you go back, in your stories, do you do it to understand what you have experienced, to reposition yourself in the present?

“I try to give as much detail as possible.

Sometimes I even take note of the business of the time.

I am very clear that the same story at the same time would have been very different if it had been in Zahara de los Atunes and Portugalete instead of in Plasencia and Miami Playa.

I transfer realities and I must be faithful to them.

As a realistic writer I have an advantage: we can take things from reality to complete the landscape.

In this case, my memories were worth to me, and at the same time they drew two very different Spains.

Because as Alfonso Guerra said, Spain in the late nineties, compared to the seventies and before, not even the mother who gave birth to her recognized her, ”she replies.

His teachers have been, he says, not so much the Spanish royalists but the Americans, with John Cheever at the helm, although today they have a problem related to the pandemic.

And it is that “the only fiction that this virus has benefited is television.

You are living in a glorious moment.

It seems that the virus was invented by Netflix, ”he says.

He also says that with regard to telling reality, the realism of which he speaks, "the series are the ones that rule today."

“They tell you the present, the past and the future at the same time.

Realist writers are a bit out of date in that regard.

TV does it better than what Galdós did, or what Almudena Grandes and I do today ”, explains the writer.