As a writer who spends time isolated from the world, Rosa Montero is used to seclusion. But the confinement was different: “I couldn't even read. It is the first time it has happened to me in my life. The pain of the world came to you and you couldn't leave it ”. What he was able to do was finish the revision of his novel La Buena Suerte (Alfaguara), strangely prophetic, about guilt and redemption, whose protagonist locks himself in a town where, without looking for it, he finds answers to the unknowns of his life. See you at her second home, Parque del Retiro, and talk about how an optimist chronicle lives such difficult times.
- Susi Caramelo: "The worst thing I have is not being able to flirt"
- Paloma Sevillano: "I have never felt any insubordinate treatment"
Question. The novel includes a quote from Leonardo de Medici: “Whoever wants to be happy is happy; of tomorrow we have no certainties ”. How does it apply to this moment?
Reply. Well, look, those magical things that literature has. I started this novel in 2017 and finished it in January, but I think it's very wise. That phrase is always true, but now it seems to be written in neon.
Q. In this period, have you thought a lot about the past?
R. My mother died on March 13, not from covid, but as an old woman, she was 96 years old, so it has been especially hard. And there you think about the past, you stay in another place, I don't know if because of the pandemic or rather because of that. You think of the time that is gone, not a specific part. Besides, I don't regret anything, because it is ridiculous to regret it. I am not a person who looks very back.
Q. What relationship did you have with your mother?
R. Wonderful, I have loved her very much, but last year it was no longer acceptable how she was. I don't want to get to that age. I am interested in a full life and from a certain moment you don't have it. Although in the end I'm sure I'm like another character in my novel, who says he's going to commit suicide at 84, but then as he likes life, like me, he leaves it: one day because he had a cold and was not going to to commit suicide, another day because I had things to do ... Love for life I suppose that prevents you from giving up and I have a very powerful chemical soup, with a lot of oxytocin. In that I am very lucky, although in the novel it is said that happiness is a habit, and it is true.
Q. You have said that as a young man you were a hippy and that many of your friends ended up badly because of drugs. How did you manage to escape that destructive drive?
R. I think precisely because of the oxytocin soup. For five years I smoked joints, took acid, speed just once because I spent hours without being able to detach my jaws and I said: "This is not for me ...". But those people, my friends, turned to heroin. At that time it was like an almost political, anti-bourgeois activity. I felt very bourgeois because I did not go to heroin or cocaine, which is the worst of drugs.
Q. With the times we live in, can there be a refuge there?
A. There is always a shelter there. Life is a mystery, it is tremendous, we come with so many desires, being so important to ourselves, and then time passes like a deer and you die ... it costs so much that we have always resorted to drugs. In Sadie Plant's essay Written with Drugs, she remembers that in the Bible, Noah got drunk to endure the existential abyss. That said, I don't know if a pandemic is more conducive to drug use than the crazy, hectic, and absurd life we lived before.
P. The protagonist of your book, a man used to living well, says that however that is not his origin and that he is surprised how he has always managed to deceive others. You come from a humble origin. Have you felt that time of declassification?
A. I did not have hot water until I was 16 years old, we bathed with a scoop and on Sundays we went up to my grandmother's house to use her bathtub. My mother painted and my father was a bullfighter, he was with the gypsy and with the duke. I did not know that the classes existed because somehow my parents were also declassified by bohemians and artists. That never bothered me.
Q. In the novel you write: "Regina is 52 years old, works a lot, is a woman with money, power and success, all of which makes her love life very difficult." Explain, please.
A. That is as is. To myself, who has managed well, the fact that being successful has made relationships with men difficult. Sexism is a wreck for everyone. It turns them into wimp with ridiculous mandates. At home my brother was under more pressure to succeed. Nobody expected anything from me because nobody expected anything from women, which gave you incredible freedom.
P. But with your father you argued a lot, right?
R. A lot, yes. He was very macho. Then I got to have a wonderful relationship with him because he lived a long time, he died at 84. But his relationship with my mother was very complicated and at first I was totally on her side. Over time I have understood the problems and I have realized that there were no good and bad.
Q. Have you ever said that in the newsrooms of your youth the gentlemen tried to find out if the girls who arrived were virgins. How did you get away from that?
R. I was born there. It was the environment in which we moved. When I went to high school on the subway, I don't think there was a day that they didn't touch my ass. Once I was going with a friend, we would be 11 years old, and she turned around and faced him, the uncle slapped her. That was life.
Q. Are you still organizing the memories of your life by a count of books and boyfriends, as you said in La loca de la casa?
R. I still have boyfriends, let's say, but after Pablo's death, 11 years ago, they don't mark your life as before. You still feel desire and wonderful things but you realize that it can no longer be built in the same way. That is another of the sadnesses of time.