Cees Nooteboom: "Spain, essentially, is a country that has not been reconciled"

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom portrayed in Venice in 2017. Awakening / EL PAÍS

At age seven, on May 10, 1940, Cees Nooteboom heard the noise of evil for the first time.

She was at home, next to her father, who from the window listened to the Nazis bombing The Hague.

At sixteen he left home, to listen to the sound of the world, and now he is in Amsterdam, pending the strange, fateful rumor of the pandemic.

From that long journey that took him everywhere, numerous books emerged, some about his experience of more than 40 years in Menorca, from where now, confined to his own land, he feels above all nostalgia for the garden.

On Friday he will receive the Formentor award in Mallorca, launched by Carlos Barral and reactivated by the publisher Basilio Baltasar.

Nooteboom publishes

(Siruela), his vision of the beautiful Italian city,

in Spanish this fall

, and his latest book of poems,

, is already in bookstores

(Viewer).

He is happy as a boy, although he is 88 years old and has just spent nine times for different reasons at different hospitals.

Activist of the idea of ​​Europe, here he talks about the threats that the virus adds to those that the world and the Old Continent already have.

Question.

The noise of the pandemic joins the sounds of her long life.

Reply.

And it will be with us all the time, because it is not over.

It will enter dreams, nightmares, people will be marked by this in a very deep way.

Even if a vaccine is found, it will still be there in memory, it will mark a whole generation.

Those who are now going to school, those who are beginning to live.

I was thinking of places like Córdoba or Seville, of the poor parents who live in small houses where it is very hot and have to sit with their children, trying to educate them, people who probably do not have a computer.

All of this is worse than we think, because it is not just a matter of money or work, it is something that seriously affects the head.

Q.

Remember a war.

R.

It reminds me.

There is something very strange about this disease.

You read the press or watch television and they tell you contagions and deaths as something abstract, because you are alive, you are not in the hospital, but you know that there are many people around you who are sick and, furthermore, one day it could be you.

But you are not sick.

If we compare with the figures, those who are not sick form a much larger group.

We are potential victims, and this is the threat we have above us.

My father had put a chair on the balcony.

Looking back, it is very moving to think that my father, who was watching the war from his balcony, did not know that he would be killed in the bombing of The Hague

Q.

Is that sound of the Nazi bombs on The Hague still present in your memories?

A.

It is not forgotten.

We lived near a military airport.

My father had put a chair on the balcony.

Looking back, I find it very moving to think that my father, watching the war from his balcony, did not know that he would be killed in the bombing of The Hague four years later.

Our house was totally destroyed. The war was noise, bombings, planes.

The pandemic, on the other hand, is silence, it is in hospitals.

There are terrible tragedies in nursing homes.

I myself was in the hospital, in Germany, in the last few months.

I don't want to talk much about it, but you understand me if I tell you that my wife, Simone, was not allowed to visit me ... There was silence: the pandemic is a threatening silence for the people, for those who are really involved.

P.

A silence that also threatens Europe ...

R.

I believe in Europe.

And I see how some regimes, like those in Hungary and Poland, which did not share our past, are not sharing our future now, because they do not share our present.

Hungary and Poland and other countries that should host some of the refugees and do not have to be heroes for it, but should at least be moved by the situation of those who are drowning trying to get there.

These countries that do not accept anyone are awakening a very sad spirit.

The refugees risk their lives, but they come, they come like drops, one, two, three, five, but in the end they come, and they must be welcomed ...

P.

Disintegration is another threat that you address in your book

, regarding an encounter with Jordi Pujol in Catalonia.

You were saying that one day we might see a Catalan ambassador in Riga, a Latvian one in Zagreb, another Slovenian in Bastia.

He pointed out that paradox of "growing and shrinking at the same time."

A.

While Europe tries to unite there are parts of different countries that are trying to separate.

We have seen it in Italy, although now that has diminished there.

In Spain it is a phenomenon that does not end.

I can't say that I don't want to talk about Spanish politics, because I read the news, both here and when I'm in Spain, although now I can't go back to my beloved home in Menorca.

I see that in the face of this pandemic there is no unity.

From a political point of view, they are fighting all the time.

One would think that this would be the time to unite and help those who are sick… At one point in

, reflecting on the Civil War, I wrote that Spain can be cruel and it can also be the opposite.

But Spain is a country that essentially has not been reconciled.

We are talking about the 1976 reform;

There was a lot of hope for reconciliation, there were Adolfo Suárez and Santiago Carrillo, everyone wanted that.

Today, however, we see that this division is still there.

There is also a great economic divide, something that is happening everywhere right now.

I don't know, it's very puzzling.

In the Netherlands there were also criticisms of the Dutch Minister of Economy for his severity, because he has not opened his hand with Italy or Spain to tell them: "We will help you"

Q.

How did you experience the Dutch differences with the Sánchez government in the agitated meeting in Brussels on the reconstruction of Europe?

R.

In the Netherlands there were also criticisms of the Dutch Minister of Economy for his severity, because he has not opened his hand with Italy or Spain to tell them: "We will help you."

At the same time, there is help.

We Dutch are net contributors.

It is true that we paid a lot, but our attitude could have been much more understanding.

Q.

How did you feel those days, Spanish, Dutch, European?

European

I can't help being Dutch, but my love for Spain is always there.

I myself am a mess politically, but this is the first summer in forty years that I have not been to Spain.

It is quite a deprivation.

Q.

How is the dialogue with your garden going?

A.

I have an old friend from New Zealand who lives in Menorca.

He walks around my garden and tells me how my cacti are.

When I see the weather forecast for Spain and big storms are announced over the Balearic Islands, then I get worried and call him.

I also talk to a Menorcan gardener, who sometimes walks around there.

I can't help being Dutch, but my love for Spain is always there

Q.

In

treated the scars that are visible on the continent, from Guernica to Sarajevo.

What does the new map of Europe tell you now?

A. It

sounds a bit sentimental and ridiculous, but I would say that it speaks to me of hope.

I see all the dangers, in each of the countries.

There are countries that are in Europe because it is profitable for them, but it does not seem to me that they are truly European, but neither can we say "well, let them go" ..., because they belong to Europe and because perhaps in a new generation their leaders are a little more European … I remember Europe after Yalta, in 1946, when I was traveling through Germany.

Even my friends who had been in concentration camps, who had reason to resent Germany, were supporters of reunification.

We must bear in mind that Europe wants to survive in these times when the United States has become a very strange country, not without its dangers, and on the other side is China.

If Europe wants to be something it has to be very united, not only in the monetary aspect but also politically and philosophically.

P

.

Interestingly, the most respected European politician is currently a woman, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

R.

And it happens that Merkel and Macron, who have their differences, do not stop talking to each other.

Smaller countries will always be afraid, especially those that in the past suffered from larger countries.

This week I recalled the reunification of Germany;

I was in Prague, and there was Mitterrand, who only gave her approval to reunification as a means of facilitating the single currency.

We must not forget: everyone has had to make concessions.

It happened thirty years ago!

I remember passion, with supporters and detractors, and we see that history moves faster than minds.

Literary past and present in Formentor

A group of independent and successful European publishers started the Formentor prize in 1961, which was awarded, among others, to Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Jorge Semprún and Witold Gombrowicz.

After their recovery, the award was received by Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Calasso, Alberto Manguel, Mircea Cartarescu and Annie Ernaux. This year a meeting will be held coinciding with the award ceremony from independent publishers in the Spanish language, in addition to the conversations scheduled between September 18 and 20, and titled 'Bagaudas, goliardos y stylitas.

Acrobats of the ancient and modern world '.

The event will feature the stellar participation of the South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, who will deliver a conference on autobiography as a literary genre.

They will also speak the British professor Edward Wilson-Lee, specialized in the history of libraries;

the Ethiopian writer, Maaza Mengiste;

or the Mexican David Huerta.