Antonio Muñoz Molina: "You have to be very careful about lamenting the loss of virtues that existed in the past"

"Now is when I don't feel like going out on the street" just when the state of alarm has just been abolished is the first line of

Return to where

(Seix Barral), the book with which Antonio Muñoz Molina (Úbeda, 65 years old) shreds the pandemic reality of our time and his own, made of memories of a child from a peasant family.

It intertwines present and past through a narrative that begins bucolic and ends up being beautiful, brilliant and unforgiving.

More information

• Articles by Antonio Muñoz Molina published in EL PAÍS

• Examination of conscience

Question.

It was to start the confinement and start looking back.

As if we have lost the future forever.

Answer.

Because when the present stands still, the past takes on tremendous force.

And the instinct to witness what he was experiencing also emerges.

In my case, I had the desire and the discipline to tell what was in front of my eyes.

Because there are things that we need to tell through fiction and others that we simply want to record.

And the latter is what happens in exceptional circumstances.

P.

For example.

A.

On 9/11 I had the need to write what I saw without interpreting it.

I understand that there is a rush to theorize things, but the instinct is to tell what is happening.

Because you sense that this is going to be lost.

Whoever is experiencing something tells it in a completely different way than any other.

I now remember 9/11, but I remember it with everything that I have lived through afterwards.

Later knowledge alters it.

The only thing that is faithful is what I was writing when I didn't know anything about the future.

“When the present stands still, the past takes on tremendous force

Q.

There were very fast rehearsals.

A.

That makes me extremely lazy.

They asked me: "And how do you see it, and what do you think?"

I don't know anything, nobody knows anything, it's happening right now.

All I know is what is in front of my eyes.

And you have to make a very healthy effort to erase yourself, to become a camera.

The immediate testimony is one of the treasures that literature can give, which is everything that the world tells with words.

The desire to fixate and get out of the stupid prison of the self.

Q.

Write a lot about the feeling of unreality.

Also in the past, when his old father suddenly says: "Life is passing like a dream."

And he dies, shortly after, sleeping.

R.

There is a very dangerous thing, and it is that we do not want reality to be altered. It is an instinct that in emergency situations I have seen, and I have thought about that a lot when you see how people historically react in catastrophic circumstances. Because there is a need for life not to change. You need that when you press the light switch, the light turns on, the water comes out of the tap, that things are as they have to be. You do not accept that it is not like that. That is why when the unheard of is near there is a part of you that wants to block it. The reality, however, is very easily broken. It is important to write what happens in the moment, because immediately afterwards it begins to correct itself. And you get to the moment when it catches you suddenly, but immediately afterwards you have already packed a theoretical baggage to make you believe that you knew.Everyone prophesies the past with extraordinary solvency. Therefore, I insist, we must count in the present.

P.

Like the newspapers.

A.

The diaries of people who have survived terrible circumstances, people who have been in the war, yes.

During confinement I read the diary of an American journalist who went to Berlin in 1933 and was a correspondent until the United States declared war in 1941. What was it like to be there?

One day, for example, he is in a hotel, he looks out the window and sees Hitler pass by below.

He sees a man in a dirty raincoat with a certain feather.

And that vision seems invaluable to me.

Another testimony is from Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, who is in a cafeteria in Munich and sees Hitler at the next table devouring cakes.

“Everyone prophesies the past with extraordinary solvency.

Therefore, I insist, we must count in the present

Q.

And account that you have halitosis.

A.

Exactly.

Those details.

That is the gold of nonfiction literature.

That this guy had a horrible halitosis.

Small detail perhaps for the great story, but that is relevant on a human level.

Q.

You go out into the street after confinement and witness a traffic fight with two guys hitting each other and the caravan honking the horn.

"This is the world to which there was such a rush to return," he says.

R.

As an environmentalist, as an urban cyclist and advocate for livable cities, I pay a lot of attention to traffic. There were a lot of people who got furious when talking about the possibility that things might change at all. Not saying that we will come out better or worse, but the fact of assessing that a pandemic could make us reflect or change a series of things. That provoked a reaction of "I want the world to be the way it was." Really? Of course I don't want people to die in hospitals, but seeing that a city can be more livable requires reflection. It is not nonsense. Because in addition, in many cities, such as Pontevedra or Vitoria, since before the pandemic they have been considering another way of living in the city. Those debates in Spain are highly politicized, but they are debates that must be had.Just as the pandemic has to lead you to debate the priorities of spending and social organization. We have already seen what a well-equipped and efficient public health system, and scientific investment to create vaccines means.

Q. As a

child, they recommended that you never complain, because complaining was pointing out.

R.

You have to be very careful about lamenting the loss of virtues that existed in the past. Now, when you live in the first world, and in a privileged situation, you can tend to lose your sense of reality and complain as if things only happened to you. It was a feeling that I had in the confinement. I am prone to depressive states, and when a black shadow fell on me at that time, I thought: "Man, this is not the time to pay attention to yourself." For a sense of proportion. Because how can you complain if you are locked in a good house, you have a job that has not been affected and you are not sick. There are people who are dying. There is a scale in the complaint. There is a lot of injustice and a lot of inequality: you have to have a slightly more public vision of things, less privatized, less self-centered.

P.

Much has been said about young people and their parties, but a little less about young people, the majority, who have complied with the rules sacrificing time that they will not get back.

R.

We must be more careful to avoid generalizations and those big brush judgments that "young people" say.

How young.

Because I see a lot of young people who have had an extraordinary attitude.

Most have acted with decency, correctness and a great sense of responsibility.

"We must be more careful when it comes to avoiding generalizations and those big brush judgments that" young people "say.

P.

We are a lot of tearing our clothes.

R.

But there are certain things that have been done very well.

And you have to pay attention to those things so as not to fall into the nihilistic nineties of "this is a disaster, always the same."

Hey, nope.

Being such a rough country in many matters, we are a country with one of the best vaccination rates and in which there is less denial of the vaccine.

We have to do an exercise of precision and nuances, of looking at the concrete: the more you look at the concrete, the less room there is for speculation and delusion.

P.

"How little blood you have", insistent phrase of his father.

R.

It's funny how the book goes from a more nostalgic memory to a more bitter memory. I start with the tomatoes on my terrace, and with the conversations with my uncle Juan, and that leads me at the beginning to a kind of childish arcadia as a counterpoint to the present. But suddenly a memory comes to you that you say: "This is very bitter." What my father used to say, that men don't cry, that we had no skills or abilities, that we weren't manly enough. That blood he meant was to jump over a wall, or fight you, or whatever. That complex that you were not worth. That your grandparents, your parents or your uncles saw you as useless.

P.

It was not valid for that world, and creates another.

"It seems that this is better than picking figs," said his grandfather when he saw him, for the first time, use his hands skillfully: typing on a typewriter.

R.

Although I came to this while writing, to the harsh, harsh and cruel part of that world that is easy to idealize now.

Suddenly I remembered the beginning of the fair in Úbeda and I remembered a terrible image: in front of the procession were the fools, those who in the town called the fools.

And people laughed at them, and they threw things at them.

And I remembered how I had seen those who called the fools beat, and the horrible cruelty that there was in many things.

Therefore, beware of the past.

Beware of nostalgia.

"Reality breaks very easily

Q.

You were born a year after your mother miscarried a girl at five months.

If you were born, you would not have existed.

And she recounts the phrase of grandmother Juana to her daughter-in-law, who was her mother: “To order the child, she knew how to do it well.

What he did not know was to bring her healthy into the world ”.

High so that she could hear it.

R.

It is terrifyingly cruel.

Go figure.

The portrait of my mother in the book is still a bit strong, but at the age of 90 she is still brooding on some things.

P.

Also about your husband.

A.

Just remember bad things about him.

That at first, although later he ended up erasing it as Stalin erased Trotsky.

It didn't appear in any of their stories.

There is a very funny anecdote in which my uncle disguises himself as King Melchior and comes to see me at my house, and in that story my mother has taken my father out of the story.

It is the novel of the memory that each one makes.

Which makes you think about how they will remember me, how I will be in the memory of my own.

In what dreams will I appear, as many dead now appear in my dreams.

P.

Time is one of the protagonists of the book.

R. Because it gives perspective. And it is a lesson in humility. This is a thing that is temporary. When you read that crap from the Amazon or Google guys who want to live 150 years. Die when I play, man. What's wrong, can't you be like the others? You have to go to space, you have to live 500 years ... Leave room for others, accept your mortality. You have to go.