In
There are more horns in a good night
(Nuggets)
,
Manuel Jabois (Sanxenxo, Pontevedra, 43 years old), a journalist for this newspaper, compiles a decade of columns on the three main topics, namely: love —that is, grandparents, couples, friends, farewells—;
football —that is, illusion, mythology and a bit of tennis— and journalism —everything else—.
The one that gives the book its title was written on his cell phone, on his way to coverage as a double agent: columnist and reporter.
It's almost 400 pages full of magic tricks.
It seems that he is talking about one thing, and towards the end of the column it is discovered that it was about another, and in the first paragraphs the reader can laugh or get excited, but the last line always provokes the same reaction: that smile of astonishment and admiration that the magicians leave when guessing your letter.
They are, above all, those closures —“Growing up is always a betrayal”;
“A man bought the sun;
Ask.
In one of his columns he lists his hobbies as a child: crocheting, knitting, soap operas, and making homemade newspapers.
Gabriel García Márquez used to say: “I write so that they love me”.
And Manuel Jabois?
Why is he a journalist and not the new Carlos Matas?
Response.
There is some truth in that, you write to be loved.
It takes a point of vanity to think that what you write has to be read by others.
I have never written for myself, to get rid of my demons or as a form of therapy.
I write to be read and I suppose that by wanting to be read, I want to be loved.
P.
Is that the columnist's greatest risk, trying to please everyone or wanting to always please the same people?
A.
Wanting the same people to always like you is the easiest way to always dislike the same people and makes you a slave to the opinions of others.
Before you sensed them, but now they write to you on networks and you think: How long will our romance last?
Until the moment I disagree with you?
Many people say something that, pretending to be a compliment, is quite scary: “You manage to put the exact words of what I think”.
But the day comes when you don't agree, and curiously, that's the day you stop being independent because you've sold yourself to I don't know who.
Independence is writing what you think.
And you have to be much more wary of flattery than of insult.
P.
And in columnism in general, do you notice that some write what is expected of them?
R.
Yes, many times I don't want to read certain people, not just columnists, because I don't believe that after calling someone a clown on Twitter they will be very rigorous in their texts about that person they have called a clown.
And that happens in sports, in politics and in everything.
Q.
That beautiful song on a shitty album
is about giving up pretending.
Also wanting to be a better person.
Does writing help that?
R.
That is one of the columns that I like the most.
When writing you have to stop, articulate your thoughts and that helps you to be a better person.
When I have written hot, angry, the next day I am not very proud, although that forcefulness has been widely applauded.
I have regretted sometimes being harsh or unfair.
And I have seen how in a group someone says something good about a politician or whoever and another says the opposite and that person first justifies himself — “well, I liked him that day” — and then changes his mind.
A troop comes that you want to be part of for love, recognition... and you change.
Woody Allen says that this absence of criteria or principles is the embryo of fascism.
I have a much better time arguing with my right-wing friends."
P.
Has that gone further with social networks?
Do you have to be braver to comment?
R.
It is part of a group dynamic, few people dare to be alone or to say something that could leave them alone.
Q.
It looks like school, doesn't it?
R.
_
Yes, they are
bullies
maneuvers .
The one who wants submission, the one who thinks that company is being with people who think the same about the same things, when good company has always consisted in arguing, in confronting.
I have a great time with all my friends, but I have a much better time arguing with my right-wing friends, mainly because there's something I don't know if I'm right.
There are certain environments where starting an argument is a declaration of war.
I have always seen it as a declaration of friendship: if I deign to argue with you it is because we are more than just strangers, we care about each other.
P.
In addition, journalism tends to force to show gray, almost never something is black or white, good very good and bad very bad.
Do you feel like you are constantly being forced to choose sides?
R.
Not me because I'm quite old.
But there are younger people who are very concerned about what is said about them.
I use Twitter to post my texts and to thank the people who read them or buy my books.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be on Twitter.
In that network, I have come to see people accusing you of what your interviewees say or treat your opinion as the opinion "of EL PAÍS", that is, not distinguishing a column from an editorial.
Political columns expire in two weeks.
Love is an endless subject that will continue to be talked about in 300 years”
P.
Account that has the word "love" in Google Alerts.
What kinds of things do you find there?
R.
(Laughs) That's a joke, but I really like writing about human relationships.
Love is a transversal and endless issue that will continue to be discussed and written about in 300 years.
When making the selection of the articles, the hard topical ones had expired even though they were viral at the time, the others had not.
Q.
Does politics age worse in opinion?
R.
Yes because it is also renewed every two times three and that it is renewed does not necessarily mean that it regenerates, sometimes what it does is degenerate.
Q.
Do you have a first reader or reader, someone you show what you write to before it is published?
A.
I have several first readers, although I try not to be too annoying.
I'm very insecure and it depends on the topic.
P.
What topics make you consult or doubt more?
R.
Feminism, for example.
I've been raised among women, but I'm always going to write from a man's point of view and that already involves a series of acquired expressions or very embedded tics that I'm not aware of.
I also consult a lot about politics and in general about topics that I'm not very involved in, which are almost all of them.
I am lucky to work in a newspaper and to be able to call whoever runs the day to day.
Q.
"I'd rather have written than write."
How is that time between when you send the column until it is published and a lot of strangers find out what you think?
R.
The emotion of the beginning is gradually lost, just as the sensation of the first times is irretrievable, but I do retain the agitation.
The next day I always wake up at seven in the morning, I go to the EL PAÍS website, I see the column there and I think: "How cool."
And there are comments that are true gems.
I wrote about illiteracy without knowing anyone who was illiterate and she wrote me a person telling me that her grandmother was illiterate, that when her husband died she set up a store and that everyone cheated her with the accounts.
That comment was better than any column I could write because it spoke from experience that I didn't have.
The feeling of having written is wonderful, starting to write is more fucked up.
I think as I write, that's when the lights go on.
With fiction it happens to me similar,
but added to the insecurity.
I still don't fully believe it: I'm not sure I can write a third novel and instead I do know that I can write another column or report.
P.
The columns provoke a different relationship with the readers.
One of them wrote to him one day: "I don't know how to die"...
R.
I love when those things happen.
Alejandro Sevillano wrote me that beautiful letter when they took away his driving license [then he was 85 years old].
I went to Valladolid to see him and we ate together.
I hope he reads this interview because I lost his phone and would like to get back in touch.
I have a lot more questions now than before.
Much more afraid to express my opinion”
Q.
What other messages from readers do you remember?
R.
A couple came to the book fair who were on their first date and had just discovered that they both read to me.
They asked me for a dedication and I put something like that for sure there would be a second one, a bit Sobera in
First Dates
(laughs).
At the previous fair another couple told me that they had met arguing about me: one was a
hater
and the other read me or the other way around and arguing they started fooling around...
Q.
"I liked myself more when I was old than when I was young."
What has changed?
R.
I have many more doubts than before, much more afraid to express my opinion.
I think it's because now I ask myself better questions, I'm more aware of how ignorant I am.
I'm never going to be an intellectual, I haven't been to university, but I think I'm a guy who knows how to communicate from the same level as people.
In the
Diario de Pontevedra
there was something: now I'm going to tell you what's happening in Iran, and maybe I'd just Googled where it was.
The days that the internet was not available in that newspaper, I had to write with the fingers that I had in my hand.
The first column I did for the 'Diario de Pontevedra' did not come out.
They censored it, and luckily”
Q.
How old were you then?
R.
_
I was 19 when I started working at
Diario de Pontevedra
and 20 when they gave me the column.
The first one didn't come out, they censored it because it was full of tacos and luckily.
Surely some more should have been censored.
Nobody with 20 years can have a column, but that was an exercise: sometimes he wrote prose poems, stories... I remember one of a girl who was gradually turning into soup...
Jabois poses for the interview for EL PAÍS.
Louis Sevillano
P.
That is very Millás, isn't it?
A.
Yes!
There was a lot of influence from Millás and a lot from José Luis Alvite, who was an absolute master of the phrase, the best metaphors I've read in my life.
Also by Nacho Miras.
I read everything I could and copied everything I could.
P.
There are many columns on hypocrisy, as if I had a specific radar for imposture.
And then he gets angry...
R.
I hate the hypocrisy of being in a certain position and pretending to be in another to be cool.
The column of the Norwegian minister who gets on a small boat and that of Ralph Lauren's overalls for 680 euros are the same thing: trying to be everything, living in an attic and pretending that they look at you with the respect that one looks at worker.
I do not have an anti-rich speech, but I will never understand why the one who has 10 million wants 100.
Is it so important to have four ships?
Do those who oppose the wealth tax know what they're talking about?
P.
Many people who do not have those millions are opposed to this tax.
R.
_
None of those who protest have those millions or many of those who have them do not protest.
Jon Rahm said a few days ago: "Money is great, but will my life change if I get 400 million?"
He has earned enough to stop playing golf, but he won't stop playing golf because it's what he enjoys.
I wouldn't stop writing even if I got El Gordo because that's what life gives me, going through Pontevedra and someone stopping me and taking out a little column of mine from their bag and telling you the story associated with it;
interfere with your books or your articles in the lives of so many people, or simply entertain them.
Not even for 100 million would I stop writing, I say it with my heart in my hand.
At the age of 18 I stopped studying.
Not know what to do.
I didn't have a good time.
Writing has given meaning to my life, it has structured it”
P.
Let's go back to the beginning: write so that they love you...
R.
Writing has given all meaning to my life.
At 18 I dropped out of school.
I spent a year doing nothing.
It was total emptiness and I didn't have a good time.
But suddenly writing began to structure everything, in a natural and slow way: my personal relationships, family… all of that has been structured by writing and writing to them.
Q.
So that they understand you...
A.
Yes, even to camouflage myself.
There are many labels, I think I don't fit into any other genre: the cheesy, the
pijiprogres
, the
cipotudos
, the Galician columnists, the malasañeros.
The only thing you can do against that, or for new labels, is write.
Q.
A
kid
doesn't write columns about his grandfather.
R.
I have no idea what it does or does not do.
The columns are transparent.
You cannot spend your whole life being the same, not at least between the ages of 20 and 40.
And it's nice that effort that some make when reading you to get to know you, to know who you are, but I also really like to mislead those who don't read me.
P.
You dedicate the book to your friend David Gistau, who died in 2020. What did you learn from him?
R.
David had a different ideology than mine.
I have always considered him a kind of older brother to be held accountable for how much he helped me.
That taught me to write with great respect for the things with which I did not agree, or that I hated, also of the people who defend ideas contrary to mine, and to know that you are never completely right.
Q.
What things should two people always agree on?
R.
In coexistence.
In that if you are of a different race, religion or sexual identity you have the same rights as the other;
in which the other lives life with the same freedom as you.
Red lines are knocked down with impunity on land that no one discussed.
A guy crosses the Strait dying of hunger and thirst, leaving his family behind, arrives at the beach and a Red Cross volunteer hugs him.
Can there be debate on that?
Here it was.
One said I don't know what about the breasts and people came out to say that it was the image of the West surrendering.
A volunteer from the Spanish Red Cross hugs a Senegalese immigrant who recently arrived in Ceuta by swimming. JON NAZCA (REUTERS)
Q.
And why does that happen?
R.
Because there are many people who previously did not have tools to show their pettiness and now they do: from social networks to political parties that applaud or encourage nonsense.
It is intended to legitimize the evil of always, that of laughing at the weak, the evil of cowards.
Q.
Why are we not better?
R.
_
We are.
What happens is that progress provokes reaction.
When does Vox stop being macho?
When it is not contemplated that there may be a false complaint if it is an immigrant who has assaulted a woman.
We are very careful with the pull effect on suicides, but not with the pull effect of the extreme right”
P.
For Vox, violence has no gender, but it does have race.
R.
It will be that it is easier to prevent immigrants from entering than to start expelling feminists.
P.
_
And why has his speech permeated?
R.
For many reasons, but there is one that is closer to me: the media.
We are very careful with the pull effect on suicides, but not with the pull effect of the extreme right that they provoke by saying barbarities, sometimes just for the pleasure of seeing the reaction of good souls.
It is the third party in Congress.
It is necessary to report on them, but without participating in the debates that they propose, without buying their agenda, without discussing whether the planet is warming or not.
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