Martínez de Pisón portrays the first post-war years: "They are the most atrocious in Spain at peace"

The latest novel by the writer Ignacio Martínez de Pisón,

(Seix Barral), is a stark portrait of a brutal time in a devastated city: the immediate postwar period, from 1939 to 1945, in Madrid.

The Civil War has just ended and the country, as the novelist recalls, is a Manichaean world (although the novel is not), split in two, where the victors use their victory to use the city as booty while losers spend all their talents just trying to make it to the next day.

The writer, born in Zaragoza in 1960, chose that period precisely because of what is barbaric about him: “I am fascinated by the atrocious.

They are the most atrocious years of Spain in peace.

There is the desire for revenge, reprisals, repression, executions.

And also the consequences of the war, the moral misery, the black market…”.

He adds that he was surprised to see that there are not many novels about that time.

“During the dictatorship you couldn't write, obviously, you couldn't count on freedom.

And then, well, it didn't interest much, it seems.

It is strange, because those times full of confrontations and violence attract novelists.

But apart from something from Umbral and the works of Almudena Grandes, I didn't find much”.

And why Madrid?

“Because Madrid is a metaphor for the rest of Spain.

What is happening in Madrid is happening in the rest of the country, only more concentrated and with more drama for being the capital.

It is also a city that is in ruins.

Except for the Salamanca neighborhood and little else, it is destroyed, which made it even more interesting from the point of view of pure photogenicity.

Furthermore, it is a city that is trying to restore itself, to rebuild itself at full speed.

Also, like the country, it tries to rebuild the social fracture.

We are talking about a few years in which Franco shot more than 50,000 people.

A group of pedestrians crossed the street of Alcalá at the beginning of the forties.

In the background, to the left, the Metropolis building, at the confluence with Gran Vía. HERMES PATO (EFE)

Martínez de Pisón speaks in a bookstore-café in Chamberí.

It is a neighborhood that appears a lot in the novel.

"He's almost one more character, like in Galdós's novels."

Near the bookstore, in what is now the Vallehermoso stadium, was an old cemetery, Campo de las Calaveras, where, in September 1945, a gang of PCE gunmen murdered the communist leader Gabriel León Trilla, accused of not follow the directives of the central committee, then in exile.

It is one of the actual episodes that the writer has incorporated into the novel.

Initially, when Martínez de Pisón decided to portray that black period in that city in ruins, he thought of stringing together a succession of real events that occurred to real people, like Trilla.

But then he found that to reflect the dark environment of the time it was also necessary to resort to fiction.

So

mixes events that happened in reality and invented plots.

There is a former member of the Socialist Unified Youth (JSU) who at the end of the war goes over to the other side, becomes a snitch, betrays his former colleagues and ends up commanding the police.

For his figure, the writer was inspired by the well-known and sinister commissioner Roberto Conesa, head of the Social Political Brigade.

Retaliated teachers, single mothers who end up in prostitution, guerrillas pushed into the maquis, fashionistas overwhelmed by misfortune, profiteering black marketeers also parade through the book… “They are characters with whom I have tried to represent the entire universe of that time.

The objective is that the reader, when finished, has the feeling that he knows that time and that he has lived through those years, even if briefly and by proxy ”.

Passion for realism

All the characters are united by the bad luck of living through an exceptional and cruel time that will mark them forever.

“The great theme of the traditional novel is the clash between individual and collective destinies.

And this is seen through characters like Cristina, the dressmaker, sister of a shot communist, forced to behave like a hero.

Deep down she is a normal girl who asks herself the same question all the time: Why do I have to live here, in this time, why can't I be in another place where I am freer and happier?

During the first years of his career, Martínez de Pisón was somewhat contemptuous of the realistic novel.

He then wrote fantastic stories, collected in early volumes such as

(1985) or

(1987).

“I then thought that realism was a dandy thing.

But already from the mid-1990s, with

, I start writing realistic novels and discover a passion for realism.

And that, furthermore, all the realist writers I had read had influenced me without realizing it”.

For the narrator, this genre is very much alive and is still necessary: ​​“You can read novels from 200 years ago and they seem to have just been written.

And that is a privilege of this type of novel, of this literature.

Realism has always had a chronic vocation.

It not only accounts for some characters with their personal conflicts, but also aspires to reflect a specific place and time.

That part of the chronicle was already in the realistic literature of the 19th century.

I think that we novelists have to tell the times that we have had to live.

I have written a lot about the Transition.

I was born in the 1960s, so those were the years of my adolescence and my youth.

And then I realized that I needed to count earlier times.

From there

”.

The novel, like any good chronicle, is meticulously documented.

To do this, the writer read memoirs, volumes of history and consulted hundreds of articles on the Internet.

“And during the years he was writing it, he read the newspaper of the day… from those years, from the forties, in digital newspaper archives.

You had to read between the lines, of course.

But he taught a lot: it came from 'sentence served', which attested to the executions of that day.

Or you saw which people had been sentenced for the 'crime of taxes', that is, for the black market.

Or he talked about the great fascist celebrations.

I found very curious things: there is a patriotic toy contest, with little dolls dressed in fancy dress and things like that, which appears in the novel and which I took from a newspaper of the time”.

—And what does this atrocious time tell us about today's society?

—The novel is not about war, but about an authoritarian regime with support within society, and that is something we are seeing now.

After several decades of democratic stabilization and peaceful coexistence, we believed that totalitarian utopias were part of the past.

But that totalitarian drive reaches us from all sides.

We see it with Putin.

Why, at one point in history, does society believe that an iron and dictatorial regime can be the solution to problems?

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