His Cuban grandmother told him that he came out the way he did because he was the grandson of a merchant and a storyteller.
"The two things intersect in what I do," says Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (Torrelavega, 1942).
More the second facet than the first.
Because he has captured stories in images ―his career as a screenwriter and director is one of the most glorious in Spanish-language cinema― and in words, as a writer, with novels and memoirs such as Life before March, Shooting, To the Actors,
The eye of heaven
or now
orient
(Anagrama), a collection of stories that invite, like everything in his work, to multiple readings because the first one does not allow us to read everything hidden in the underground layers.
A member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and of the Fine Arts Academy, he is a tremendous stoic with a hawk's radar who misses nothing on what is fundamental.
Ask.
The stories do not end, an author finishes them out of delicacy, says one of his characters.
Are endings an absurd convention?
Answer.
We can come to imagine a story that has no end, that goes on indefinitely, that can continue to be told, even if the narrator dies, because someone else can always continue it... But that is so dizzying that it is better to put an end to it.
Q.
By way of agreement?
A.
Yes, between the narrator and the reader.
But we know that it can only be a consented deception: the stories do not end, they are liquidated, they are killed.
Before, the convention was that the boy and the girl got married.
With all the drama that comes after!
Not now;
For the story to continue, the series have introduced multiple adultery.
Q.
How do you think your story will end?
Cares?
A.
“And I will go.
And the birds will stay singing”, said Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Someone will continue the story.
Perhaps an artificial, robotic bird that sings to another machine.
Q.
He puts some characters in the Teatro Real to see an opera and doesn't let them out.
As if they wanted to die of music and
foie gras
.
It's clear that his favorite opera is
Tristan and Isolde
and his movie
The Exterminating Angel
, isn't it?
R.
You have found out that it is
Tristan and Isolde
, although I do not say so in the
Eastern
text .
I only say that it is a definitive opera.
Go?
You have continued the story yourself.
As for
The Exterminating Angel
, the movie, it has two endings.
In other words, it is not at all clear how it ends, or even that it ends.
Q.
One is a five-hour play and the other an hour and a half.
Do you think that Wagner lacked the capacity for synthesis and Buñuel had plenty of austerity?
R.
Of course, Buñuel never has a plane left over, they all have a purpose.
Q.
And what do you sin between the two options?
R.
Unlike other directors, I have always cut a lot in editing.
Now my stories have as few words as possible.
Synthesizing is not a sin.
Q.
And what do you sin in general?
R.
I sin from pride, but not from vanity.
Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, photographed at his home in Madrid.Santi Burgos
Q.
Since you are a member of the RAE, only that or only that?
R.
Well, I am delighted that the public takes the accent mark thing so seriously.
It reveals interest in the way of expressing each other.
Contrary to my previous statement, I would tell you that if some spelling rule is already established, it is better not to touch it.
I bet for the simplicity of them.
Q.
In the RAE they discuss wildly, as Pérez Reverte says, or do they apply the pasiego mode?
That is to say, more flexible and distrustful, like the characters in his Cantabrian novels.
R.
When I entered the Academy I was surprised by the rigor that is used to make the definitions.
Experts in science, medicine, anthropology... are consulted, and then it reaches the philologists, and it starts all over again.
The word comes and goes before being fixed.
We always maintain an unstable balance between creators and philologists.
And among the creators I also include the sovereign people.
P.
Which does not take away, that some character of yours would also say.
R.
It seems to me that the pasiego is you.
Q.
My maternal grandfather was from around there, so…
He once told me that this literature thing was a bargain, because you could invent without a budget limit, unlike the cinema.
What is the literary scissors you fear the most?
R.
I think the worst thing about a controlled system is self-censorship.
Of course, the one that is exercised in creation, but also in universities, in newspapers;
the dictatorship of what is correct is terrible.
That is what seems most scary to me, not the limits of a budget.
Q.
"So you, Manuel, are the grandson of a merchant and a storyteller, that explains why you came out the way you did," his grandmother tells him in one of her stories.
As?
A.
That is exact.
I come from a very utilitarian family, and from another very fanciful.
I think the two things intersect in what I do.
Q.
“All movies talk about love”, you say, “if they don't talk about love, they are…” a fiasco?
R.
One day my father, who was a veterinarian, told me, when I was very young, that love was a trap set by nature to perpetuate the species.
I still haven't gotten over it.
Dostoevsky's work is a reckoning with the father.
Mine is a reckoning with a vet.
Q.
Always, is it a word without an image?
R.
The term "always" does not have a concrete image, it covers everything we do not know.
It's scary.
Q.
Well, nothing more.
A.
Very good.
Until forever.
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