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In times of confusion, go to poets, in hours of uncertainty, lie down on good verses, such as those of Antonio Gamoneda (Oviedo, 92 years old). The one who threw us so much truth in Description of the lie, sheltered us with his Book of the cold, froze all a time with Immobile Uprising, Castilian Blues or Arden the losses ... and has gathered his work in the anthology This Light (Galaxia Gutenberg). A poet who produces tremors and has always fought to seek serenity in the midst of anguish since, fatherless, he had to help his mother keep the house working since he was 14 years old. Self-taught and rebellious, mystic and hedonist, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2006 and has just received in Gordoncillo (León), where an exhibition on his career, the Golden Seed Award, has been inaugurated. Gamoneda, 92, has not been able to say no, among other things because they dedicated a wine to him for the occasion, a red crianza that they make in the Gordonzello wineries, a local cooperative, and there he presented himself to toast, very supportive of taking advantage in life, as he says, "those situations that are not repellent".
Question. This prestige of ignorance for those who have been self-taught must be abominable, right?
Answer. First I must say that I am not a great advocate of autodidacticism, there is no better teacher than a book. But this prestige of ignorance, today, is repellent. It corresponds to a degradation of thought and institutions when democracy and ideologies have been rusty. It is not a question of throwing them out the window, but I see the fall and the political and institutional cane coming.
Q. A lot?
A. Democracy has been distorted. We should think about priorities. What's precedence? One concordance, one chord. The notion of fundamental rights has fallen. Economic structures have not changed since the dictatorship. What democracy is inhabited by an economic dictatorship? The element that should govern coexistence before the right is the coverage of basic needs. What good are our rights if we have not first met the needs? All Spaniards have the right to a roof, says the Constitution, where is that ceiling for so many?
Q. Even if you don't rely on self-learning, how did you manage to learn?
A. My mother couldn't win for us both to eat after my father died. I entered as a messenger at Banco Mercantil at the age of 14. He turned on the heating at five in the morning. It is not ideal that, at that age, a child should be engaged in starting wood and burning it at that time, but he served the little satraps of that bank with 80 or 90 hours a week. All this incited disagreement and I became friends with people older than me, consciously dissatisfied.
Q. And did they open your eyes?
A. They were my conscience, my progressive formation. They formed in me a will and a form of informed resistance, so I placed myself in the will to learn.
Q. Your mother and that will to want to know mark your work.
A. My mother is a woman repressed by her own life, she is left without sustenance and love very soon and turns her loneliness into her son. She was asthmatic, we came from Oviedo to León to fix that and she fixed it. The poor woman sewed with a machine that she bought with compensation when my father died.
Q. There is a complicity between her and you: physical, emotional, transcendental.
A. True, I had not found the word complicity to define it. I thank you. It was like that. The word is a creator of thought. I hid a friend at home for political reasons. She made breakfast and never asked.
Q. When did you become aware of being a poet?
A. More than conscience, it was conviction. My father happens to be a poet and I learned to read in a book he had written and published in 1919. His only book. He died at the age of 42. He left bohemia before and entered journalism.
Q. What has happened to us is nothing but destruction, you say in Description of the lie. How is this present attraction to the abyss justified again?
A. All my work has a dramatic component. It has been fueled by the weight of tragedy. My mother showed me death in my hands every day, my father's, then I saw the prisoners pass in front of my balcony. They never returned. The friends I mentioned before committed suicide and that crystallized in my life and in my poetry. At some point in my work, I speak of that magnetism towards the abyss, although poetry provides, at the same time, pleasure.
Q. In the Book of Cold you say: "This hopeless pleasure, what does it finally mean to me?"
A. Well, that's what I'm trying to unravel.
Q. Like agony and serenity at the same time, will it be able to reconcile them?
A. It is possible that all our lives try to bring us closer to that conciliation. In me it is a desire. But I will reach the goal without knowing it.
Q. Why do you have this obsession with merging into music?
A. Because poetry is. Mainly, rhythm.
Q. That fascination and at the same time disappointment for the rite and the ceremonial, does it come to you to live next to the cathedral of León?
A. By aesthetics I could agree with the ceremonial, but that is artificially constructed, the ceremony is a falsehood armed to create respect.
Q. In pursuit of domination?
A. It is a shell of power to prosper. If 50,000 had to be beheaded, a Te Deum was organized, period.
Q. What about death? "Between your gaze and my voice, the dead vibrate."
A. I was 17 when I wrote that. That language is created to draw the impossibility.
Q. The invisible?
A. Also, what is impossible for us to see. The dead vibrate because there, with the word, they come back to life.
Q. You don't believe in invocations, but invocations, you say, believe in you. How do you know?
A. Because of what I just told you. By language, which is independent of what I create. That invocation, the word itself, creates a reality of my own to which I may or may not belong.
Q. In this world full of noise another wish of his can serve: "I could not resist the perfection of silence." A mystique?
A. I sometimes perceive the very low tremor of this tree that we see here, in my yard and it is with me. If I put my hearing aid up high, I feel it. Also, when I don't want to hear nonsense, I lower it and holy Easter. That advantage has. How far can one go in the perfection of silence and resistance to loneliness? I wonder... That's where things are going...
Q. And does that friendship within himself comfort you?
A. Yes, because it serves to reconcile with one's own failure. A friendship, as I've called it, looks like that.
Q. What is retraction?
A. Back to the mother. To the abyss, to my suicidal friends. For what? To remain myself.
Q. And that obsession with betrayal?
A. Here I have to go slowly. My two suicidal friends, when they make that decision, abandon me and I saw it as an act of betrayal.
Q. Is that how you see it?
A. No bitterness, no rancor. You aim a lot, uh...
Q. Forgive me, that's what your poetry does to me. Do you understand today that they committed suicide?
A. Yes, but what does it matter? Does that eliminate the occurrence of betrayal?
Q. Is your memory still cursed and yellow?
A. Everything we've talked about leads to that. Since my memory is the only thing I have. There is no poetry without memory.
Q. Is this country still the one you didn't want to go to one day?
A. Yes, because I guess it is also empty. Along with yellow, I also use white a lot, which for me represents extraction, emptiness.
Q: But should we call that country Spain or can we also call it the world?
A. Spain walks within that nature of the empty world.
Q. Are we fast without destination in this accelerated present?
A. We are heading fast without destination to places that do not exist, let's bring it closer to a future of democracy. It is empty, but we must head there.
Q. Another verse of his: "When I put on my pants, I take away my freedom."
A. Read it again and take it for granted! You put your pants on to get out there!
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