/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/MBLME5ZIDRCJ7GBQHQY65CG5MI.jpg)
Luis Landero (Alburquerque, Badajoz, 73 years old) is still on a roll.
When not ... We are talking about one of the most forceful, rich, profound and recognized storytellers in Spanish.
A magician who through memory, fantasy and loyalty to the lineage of a storytelling family and a fanciful father became —or rather followed his destiny and became— a writer.
He became known with
Late Age Games
(Tusquets, 1989).
There he broke in as one of the fundamental voices of the death throes of the Transition.
He had left behind an intense life as a flamenco guitarist, but decided to get away from the noise and cloister himself in its world of words and figurations.
Seven years ago he got fed up with his own way of counting and began a path very close to childhood and memory.
That led to a masterpiece,
The Balcony in Winter
;
to a haunting novel like
Fine Rain
and now to
Emerson's Garden
, all in Tusquets: a beautiful elegy that is, as he says, another fragment of selective memory in which an entire country can be portrayed within a physical and mystical transhumance from the countryside to the city, from repression to freedom, from the bosom from the family to the streets, from a remote past where virtues and roots have been lost to a modernity where experience hardly counts, he says, and this has been replaced by information or social networks.
Question.
Emerson's Garden
and also
The Balcony in Winter
awaken peace, melancholy, but also a rage for a world that has been lost.
Answer:
Well, good, because peace and shelter is what I have felt writing them.
I would like them to give heat, fire, light, suggest a place to return.
It would be my greatest achievement.
Not all books feel that way.
Q.
And what you say about your cousin Antonia, that she does not believe that you are the one who writes her books ...
R.
He is almost 100 years old, yes, and he has never, never, believed it.
My cousin Antonia says okay, that maybe I have imagined them, but the one who works it out is Coté, my wife.
The women in my family don't believe that men do anything.
In my family, men were strange people, dreamers, tormented, incapable of being happy, very good speakers, the Landeros.
And the Durans are all gentle, magnificent, starting with my mother or my grandmother Felisa.
They did not ask of life for more than it can give.
They knew how to be happy with little.
Practical and beatific.
Q.
And does Antonia live in the country or in the town?
It is a distinction that you make, very clear.
R.
Of course, that showed in everything.
To begin with, the town was far away.
We went there by car.
We had a dry farm, which was not bad at all.
My father had up to two servants.
P
.
The shadow of his father weighs on those two books.
Did you leave a lot of frustration along the way?
R
.
Yes, well, partly because I was his life project.
P
.
That you became a lawyer, or an engineer, as the priests called you.
R.
Yes, or doctor, or military, career.
Good grief, what a high school of science cost me!
And yes, well, even though I had three sisters, my life project was me.
P
.
Do you still see that look of hers in the hospital, before you died, so that you wouldn't get lost?
R
.
Damn if I see it!
That imploring look.
He was 50 years old, I was 16. My father was tough, not very affectionate ...
P.
Of those who took the belt ...
A.
It was like that, things had to be done now.
My successes and failures were his and I had to become the best.
He came to Madrid for me, in a visionary plan, because there was a mission to fulfill, for me to become a lawyer, one of those who, according to him, with a firm could earn more than he could in a year.
Sign, be well dressed ... The few gestures of affection that he had I treasure.
Q.
Which ones?
R
.
When I came from the casino, because my father never worked: he dreamed.
His world was elevated.
They put some peanuts there, which he called hazelnuts, and he kept them.
When he came back he would tell me: "Go see what's in my jacket pocket."
He loved me, I know he loved me.
P.
But the same thing that remembers those gestures of affection, also the blows.
What has hurt you the most?
Write about it or have it received?
R.
Writing them has not hurt me.
I have always suffered from them, it was a feeling that I have carried in me.
Q.
A trauma?
R.
Well, I did not want to say that word, but it is the right one.
I became a writer a bit for him, to pay off the debt.
When he died, I began to understand him.
I was a badass kid and a bit of a golfer.
Q.
That you ended up as a flamenco guitarist, instead of an administrative officer at Clesa: you were serious.
A.
Yes, yes, I liked motorcycles, girls, American blond tobacco.
I became a good guitarist.
But what I was passionate about was literature.
I was a poet then;
well, he bragged about it.
P.
As posture.
R.
No, no, romantic, a very serious thing, a suicidal poet.
Prose also appealed to me.
I even won an award that I showed my father;
he looked at it, but it wasn't enough.
He told me, look at what ideas, that I had to study.
And that, when I did, I would buy a Vespa.
And that I should get into the tuna.
P
.
That really is a life project.
And got in?
R.
How am I going to get into the tuna!
What the hell!
I was late for college.
I've been late for everything.
P.
Late but on time.
Why do you have to get to things early?
R.
Well, arriving at the time, my friends were younger than I was in college.
I have the impression that he was lagging behind.
But I have lived a lot and I do not change that for anything.
P
.
I find in Extremadura writers like you, Gonzalo Hidalgo Bayal or Javier Cercas, of the same origin as well, something of a western.
R
.
With Hidalgo Bayal we have that of being like twilight friends.
And Cercas explores that obsession with the hero ...
P. I
also notice a certain pathos.
R.
I do not know, we are immigrants, we have to show off something, a time already lost.
Of extinct creatures.
Of loneliness in the farmhouse, on the ground.
Little went to school, the culture was oral.
Now that has changed.
With television and the car, people are no longer from the countryside.
P
.
Where are they from now?
R.
Of the town already.
There are few who live in the old way and who go to town from time to time to jatar, that is, to buy what is necessary.
Q.
From your time as a guitarist, what do you remember?
R. I
studied for hours and hours and earned a living.
You could play badly, they were the times of tourism.
More from the dance than from the cante, which made money: the tourists, the tablaos.
Then things changed.
Paco de Lucía appears ...
P
.
The art.
R
.
The commander came and he ordered silence, that is.
P.
He made them firm.
R
.
He left a lot of debris on the way.
It is that that… I already left it, nor did I touch.
In flamenco you have to renew yourself.
P
.
From the countryside to the city, modernity passed over you.
In this journey, how do you get nostalgia?
What is it?
Something positive or deadly?
R.
There is a nostalgia that kills, complicated, radical.
And another sweet.
Literature has healed me of many wounds.
Until I was 30 I lived a lot: the country, the guitar, the rural boy in the city;
then he wrote to learn to write.
To discover the world that was inside me ... The thread goes away ... well, until I am 30 years old.
I lived a single relationship with literature before and since then it was conjugal.
Fuck!
So conjugal that we are still here.
Literature vampirized me and life was moving away.
It was far away.
That's it.
And it still is.
Q.
From
The Balcony in Winter
, do you become another type of writer who is now still exploring with
Emerson's Garden
?
R
.
It is that we are getting tired of certain stories and we move on to others because the truth is that we cannot live without them.
They never run out.
We all have a world of our own.
The stories do not end, but the ways of telling do.
There is a time when you get tired and repudiate the tinge, the whiff.
I noticed it when I was starting to write The Balcony in Winter, a kind of fatigue with narrative music.
You notice the artifice, although it has everything legitimate, it does not stop looking like it when you are an old dog.
P
.
That is the search, the grace of not letting yourself repeat yourself.
R, It
goes by times.
Sometimes the one who gets tired is the reader.
P
.
Here comes the danger.
R.
We are surrounded now by all kinds of stories.
In books, on television.
Q.
Do you watch television a lot?
R.
Some series in the afternoon, movies, football, of course.
And
First Dates ...
P
.
¿
First Dates
?
R.
It seems to me a gift for a writer.
You would have to pay.
It's good ... What people say, what they think, how they speak.
One of the things that I like or horrify me, I don't know, is what they think of life.
P
.
And what do people think of life at
First Dates
?
R.
What is all that milonga that the romantics told us.
Before them, life was something else.
First Dates
is in the romantic suburbs.
Romanticism goes through the avant-garde, the beat generation, but then there are some suburbs of the genre where the romance novel, boleros, pop music, self-help books and programs like
First Dates appear.
There life appears mythologized, as a succession of astonishing moments, such as travel, rebellion against the norms, against stillness, monotony, normality, the exaltation of the self.
The fight to the death against custom.
All that is a lie and people believe.
Q.
what?
R
.
Monotony with some flashbacks.
A passing where time comes, it is screwing you up, you get old, you die and then oblivion arrives.
Man is a useless passion, Sartre said.
With life you have to make a pact, you cannot declare war on it, just like with love, so that there is peace.
P.
Perhaps life, in your case, was euphoria and now the search for peace.
Has it reached you?
A.
Sometimes.
P.
And in love too?
A.
We enter here on mined ground.
Q.
Let's get to it.
R
.
You have to know how to love, there are people who don't learn.
Maybe I am one of them.
Q.
Why?
R.
I don't know, maybe science can explain it.
There are people who neither know nor need to love to live, if we speak of a couple, a woman.
There are other forms of love that we all participate in.
P
.
But you have been married ...
R.
Coté, my wife, and I met when I was 21 and she was 17. Love is drifting, it has phases, and the good thing is that it leads towards, towards… friendship, for example, tolerance, being together.
Love and custom are sometimes confused.
I don't think we're going that way.
Q.
Is it important for you, for example, to tell the other person that you love them?
R.
It is important, yes, yes, but there are also the understood ones, there are looks, gestures.
I don't know, entering intimacy is a bit shady for me.
P
.
I say this because of the fact that for many the death of love is the custom.
A.
No, no.
That was the dragon of Saint George for the romantics, that life must be an unforeseen event, that it must be a permanent premiere.
I told the life of the romantics to my students to delight them.
Reality TV came along and it turned into shit.
Once I asked in class what they thought of romantics and one of them answered: “Some babes”.
Anyway, I stopped telling how José Cadalso unearthed his beloved and all that because they saw stronger things on TV.
Q.
Has teaching been important to you?
A.
No, just a way to earn a living.
I hate foremen and bosses, so I thought the best way to survive was as a teacher.
I have enjoyed it, yes, although I do not feel vocational.
But that does not mean that I have not enjoyed my students.
I am a writer who taught classes in his spare time.
P
.
And did you combine it with literature?
R
.
In fact, it could have lived on literature since the late Games.
They offered me things on television, for example, that would have helped me get by without teaching.
But I am a neuras, I believed that this path was incompatible with the monk discipline that a writer must carry, against those habits of living within literature all the time.
P.
A neuras?
How does that translate?
R.
For example, in the sense of guilt.
If I play a joke, I automatically blame myself for having offended the person.
Offending horrifies me.
If it takes me three days to answer an email, the same, what will they think of me.
I always answer because guilt forces me.
I live it as a very exacerbated feeling.
I do not know why.
P
.
What idea do you have of yourself?
A.
I don't know, really.
I don't even know how others see me.
News reaches me, but when things are good I don't believe it.
Q.
That mistrust, will it come from what your mother said, who was a very liar?
R
.
Lying is not bad, as long as it is not immoral.
To the lie, if we remove the moral wardrobe, it remains in the imagination.
I lie to my friends a lot, they also know me.
And then we put the cards face up, it is an imaginary game.
Another thing is the calculated lie with an end.
Q.
Now they tell us that mandanga of the story, which is, in itself, a lie.
The facts are not worth it, but the story.
If it creeps in with everyone and we are building fictions everywhere, what are writers painting here then?
R
.
It is complex.
They told me the history of Spain or the sacred one in a way.
We all have our story, especially when we have to hide our frustrations.
Love is a story, how the loved one looks.
Somehow we tell each other stories.
When we dream we tell each other stories.
But another thing is hoaxes, which endanger democracy, mental health and the dignity of people.
Sometimes we prefer that instead of proven facts they tell us the
Fourth Millennium
...
Q.
Do you also see
Fourth Millennium
?
A.
No, no, well, bits.
All are fragments, anyway.
Emerson's Garden
is a collection of selected fragments of what is preserved in memory.
An anthology of the past.
P
.
With his grandmother, for example, telling stories.
R.
And he was illiterate.
It was focused on experiences.
Now the experience has been impoverished.
It has been replaced by information.
In my childhood they transmitted us experiences, essential stories that were mixed with practical matters: the field, the farm.
People used to talk a lot then, I think that has been lost.
That relationship with things and people ... now we are more vampirized for that, for information, for social networks.
Q.
Did you write the book in confinement?
R
.
Nerd.
In 2017 a transfer was made and more than 40 notebooks appeared.
I like to write without having to end in a work.
There I find the exact point between responsibility and its absence, like a game.
The true seriousness is that of the child when he plays, said Nietzsche.
And so I have done it, almost without knowing that I was writing it, until I realized that it had a coherence.
I left it to get on with
Fine Rain
, that came over me after reading a story in a newspaper.
It activated something in me.
P
.
What do you think was activated for that story?
R.
My family affairs.
The frustrations that lead to the search for culprits.
They may be close people or it may be the Franco regime, who knows.
When you fail, you always look for a culprit.
Fear appears, the reckoning.
There are people who have failed, but they don't see it, and they also do very well.
But when that appears and you know it, your life loses meaning and you look for culprits.
You usually find them, the parents, usually the siblings.
P.
And the success?
That tells me?
A.
My greatest success is having come to esteem myself as a writer.
Overcome that of being worthless, as my father used to say.
The boy from the town, the boy from
Prospe,
from the neighborhood, who becomes a guitarist and on the other hand reads Faulkner, Proust, poetry.
I managed to get rid of the opinion of others, of my father in the first place.
Q.
Do you think you would be proud?
R.
I think so, after all, the culture house of my town bears my name.
That, to prove to my father that eagerness to prove that I am worth more than he believed.
A reckoning that has to do with love, but also with resentment.
Q.
Have you even wanted to prove that to your father more than yourself?
R.
Well probably ... I don't know, I have to think about it.
P
.
And your children?
R.
No, rather the opposite, rather I have feared that they would go through that or that my success would affect them.
I have enjoyed them, you cannot imagine how much.
They have been above everything.
I have been very happy with them.