In the beginning, Mexico was television.
Soap operas.
El Chavo del Ocho
.
The Peruvian children talked like Kiko: "Shut up, shut up, you're making me desperate!"
And we listened every night to women in love crying their sorrows in chilango.
During the eighties, in Lima, we grew up confined.
There were no viruses out there, but there were bullets and bombs and blackouts.
Going out at night was reckless.
Get away from your neighborhood, an expedition into the unknown.
There was no internet.
Luckily, there was TV.
The comedies and soap operas of Mexico accompanied my process towards adulthood like no friend. More than anything, they were the only vital reference point for the afternoon's programming. When my parents divorced, I consoled myself with Single Dad, imagining that my father was a nice rocker. The first time I fell in love, I tried to act like Pancho de Quinceañera. (The second time, like Memo, with equally mediocre results.)
Decades later, and thousands of miles away, as an adult dedicated to literature in Spain, the pandemic brought a new confinement to my life.
And it swept her away.
All the book promotion trips, all the bowling, the fairs, to which I spent a good part of the year, were suspended.
He also had on the agenda the premiere of a play, which was abruptly canceled.
Suddenly, the future was a black void stretching out before me.
I spent April 2020 doing gymnastics with Just Dance, reading and watching series marathons.
I made the children go for a walk so I could go out legally.
I went back to smoking.
Every day I woke up to hear a new crack crack in my mental stability.
And then I started getting calls like this:
"Hey, we're doing a television series in Mexico and we need writers for the team."
"Is the subject very Mexican?"
-
Pos
itself.
"But I'm not Mexican."
"Do you want the job or not?"
-
Pos
itself.
The real
Half of my work with Mexican creators was to say:
-This is impossible.
First lesson: nothing is impossible there.
It happened to me for the first time during one of the projects: a thriller.
While we were shuffling possible dark plots with the team, I felt our hands slip and I thumped on the table:
"Hey guys, we all like suspense and all that."
But a gang of pedophiles with ties to the highest spheres of power who torture journalists to silence them is too much.
Nobody is going to believe it.
"How could I not?"
One snapped.
"My
precious
ruler
!"
Google it.
I considered it implausible.
For my colleagues, in fact, it was old news.
During another project, a documentary, I also told the director that we could not get witnesses to the great conspiracy he wanted to tell:
"What madman is going to dare to say that in public?"
I scoffed.
In 48 hours, the director had four or five volunteers.
I refused to believe it:
"But why are these witnesses speaking?
What can they win?
"Know the ball, carnal."
In his book of chronicles
Mexicana,
the Spaniard Manuel Arroyo-Stephens accurately portrays the amazement of the foreigner at a country larger than reality.
Drinking painters, lesbian divas and drowned poets, extreme characters, unable to conform to the narrow dimensions of the normal pass through its pages.
Scripts in English frequently use the verb "produce."
When a character takes something out of a purse or pocket, he "produces" it.
Sometimes, it is not even written where the thing comes from exactly.
Wherever it works for the stage manager.
In that sense, Mexico does not exceed reality: it produces it.
You conceive something delusional, absurd, wonderful or terrible, and that country pulls it out of its sleeve, just to show you that it came before you.
It has a river navigated by flower boats, Xochimilco.
And an exhibition with baby mummies in Guanajuato.
Indecipherable pre-Hispanic calendars.
Delicious dishes made with ant eggs.
Second division teams trained by Maradona.
Gloomy islets populated by broken dolls.
Make up something, whatever you want.
Try it.
Mexican for beginners
My house in Spain is a call shop.
A
coworking
.
A room for telemarketers.
The children with their homework, my wife with her work, I with my stories.
We all talk to different people in different countries at the same time.
If the internet fails, it will be the apocalypse.
The world will fall apart.
Sometimes my wife stares at me and I stick my head out of my headphones:
-What's happening?
"What language are you speaking in?"
"Ours… right?"
"Mmhh ... no."
Apparently I'm getting
shrill.
I'm not saying uncle, but guy;
Nobody bothers me anymore, they just fuck me, and when someone says something silly, I kindly ask them not to suck.
But I still have a long way to go.
In each project, a team member checks the language of my scripts to hunt down rare words:
"What is a tracksuit?"
-asks me.
"Well, a diver."
"I think you mean pants."
-I don `t believe.
What are they going to call the tracksuit pants?
In the universe of the Mexican vocabulary, moreover, the planets go out of their orbits, describe strange parables, collide.
There are some delicious sweets called “alegrías”.
"Tray" serves the same for a tray of glasses and for the insignia of a policeman.
The title of "Licenciado" covers more or less any civilian that you should take seriously.
"Teporocho" is a homeless person, but not just anyone, but one drugged or drunk.
The term originated at the beginning of the 20th century, when the poor consumed alcoholic macerates euphemistically called "tea for eight cents."
Throughout a century, substances have changed, but a word has been kept to designate that nuance, to draw one more line on the tiger of degradation.
Those words are becoming daily to me.
Due to global mobility restrictions, my writing partners are also my social life.
In some projects, Zoom meetings last four hours and five days a week.
We don't see anyone else that long.
During this period, we get to know each other, we talk about politics and we celebrate each other's vaccinations, as the birthday of our dystopian society.
The language we use constitutes, at least for part of the day, the world in which I live.
As we advance, in addition, that world is materializing.
The production departments send us photos of castings and locations.
Suddenly all of our creator conversations begin to come to life and form.
The images are made of things that I have seen before: viceregal palaces, buildings destroyed by an earthquake, Mayan cities, Pacific beaches ... But at first they were made only of words.
Weird and beautiful words.
A world you can touch
"Let him die a slow death," I propose.
Let him suffer for a while.
He was a bastard.
"Pfff ... It wasn't that bad."
His relationship with his father hurt him ...
"Don't give me excuses."
Blaming your family is more of a bastard.
Deatheee!
My son watches me from the door.
You are listening to my conversation with another writer.
You don't know whether to laugh or panic.
A book writer is like a Judeo-Christian god: he reigns alone over his creatures, imposing his wishes with unquestionable authority.
The series writers, on the other hand, are like an Aztec (or Viking or Greek) pantheon: a swarm of desires, philosophies, sometimes whims, trying to reach a reasonable agreement.
After all, they are discussing their worldviews: when and why to love.
Betray.
Die.
In the old days of television, despite everything, the Judeo-Christian god reigned.
The classic Mexican soap opera of my childhood was carried out by a good girl who kept her virginity intact for 120 episodes.
No one around him was saying bad words.
Only the bad guys smoked.
And the conflicts between rich and poor were solved ... by marrying the rich.
Today, however, there is a very sophisticated audience there. Consequently, screenwriters are more creatively ambitious. Even politically. My colleagues have a great sense of responsibility for what they write. Among them, there are authors of documentaries about violence or thrillers that denounce the corruption of power. One has a special interest in dismantling the gender and race clichés that the screen has helped to consolidate. From the hand of these writers, I discover others: the historian Miguel León-Portilla, whose Vision of the Vanquished brings together the chronicles of the conquest written by the defeated. The activist Yásnaya Aguilar, who denounces the cultural erasure of indigenous peoples. He traveled through Mexican time and space through the words of all of them.
At the end of the scriptwriters' work, during pre-production, we get the photos of the last scenes.
Some locations have had to be built just to shoot.
Then they will be demolished.
I understand then that apart from inventing, transforming, perhaps disfiguring a country, we have invented another, a small ephemeral territory, which will return to the screens, where it was planned, but will physically exist for a few days, material and palpable, in a place 10,000 kilometers away. from my.
As I write these lines, I am waiting for a vaccine that will allow me to visit that place.
Hopefully it will be on time.
To see if life continues as we invented it.