Julián Herbert: “I am a very proud man. That is pure poison "

When her mother died, Julián Herbert (Acapulco, 1971) sat next to her to clean her.

And to write.

(Random House) is the story of that mother, who earned her living as a prostitute, and her own, plagued with escapes and searches for addictions. Also his poetry or stories are a celebration unleashed and a fight against himself, his fear and his pride. "The bad thing about being the son of a whore is that many act as if the whore was you," he says as we walk in Mexico City. He asks me to excuse him: he has to walk on the side of the road. It is your protective instinct. "Or macho, if you want." At a taco stand he orders a cider. He does not stop giving pesos to everyone who asks him. “It is part of being here. In Saltillo it is different ”. He has just arrived by bus to return his son Leo to his mother. He has two previous children. "And Sylvia's 18-year-old daughter, whom I have adopted."Where do you get the strength to get married each time? "I have a lot of faith in the life of a couple."

“I am a cynical orphan, a former son of a bitch who has read San Juan de la Cruz: I know that the tribe will not give me purer words than the vulgar ones of Lorenzo Santamaría to speak to my son: 'So you don't forget me, nor even for a moment ”.

Is life in those songs?

They are one of the great schools.

But it varies.

The

it doesn't tell me anything.

And Bad Bunny, either.

The traditional is what remains.

Do we need to make us cry?

It can make us dance.

Two or three from Madonna.

Or Zorba the Greek, who after the death of his son dances in pain.

Dancing and crying have a deep connection.

When you vindicate Santamaría, do you criticize the snobbery of a certain writing?

No. I believe in cultured language.

What I can't find is distance.

My job is to reduce that artificial distance between high and low culture.

What has caused it?

Passing your eyes over things and not entering them.

He was walking with the GPS.

It's maddening.

One can sit and look at a map or walk, but both at the same time ...

When he wanted to be a father when he was 21 years old, his mother told him: "You are no longer my son, you bastard, you are just a mad dog."

My mom grew up with extremely violent language.

His experience of the world was what his language reflected.

Words that were habitual to me 15 years ago now seem violent to me.

For example?

Dumbass.

I learned to be very foul-mouthed since I was a child, but no obscenities were spoken in my house: no references to parts of the body or sexual matters.

As long as I related to women of the same social class it was not a problem.

My last two partners come from the enlightened middle class.

They have not imposed a language on me, but the experience changes.

The violent form of language has moments of insult and moments in which custom makes it not perceived as an insult.

The writer Julián Herbert, portrayed in Mexico City, to where he accompanied his son to return him to his mother.GERMÁN NÁJERA + IVÁN FLORES

He ended up cleaning his mother when she was "drunk on transfusions."

Is there a form of greater love to take care of?

Gravity and Grace

, by Simone Weil, says that we cannot give to those we love more than a work of art gives us: that it improves our lives because it exists.

For me, that is the feeling of love: giving.

I believe that love sufferings have to do with the fact that we cannot stop being selfish.

Love does not make you suffer.

It is the selfishness of wanting things to be the way you want and people to stay and not die submitting to your will.

That's not love.

They are things that hinder love and we cannot renounce them because we are not monks.

Accompanying his mother during her myelitic leukemia, he wrote his masterpiece Song of the grave, open grave like almost everything he does.

Was it an escape?

A defense?

I believe in the radical experience of writing.

I would not want to write otherwise.

Although I stopped writing poetry when Leonardo learned to speak: how lazy to write masterpieces without stopping like those Vargas Llosa-type novelists.

He talks about Leo, as if he did not have three children.

He was born when I was already a man more focused on fatherhood.

But he is 12 years old.

He's about to get out of my frame of reference.

I love being a dad.

What is the father's fatigue?

The normal is physical: follow him when he learns to walk.

But what's strenuous is the mirror neuron thing: you're always reading each other on every trait.

Does it have to do with the absence of a father in your life?

Surely.

I don't know why I don't have that experience.

My experience of being a son is limited to being my mother's son.

Guadalupe, Lorena, Vicky, Juana.

His mother changed her name like others change their hairstyle.

It was an experience of identity.

And the mexicanidad.

One of the ways to express classism here is by knowing how many generations you have owned your name.

I didn't see it until I played with it in the novel.

Those of us who do not come from nowhere do not come from any name either.

Her prostitute name, Marisela Acosta, was fixed.

Yes. The only one.

My biological grandfather was called Pedro Acosta, although she was adopted by my grandfather Marcelino.

Of her four siblings, only you traveled with her.

And he changed schools: Acapulco, Laredo, Oaxaca.

Why?

My brothers will be angry, but I think it was their spoiled.

Or that is the fantasy that I make myself.

From her I learned to go through the world as if all things were yours.

Did you feel sorry for her too?

Shame?

As a child, no.

At some point I was saddened by others to see her very drunk when she came back from work.

His work embarrassed me when I grew up.

I was very resentful.

Weren't you grateful that you took them forward?

It is that in adolescence you resent your father even if he is Carlos Slim.

I also had good tools to articulate my resentment: poverty, prostitution.

That became a taboo for me.

For my older brother, who lives in Japan, it still is.

They lived in a room built with concrete blocks and a cardboard ceiling where they crawled in.

He wrote: "Three years of extreme poverty do not destroy."

What does it destroy?

I see that phrase today too enthusiastic.

There were footprints that emerged afterwards.

What makes wounds bleed, old or new, is always the same: pride, pride.

What has always shattered me has not always been what I have suffered, but not knowing how to manage the rewards of life.

Not having emotional thickness or a sufficiently generous vision.

The most destructive thing has been, and still is, dealing with pride.

I am a very proud man.

That is pure poison.

And he always disguises himself as something new.

From an eviction he saved the

You don't need to be poor or rich to write.

It will happen.

You fantasize about it, but I think I always knew it.

Margarito J. Hernández, her mother's last husband, told her that he would be a writer.

Yes. When my mother showed me the first letters and I managed to write a word I cried.

Walter Benjamin says that we begin to read before we can read: one reads the weather, expressions ... Before language, there was already a way of reading.

He also recommended that he leave Mexico, which was dead weight here.

It is the reading of journalists: writers are of no use to the country.

Was he a journalist?

Of the Mexican ranch-corrupt type with a utilitarian and cynical vision.

What are you going to live on?

You are going to starve.

My brother Jorge also believed that he had to leave Mexico.

And he went to Japan.

Yes. I didn't even leave Saltillo.

A little to go against that opinion.

Did he stay out of resistance?

May.

But all the time I have to watch that it is not my arrogance.

Why did you save the

To go against them.

He is a great master of what he does not want to be.

I really like that we are here where the tables are half screwed up.

I live in an old building in front of a shoe store that used to be a movie theater.

In the forties, Edward Hopper passed through Saltillo and painted that cinema that I see every day.

It's not that I live there because of that, but why does an educated guy in Chicago have to come to tell you that this is important and that something else is beautiful.

Why can't you see it?

If you're thinking of leaving, you don't see it.

He stays, but he is self-critical.

I believe in the figure of spoilers.

The only way they can do their duty is by going to a party.

The relationship I have with Mexico is intense but far removed from the Mexican perpetually in love with his land.

Has López Obrador become very populist?

There is something that is difficult to see from the outside and from certain social classes that wonder how it is possible that it continues to have so much acceptance. After 70 years of rulers who have ruined us, it is difficult to question the mistakes of a guy who has been mounting a mess for three years. It is not that there is no corruption now, surely there is a lot of which we have not yet found out. Not that the government is honest. But I do believe that there is a change in the dynamics regarding corruption. And that issue is not seen. I think there have been long-term legislative decisions, like holding consultations. Holding the plebiscite now is decorative for him: a way of showing that he has power. But as a legislative norm for the future it is important. It means that the president will have to face a control. Those decisions will be good in the long run.But what is seen now is very disastrous. It is too much like the past.

He defines himself as a hartist: he makes art out of being fed up.

I guess I learned to go to extremes.

I want more, of everything.

Does it come from poverty?

Surely.

But even though I continue to deal with that need to be fed up, I no longer see it as a virtue, but as one of my shortcomings.

It is one of the many incarnations of pride.

Herbert at the Hotel Hábita, in Polanco (Mexico City).

GERMÁN NÁJERA + IVÁN FLORES

There is a lot of humor in what he writes.

I think it comes from my mom, deep down you know that everything is a little ridiculous, dramatic but funny.

Being able to make fun of yourself is important.

There is a sensitivity that reacts worse or better to ridicule.

Partly it is given by culture and partly by temperament.

We've all been making love in a ridiculous position, haven't we?

Almost everything can be ridiculous.

Think about it: you and I don't know each other and we're talking as if we've known each other for 30 years.

The drugs got him for a book,

They are a substitute for many things: a partner or having grown up without a father.

We are all junkies of something.

Were you tempted to think that any collapse would make you a better writer?

The important thing is the junkie condition.

It has not been taken from me.

Nor is it going to be taken away from me.

I'll get hooked on other things.

The difference is that now, when I am raw and I wake up in the morning, I am clear about what my feeling of hangover has to do: with having made fun of someone, with having controlled a degree of anger.

They are the remnants of emotional life.

I've found that I need to be sober so I can see those remains and put something together out of it.

In the other way, the hangover is like plasticine, which comes in colors and when mixed, it turns all brown and loses its colors.

If you stop when the colors still exist, with that you can build.

He earned 100,000 pesos for a book and bought

You are so obsessed with the limit of drugs or passion that you forget a paradox: the only limit you lack is calm.

They say you get to the bottom and you see it.

But my experience was that you can always degrade yourself further.

You have a choice: to be an ordinary person, which most of us would not want to be, or to continue to enter a form of darkness permanently.

He's been sober for three years.

I am now as a recent graduate, understanding sobriety.

How many times have you left and come back?

Like five.

But it had never been three years.

Now I'm on a show.

Before I always thought that my will was going to be able to control that.

The arrogance.

Exactly.

Accepting that I couldn't was liberating.

Years ago I took a trip to Baja California.

A fisherman told me his life.

He was very

.

He said he had always been a clandestine fisherman.

And recently he had gone to work as a commissioner of the sea.

"They sent me to the sea to get me out of the sea," he said.

They entered his house to search it and found nothing.

But that night he woke up to look at his children and the next day he asked for a job.

I told him I would write that story.

And a little over three years ago, Leo was with me for a weekend.

I did some stripes and went to see how he slept.

I remembered the story of the fisherman.

It was not a great adventure.

It was that: see it.

There is no overdose greater than reality.

I learned that there are tricks to heal.

I wake up at six in the morning.

I do a series of readings.

I meditate.

I run five kilometers.

I go up and down the stairs.

I do an hour of weights.

That takes me until eleven in the morning.

But it gives me resistance.

I come crawling in at midnight.

And there I need to cut ties.

Less with Sylvia [Georgina Estrada, also a writer and her partner], short with the rest of the world.

And, of course, you are not a good friend, you are not a good host.

He had never enjoyed uncreative solitude.

When you lift weights, you don't even have a

to think.

In the end the gym fans are right.

There is one thing about them that I don't like: they are very concerned about how they look.

It is a religion and for you a salvation.

Body control gives you distance.

At Leo's age, his older brother saved him from being raped at least three times.

And he explained what the risks were that he would have to live with until he became an adult.

Rape could come from other children, from teachers, from adults ... I hope it was just a matter of protecting yourself from the curiosity of other children.

His brother Jorge saved him because he had lived it.

Yes. He wanted to let me know.

He's a strong guy.

Of those fish that swim aggressively.

Since he was young, he said he wanted to know languages, leave the country, have three children, and ... he has.

From the age of 33 he has sung in rock bands with names like Madrastras, La Dictadora, Bruja ...

Now the group is called Los Tigres de Borges.

Goodness!

Music was the first to come.

I started writing songs when I was 15 years old.

And at 18 he sang in Saltillo bars for a few coins.

I have never been remarkable.

As Borges says, with very little success, but with a lot of vocation.

From Saltillo, where he lives, he has written: "They talk about the problem of drug entry at the border, not about arms trafficking."

The US prosecutor considers the drugs to be illegal in origin.

Weapons, no.

How do weapons get to Mexico?

The narcos have an impressive amount of weaponry that is not manufactured here.

Journalism is not covering it.

The United States accuses Mexico of the entry of drugs, but that of weapons is not considered.

What do you fear now?

Not understanding how to deal with things in the least destructive way possible.

What I did not understand before is that crises have a reason for being.

And what I need is to see them coming.

And accept that I have no control over what is to come.

A lot of things are going to happen to Leo that I won't be able to control.

I don't know if Sylvia is going to fall in love with someone else.

I don't know if we will have enough money.

Before all that was my sense of reality.

Now I accept the uncertainty.

It is encouraging to know that there is a crisis around the corner.

Sign in to continue reading

Just by having an account you can read this article, it's free

Sign upLogin

Thanks for reading EL PAÍS