The journalist and writer Joana Bonet poses at her home in Madrid on Tuesday. Víctor Sainz
Joana Bonet (Vinaixa, Lleida, 55 years old) met Carme Chacón two decades ago.
Catalans in Madrid, they hit it off right away.
When José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero named Chacón Minister of Defense in 2008, the journalist proposed a book to him.
They recorded many conversations, they traveled together... until the policy told her that they had to park it.
“She had started the friendly fire and she felt very observed in the match”, recalls Bonet.
Chacón died in 2017, at the age of 46, due to congenital heart disease.
"The heart upside down," she called it.
The book is published this Wednesday.
It collects the story of a girl who was helped to be born by 13 doctors, who took several days to have a name —they did not dare—;
she that she grew up in one of those houses where she toasted with champagne on November 20, 1975—her great-grandfather had been shot;
his grandfather was an anarchist —and that he wanted to preside over the PSOE.
Its titled
Chacón, the woman who could govern
(Peninsula).
Ask.
Is writing from a friend easier or more difficult?
Answer.
It has been very difficult.
I have had blockages.
Listening to her voice on the recordings caused me pain because she loved her very much.
She had her notebooks mixed up with mine and it was a very strange feeling.
On the one hand, it is a friendship beyond death, very Quevedian, but with a trace of sadness, of absurdity... She had given me a list of people with whom I could talk and in the interviews, telling me how they had influenced her in their lives, we ended up crying many times.
Carme humanized politics.
P.
A doctor told Chacón's mother that it was better for her daughter not to marry to avoid risks and she replied: “What do you want?
What becomes a nun?
When, a long time later, Chacón told his mother that she was pregnant, the first thing she replied was: "In elections?"
He states in the book: “he rebelled against death”.
A.
He ignored his sword of Damocles and made us all forget about his heart disease.
He lived without fear, although there was a certain melancholy in his gaze.
He didn't talk about death.
Not even with Dr. Petit, who had attended her since she was four years old.
But she was very smart because she prepared her son Miquel.
She was only eight years old and she said: "Mom had already warned me that something like this could happen."
P.
He confessed to an attempted rape before Me too.
Did he want her to know?
A.
It happened when I was 13 years old.
He was a relative and the impact was brutal.
He could not understand that something like this could happen in his family environment, in a protected space, and that disgust caused him to have an eating disorder.
Her therapy helped her.
I have thought a lot about this and I think that if he confesses it to me knowing that I am a journalist it is because he wants to deposit that confidence.
She also recounted an episode of harassment working at El Corte Inglés and situations of great sexual tension in politics.
When I asked her why she hadn't reported it, she told me: "Do you want it to be another Nevenka?"
All this was long before Me too.
P.
You were very upset that the PSOE agreed with Nevenka's stalker.
A.
A lot.
It was unbearable.
She recognized that pain.
Q.
You say: “Appointing a pregnant defense minister was a fucking
Mad Men
goal .”
R.
Zapatero says that it is the image that best defines his Government and that it was his idea.
Pepe Blanco also comments on it at a dinner before the appointment.
The association of the concepts of Defense and the womb of a mother seems magnificent to me.
That gut reviewing the troops was war and peace, pure Tolstoy.
Summarize the transformation of the country.
It is the image that made us enter modernity.
Carme Chacón, in Afghanistan, seven months pregnant.
Ministry of Defence
P.
So many barbarities were written.
For example: “It hasn't occurred to Zapatero to make Pedro Zerolo Minister of Defence.
What a mistake!
It would have been more provocative, more ingenious than the appointment of the nice pretty thirty-something”.
They wouldn't dare today.
Or if?
R.
Many barbarities were said, but today they would not dare.
When Carme arrived, feminism had not yet won the battle of public opinion.
P.
It was the time of "neither macho nor feminist"...
A.
Exactly.
Today nobody questions Margarita Robles and it is thanks, among others, to Carme.
The concepts of homeland, family and good taste have always been thought of as right-wing heritage, but she represented all three.
She was a stateswoman.
P.
Tell me that anecdote from the book about the “parade of ministers in girdles and bra”.
R.
They called me from the cabinet of Vice President María Teresa Fernández de la Vega.
It was going to be the wedding of the then Princes.
They tell me: “We want to look good, we are not going to go to the wedding in corduroy”.
I have directed fashion magazines for many years and helped them.
I accompanied De la Vega, María Jesús San Segundo and Cristina Narbona to look for the suit.
With Magdalena Álvarez ―“is it mandatory to wear something on your head?”― and Elena Salgado ―“day gloves, yes or no?”― I spoke on the phone.
It was a hilarious moment.
None of them needed too much advice, but women have that imposter feeling, we are the most demanding judges with ourselves and they were afraid of making a mistake with the dress code.
Years later, a stir arose with the tuxedo that Carme wore for a Military Easter.
It was fabulous there.
He knew that in that act he could renew the protocol, which was necessary.
He says to me: "How am I going to put on a curtain skirt of those to the feet?".
She was concerned to find out if the tuxedo fell within the international dress codes for a gala and put it on.
It is true that the next day he told me that he thought that Letizia [then Princess of Asturias] would too.
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Carme Chacón, in the celebration of the Military Easter of 2009.CRISTÓBAL MANUEL
Q.
You were criticized for going to Afghanistan seven months pregnant.
She says that King Juan Carlos told her: "With two balls, yes ma'am."
They got along well.
A.
Very good.
Just as some ultra-conservative military said it was an indignity to have a pregnant minister, the King always saw her favorably and always encouraged her.
He also called her once to ask if her candidacy to lead the PSOE was Republican.
It was a lie, part of the methods they used on her to undermine her credibility and disillusion her.
That she did not reach the head of the PSOE is a social and country failure.
They were not prepared to have a woman in charge.
P.
Do you think that the current situation of the king emeritus would have saddened him?
R.
I think a lot.
It's curious.
Her whole family was apostate, she was not.
Her entire family was Republican and she never claimed to be.
Q.
Zapatero says in his book: "She was one of those who had the best chance of reaching the top in the game and if it didn't happen it's because her name was Carme, not Pedro."
Does he share it?
R.
Yes, there was a lot of machismo.
They told her that it was not her time yet.
Felipe was 40 years old when he came to the Government.
The PSOE was more anchored to the 19th century than to the 21st.
Q.
What politician or policy do you think Carme Chacón would identify with today?
R.
With those independent, middle-aged women who have built themselves with merit, dedication and ambition.
She would not identify ideologically with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, but she would identify with the loneliness of those leaders who are so exposed, so observed, who still raise suspicions because they are not from the party apparatus.
I think that Carme could be well inscribed in the Yolanda Díaz trend.
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