Arturo Pérez-Reverte has arrived in Mexico City with another city in mind.
Since he began writing his most recent novel,
Revolución
(Alfaguara, 2022), the Spanish writer has been studying old maps of the Mexican capital, reviewing tram lines, looking at vintage photographs to rebuild a country, that of the early 20th century. , which no longer exists.
And a few moments ago, while he was coming in the car to present the book to the press, he had a strange feeling: "I was erasing what I saw, eliminating modern elements and mentally placing there what I have had for two years in my head."
The meeting place is not trivial: here, in the Casa de los Azulejos, in the Historic Center, part of history takes place.
It had been almost a decade since Pérez-Reverte (Cartagena, Spain, 71 years old) had not come to Mexico City.
"I had to show my face, they broke it or they applauded it," he says before twenty media outlets because his novel deals with one of the most relevant episodes in Mexican history.
The protagonist of his story, an Andalusian mining engineer, enters Pancho Villa's troops almost by accident, who is making a revolution in the north of the territory.
Martín Garret –his English surname comes from a great-grandfather– will help the insurgents to blow up bridges and banks, and will experience with them episodes marked by gunpowder, sotol and testosterone.
“He does not want to make the world better, he does not believe in the revolution”, says Pérez-Reverte, and continues: “He is not in love with the revolution, but with the men and women who make it.
He wants to learn and Mexico becomes a place that changes his life”.
The author, who was a war correspondent for two decades and has covered twenty armed conflicts, recognizes his own ideas in the protagonist: "I don't believe in revolutions, but at the same time I think they have to be made even if it's just to shake the world, because some blood runs from time to time, because the one who is upstairs sleeps with one eye open”.
"But knowing," he adds, "that when the bottom reaches the top, it becomes the top one."
It's eleven in the morning and inside the Casa de los Azulejos a pianist plays live.
Pérez-Reverte repeats one after another, as if he had them ready for the journalists, round and effective phrases.
This building, where the author now speaks, housed the Jockey Club at the time the story takes place, a meeting point for the Porfirista elite.
In the novel, a tribute is made here to Francisco I. Madero, who after leading the Revolution in the north is already president.
In those salons “everything was a good tone”, writes Pérez-Reverte: “The starched dresses of the ladies rustled, the fans fluttered, and the high space up to the ceiling (...) thickened with cigarette smoke and the murmur of conversations. ”.
Zapatistas have breakfast at Sanborns in the Historic Center of Mexico City, in December 1914. Casasola Archive (INAH)
The building that stands today next to the Palacio de Bellas Artes was remodeled in 1905. A plaque on Calle Condesa gives some more information: “The modern construction of this house measures 18.25 meters from this corner to the south and 23.20 meters to the east”.
The exterior ceramics, which give the property its name, draw a succession of blue squares;
up close, each square is actually a center from which four flowers grow.
Inside, light enters from the ceiling as in a greenhouse.
It is not hard to imagine that here, at the beginning of the 20th century, the political and economic elite of the country met.
"When I started the novel," Pérez-Reverte says, "I thought this was the Sanborns of the time."
The author refers to a coffee shop founded in those years by the brothers Frank and Walter Sanborns.
A photograph from the time shows armed revolutionaries, Villistas and Zapatistas having breakfast there.
"When I started to investigate I saw that it was not true," he continues.
The cafeteria was actually a little further on.
"It happens that later they came here," explains the author.
The cafeteria still operates in the building, although the family business founded by the Sanborns brothers has become the property of Grupo Carso, owned by magnate Carlos Slim.
“I wanted this place to appear [in the book].
So I have a party here and then have breakfast at the Sanborns”, says the author.
“With this novel I can go to Tenampa with my head held high”
Pérez-Reverte says that he had “a fundamental problem” when he began to write.
“The Mexico of the 20th century didn't have it under control and I couldn't make mistakes because they were going to crucify me,” he says.
He read, above all, contemporary novels of the Mexican Revolution – "all, all, all" – to master the way his characters and later publications of his speak, such as
Old Gringo
, by Carlos Fuentes, or the biography he wrote of Pancho Villa Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
“My Villa is the right one”, he says about his character: “He is a semi-illiterate bandit, cruel, womanizer, elemental, vital, whom circumstances turn into a leader.
And he has an extraordinary technical instinct.
He is a providential man.
He is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time.
He is a man I would have possibly had shot, but I would have had a tequila before shooting him.
Or he would have had me shot."
“Excuse me for speaking with a certain insolence, but I am not abroad here.
I'm at my house, let's go, ”he warns journalists.
If
La Reina del Sur
, a bestseller he published in 2002 about a woman who makes her way in the world of drug trafficking, was for him "the discovery" of Mexico, this book is "a kind of conclusion": "It is a accountability, is to say to the Mexicans: 'This I have learned from you in the good and in the bad'.
One is horrified, when reading this book, at how cruel the Mexican can be and is amazed at how amazingly bright, funny, generous, brave the Mexican can be.
And when I say Mexican, I mean Mexican men and women.”
Pérez-Reverte knows how to narrate, it is evident, he smiles politely, avoids answering about Spanish politics, marks the time for questions, which is already running out, and remembers that the night before he went to the Tenampa Hall, a historic canteen founded after the Revolution that José Alfredo Jiménez or Chavela Vargas frequented.
“Yesterday I came back, I found my friend César, a mariachi”, he begins and for a moment it seems that he is going to break, but he continues: “I feel at peace with Mexico, which has given me many things and I try to give it others.
With this novel I can go to Tenampa with my head held high”.
"You will judge," he continues, "if I have understood Mexico or if I am still a fucking gachupin who walks around here without knowing it."
subscribe here
to the
newsletter
of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country