Rosa Montero (Madrid, 1951) is perhaps the best Spanish-speaking journalist.
From a very young age she saw reality to tell it and fiction, in which she is also a teacher, to understand it.
Her reports, since the newspaper El País was born, dazzled a country that was born to democracy and was preparing to abolish the fallacious custom of dictatorship.
She told, in her reports, the vestiges of that long and sad excursion of Spain through the post-war period and the Franco regime, and now she resurrects those reports in a book,
True Tales
, in Alfaguara.
She is the author of novels such as The Danger of Being Sane or The Crazy Woman in the House.
This collection of her reporting is a chilling return to the multicolored Spain of post-Francoism, whose black areas now seem like lies written by an astonished journalist.
And it's all true.
-What was there at that time for you to be so demanding with your work?
-During the Transition all the media, and El País in particular, were essential for democratic change.
We were clearly aware of being journalists, helping society establish the values we wanted.
In El País they planted a bomb, killed a boy and seriously injured two other employees.
Several journalists were murdered by ETA.
You took risks, but there was that demand for good work, to get to the bottom of it.
-Since you started writing these reports until today, what have you learned as a person?
-Very much!
I decided to become a journalist because I liked writing since I was little, I wrote stories and I had a knack for writing, a universal curiosity and I didn't want to specialize.
I thought that, as a journalist, I was going to continue learning all my life.
The journalist is a witness who questions, documents and speaks with those who are making history.
I felt super privileged when the Berlin Wall fell: I was there a week before it fell and a day after it fell, twice.
I interviewed Felix Novales, a boy from the Basque Country who, at the age of 18, joined the Grapo (a very fierce and highly ideological Marxist-Leninist urban group) and in three months murdered three or four people... The first one he killed was a pharmacist whom he didn't know: he entered the pharmacy and shot him dead and to celebrate his first murder he bought a bottle of cheap cava and a tray of cakes... Fifteen years later he published The Iron Bowl, a reflection on how a boy from 18 years old can shoot a man he doesn't know and celebrate with cava and cakes.
I went to interview him as if I were going to that black spot in the heart that we all have where the whirlpool of monsters gathers, with a guide who had been there and left.
Journalism gives you that, it is a journey to the other, to the others.
This journalism allows me to enter, live, understand so many other realities, so many other lives that greatly enriches your own life.
-In all the reports you are looking, paying attention.
-I don't appear as a character, but I am there experiencing everything that is happening.
I was surprised to notice that most of these reports are narrative, they seem like stories, although they are true, absolutely everything that is narrated is documented, but they are written with a structure similar to that of fiction.
That is why I have titled them True Stories.
This type of journalism is no longer done.
Now we are in a journalism of minimums and thus it is not possible to do very good journalism, not because there are no people who can do it.
When in a single sentence you say: “And he crossed to the El Brillante bar and had a drink”, you can't do it if you have not been to the damn bar El Brillante and the owner has told you that he crossed and had a drink.
-You were always there, where what you were talking about happened. Except in the 1981 coup d'état, your colleagues were sending you information about what was happening that night...
-Exactly, exactly!
It also happened to me with the murder of the Atocha lawyers, that chapter is shocking, it makes my hair stand on end... I did it a month after it happened... I spoke with the three survivors and had access to the summary in which some things appeared that Not even the survivors themselves knew, such as that the murderers had been waiting upstairs or that one had been shot.
You get in there and try to live it.
With the coup d'état: they sent me all the documentation of what had happened and I tried to live it, get inside and feel what it would feel like in that situation.
When I started writing it I didn't know how that assault was going to end yet.
-How has your way of being adapted to everything you have seen?
-We are children of our circumstances, of what we have lived and dreamed, imagined, been told or desired, although we cannot know very well what has left us more or less trace.
I have the feeling of having lived very intensely.
Sometimes those interesting times were so exhausting that I remember myself saying: I wish we were Swiss and we would get very bored democratically.
The thing is that the time we have lived in in this country has been a continuous stupor.
I am a vehement and passionate person who has lived to the core, and that's okay.
I feel like I've lived more lives than normal.
-Don't you feel like you were inventing journalism...?
-I don't know, I have no idea, what I do know is that I was trying to find my own way of expression.
It has always struck me as very striking that press journalists in general are not ambitious enough literary speaking.
When I taught journalism classes or when I was editor-in-chief of the Sunday newspaper of El País I saw that young people were very ambitious when it came to being editors of a newspaper, correspondents in New York, to have a career, to be known and famous, to appear in the news. TV and earn a lot of money, but with the ambition of writing literature, of finding my own style, of doing it as best as possible, I found very few.
It seems amazing to me that you don't have that ambition... Yes, I have had the ambition to try to find my own way of expression and to do it as best as possible.
-Perhaps that journalism encouraged us to do better, not to invent? You say: “The most rounded text is not the best journalistically speaking if what you say is not documented.”
-This desire for documentation is something internal, before I don't know if that demand existed in the newspapers more or less than now... I think it is a personal attitude.
There were journalists who were super thieves.
that they were not looking for anything and also shot others;
and there were rigorous people.
Now the same thing, there are rigorous people that you trust and others that you don't trust at all.
-How do you see current journalism?
-The way we do journalism has been greatly impoverished.
Due to economic circumstances, it entered that black hole of adaptation to new technologies.
I think that in recent years a number of the world's newspapers have disappeared, it has been a brutal devastation, newspapers are made in difficult conditions.
The newsrooms have been left to the bones, they have to write a text, they have to be women and men in an orchestra, seniors are fired and juniors are hired for slave salaries.
This way of dealing with journalism has greatly impoverished it, as well as the blind spot of the editors because as they see that the accounts are not working out and the serious newspapers have begun to publish as news from the heart...
-You spent time telling a lot of events in the history of Spain that I wish had not happened.
-Bad news, misfortunes is what normally reaches the press.
I liked and still like to look at the edges of the social, I have always been very interested in the scoundrel, the lumpen, also in my novels, and not for anything perverse but because I think that in those places it is seen in a more The fabric of life is clear, in our middle class life it is more made up, more hidden but there is life as if beating with an open heart.