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Peering into the pages of a good journal can be taken as a life-shaking and shaking lesson. Strange and uplifting, right in the harshness of what is revealed to be lowest, most miserable. Many write it in a kind of secret breath, like a self-confession pact that simply serves to clarify itself and that does not have to see the light afterwards. The decision to write them can be spontaneous, even unconscious. But the fact of publishing them, also, in life, something very thoughtful and brave. Héctor Abad Faciolince (Medellín, 1958) has done it. It has made available to the reader those exorcisms that, by way of notes, vomiting words or catharsis with tremors that only calmed the syntax in the darkness of a room, was filled in between 1985 and 2006. He has titled it What was present (Alfaguara) and in them there remains that distant intimacy with sins that he needed to purge in continuous flight, but not necessarily to repent: infidelities, disloyalties, ruins, miseries, spoils, the shadow of a father whom he immortalized in The forgetfulness that we will be – now taken to the cinema by Fernando Trueba, with Javier Cámara in the role of the doctor who was murdered by paramilitaries in Medellín – but also tenderness, the fight for the love of his children, for being worthy of the family inheritance, the author’s doubts who does not yet know if each line is worth it … Or the young man who looks for homosexual dabbling and ends up in several heterosexual mishaps without impotence being left out of his penances or dysfunctions … A writer, a man, open to the channel, generous in the scar of his wounds, so that we can all learn from his life event discussed through Skype from Madrid with him in Medellín, confinement broken through the screen.
Question. That dynamic, that drive to permanent flight that his newspapers dismiss, I do not know if it reflects a lifestyle that is not possible again at least in one season. How is the running of the bulls in Medellín?
Answer. Flight is the expression of freedom. Whether it is true or a lie, the illusion of changing life, going to live in another country, I have always had and it has not disappeared over the years. These necessary measures to which we are subjected must not accustom us to the fact that security prevails over freedom. The disease will leave a strong psychological impact. But I hope I am not afraid of freedom. When this happens, what will happen, because even the medieval plagues passed, I hope to recover that exercise of being free, and it has to do with movement.
P. This freedom / security debate has found a perhaps more disturbing nuance that has to do with health. Will it affect our lives more for that?
R. I understand it very well. I am the son of a doctor and the brother of an epidemiologist. It is the experts who must carry the voice and the reins. We have a responsibility not to infect others, especially the older ones. We must think about how we balance it. Especially the countries that cultivate close ties: those that we give our children to grandparents, those that we like to feel close to, we are going to be very punished. Our way of life will pay a higher price. I do not see myself greeting my children with a bow, nor giving up having a wine with friends. At least more wine is being sold: I like that …
P. What does the epidemiologist say to her sister?
R. She is working in Rionegro, a municipality near Medellín. It is in contact with the sick, advises and helps the health secretariat of that place on uses and measures, according to what is being known and studied. He goes to work every day at a coordination office and examines what is also happening in countries where it hits hard, such as Spain or Italy. It is time to strengthen the health system everywhere. The private ones cannot do it, the State has to take charge.
P. One of his most recurring clutches, as you confess yourself in your diaries, is the expression “perhaps”, synonymous with doubt.
“My father once said, ‘I am going to be remembered because of my son,’ and that created an awful internal commitment.”
“
R. Maybe, maybe, hopefully, I don’t know … I love it. When I tell my doctor about my symptoms and he says “I don’t know …”, then I trust that doctor a lot. Skepticism seems welcome to me. We return, as you see, to the crisis, it is difficult not to get out of there.
P. Sure, but delving into that, isn’t the situation a temptation to make Solomon decisions? Especially when you must give directions and dictate rules for millions of people.
R. Nor can a government say: “Perhaps it is good that they stay at home.” Others believe that perhaps the most authoritarian function best in this type of crisis. To which you can answer: maybe China is hiding a lot of dead …
P. Is doubt the essential condition of the writer?
R. Even what you hate the most can be part of your reason. This is how you must face even novels. Antipathy has its acceptable point of view.
P. In the newspapers we observe a young zascandil. Do you agree?
R. That word is rarely used here.
P. But surely you know her from her time in Lavapiés.
R. She is very pretty, I know her, of course.
P. Not to mention his explicit love life.
R. A novel writer must live. Being surrounded by books is nice, but if you don’t live, if you don’t combine the readings with the street, the body, love, death, disease, dissatisfaction, failure … It speaks a lot about the failure of this newspaper, about earning the life where you can, not what you want, to receive the generosity of others when you have no place to live, to lend you a house, that your sister makes you part of the market because you do not come. All this I think that, if you read it in a book and you have not lived it, you may half understand it, but that if you read it and, in addition, you have lived it, humiliation and failure, being screwed, infidelity …
P. More than infidelity, betrayal, right?
“Impotence is very present in my diaries. Is that about having a penis, which is an involuntary muscle… ”.
R. Well, yes, absolute disloyalty, lies as a way of life, at times.
P. Yes, but don’t throw your hands to your head as if it were someone else’s thing.
R. Oh no…! For a moment I saw you dressed in black and that the screen was missing a grid, father confessor.
P. He is acquitted. This book can also be read as a booklet, like a soap opera.
R. Life is very soap opera. These ridiculous things that happen to us and at the same time so obvious …
P. What did you think when you clean them up? Did they recognize or believe they were talking about another?
R. I used to say: “But this guy is an asshole! There I see the precipice and it is going to fall! ” The doubt was to publish it.
P. And in MeeToo times, why expose yourself to being spit on the street?
R. Also if. Because if they love me more or less it is because they confuse me with my father thanks to The forgetfulness that we will be. They think I am good and fair, but they will discover that I am poor motherfucker… One fails and fails and fails. Still, if you are obsessed with writing, you can draw from that experience, you can better understand the human condition and even learn to live a little better, after so many horrible trials.
P. Another reason may be what Gabriel Iriarte, its editor, told him that in Colombia there were no such newspapers. Nor in many parts, with that harshness.
R. There is no such tradition here, not even posthumous, of revealing intimacy like this, starkly. But it is not a memory.
P. But those diaries serve as an autobiography.
R. Yes, but without going through the memory, hot. Nor was he doing it consciously. Nothing to see. Memory turns everything into a beauty, not here. When you misbehave there is a cognitive dissonance that justifies you. In this case, no. I wonder what the fuck is wrong with me, I was trying to understand why.
P. Do you find in these pages and in the fact of publishing them the symptoms of repentance?
R. I am not a Catholic, although I still feel that part of me, from childhood. The newspaper has some purging and I was sorry to write it like that. No regret, life you cannot correct, what is done is part of you and there is no going back even if you ask for forgiveness a thousand times. It is the confirmation that the ugly or beautiful life is as it was: what can I get out of it? Well, I do not know. The feeling that goodness and happiness is difficult, that this search crashes against your character and your way of being. Purge is the word …
P. Her father’s presence is constant. When I read The Oblivion We Will Be, I thought you were a kind of Oedipus in reverse, in the opposite direction: not towards your mother, but towards your father. Strange and wonderful at the same time. What has your absence meant to you?
R. In the newspaper there are many comments and dates in red.
P. Is it blood?
P.!Take it now!
R. He said so.
P. How is it loaded with that? Writing The forgetfulness that we will be?
R. I was bad. That phrase never happened to me. Although when I heard it I thought: he’s crazy, what is he talking about? I was committed for life to that.
P. More than a phrase, it is a destination.
R. Look, I never really trusted my writing ability, but what my dad had in me was infinite. Every time I go to shit thinking I don’t get it, I tell myself, well, but he would have liked …
P. And would you also like these newspapers?
R. Ah … that’s another thing. The same book I dedicated to him I don’t know if it would have convinced him. I discreetly tell there what I indiscreetly relate in these newspapers. His intimate life: that double life. I do it because I play with myself, getting into others is more fucked up. I do it because I don’t believe in immortality. I don’t think you can read me.
P. Don’t you even believe that your father may be reading to you?
R. Uh-huh … inside me …? Since I have set myself a standard of honesty, I cannot omit it. The same editor, when I talk about my father’s homosexuality, asked me if I wanted to leave it like that, rough. And yes, I am not going to beautify it for the experts to understand it. No. It must be as it is, as my sister asked me: “So my dad was a fag?” I didn’t know and found out by reading The forgetfulness that we will be … I’m going to pour myself water.
P. OK OK…
R. And of course he wouldn’t like that.
P. And his mother?
R. She accepted it. And he had the most beautiful reaction then: “I loved your father completely, just as he was, completely.”
P. Nor are you avoiding homosexuality with respect to yourself.
R. Neither, of course not. Because I, in my teens, was there in doubt as to whether or not I was.
P. And he tried …
R. I tried … I even liked it, but when you are full of hormones, everything is very attractive. And now, no longer. I have no nostalgia, I even see it with affection. It gives me a sense of openness and tolerance. When one accepts the drives that are less socially accepted, there it is, in the diaries of André Gide or Thomas Mann, now the first would go to prison: he liked boys.
P. Could that have helped him to understand his later Don Juanism as well?
R. They say that, as in that search there is a desire to reaffirm masculinity. Yes … Well, Freud says it, which doesn’t convince me either. But what is very present in these newspapers is the fear of impotence.
P. Fear and sometimes verification, specifically.
R. Is that having a penis, which is an involuntary muscle … Like the smile, frankly, it is an involuntary muscle. So when you smile inadvertently, it shows.
P. Maybe that is a vital triumph? Being able to control the involuntary muscles?
R. There are several ways: one, the way of the saints. Someone ends up getting married. But those of us who are not chaste sometimes hate the opposite as well: involuntary non-erection, that is, impotence. Being there like an idiot before a perfect creature and nothing. What’s going on! Do something! Cowering, cowering. Wanting and not being able …
P. It serves as a metaphor for everything.
R. Yes, but in the case of the penis it is tremendous. Many women say they are envious of not having it, but sometimes it seems to me a nuisance, something very complicated, that whimsical, hanging, ridiculous, ugly and treacherous thing, which is superfluous and has its own head.
P. And that says a circumcised.
R. Without being Jews, although my father and I shared that and the rejection of tattoos.
P .. The truth is that as a child it is not well understood that they do it if there is no tradition or law, but as adults, over time, is it appreciated?
R. As a child and in adolescence I perceived it as a mutilation. Comparing you to your friends was a stigma. A rarity. It also looked smaller. But it is more hygienic, it has many advantages in the long run.
P. He says that Freud does not convince him, but the first thing he does in Vienna when he arrives is to go see his house.
R. Yes! I was psychoanalyzed for many years with an Argentine doctor, as it should be. It is that psychoanalysis has been a kind of religion in the 20th century, almost like Catholicism. Many of us believed. With their sects, in addition. Now we are going with the religion of environmentalism, veganism, animalism, which can become very fanatical movements. As if we could not live with people who do not prohibit us.
P. You also get a good part of your literary references from Central Europe.
R. Joseph Roth, here I have it, on the wall, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, the great Austro-Hungarian essay produced incredible creations for humanity: in art, literature, science, medicine …
P. Always with due respect to yours. Or prevention, like the one you have with Gabriel García Márquez. Being Colombian and of a literary generation after him, to what extent does he complex?
R. It has tremendous strength, each page has the ability to enchant you, but if you try to imitate it, you are ridiculous. As also happens with Borges. García Márquez was very devastating for the generation directly after and also after. I think I could read it calmly. For me he was no longer a father, but a grandfather, who could be unforgiving. As with me, for a criticism that I made.
P. Yes, but later it seems that they understood each other.
R. Yes, later he invited me to write in his magazine. I had great respect for him. When I went to his house, to Mexico or Cartagena de Indias, I felt intimidated, it was not me fully. But he was always very warm. Even when he got sick, he kept saying nice and original things. Like someone came and said, “I don’t know who you are, but I know I love you very much.” Those things left you screwed. And as they told me that he reacted when he entered his house in Cartagena one day: “I did not remember that this house was ours, but then we planted trees and we stayed.” Something, someone dictated things beyond himself. That is the genius, that stream of language or of his own invention belonged to him and to very few.
P. To whom his confessions should not have settled well is his countryman the writer Fernando Vallejo.
R. He went crazy and wrote ridiculous, delusional things. He has great books, with fits of genius at times. But he is what in Antioquia we call a town genius. Destroy everything in front of him: Darwin and García Lorca. Everything seems shit to him, poetry is a mnemonic ridiculousness and he continues with these stupidities: Even to speak of coronavirus!
P. You also delve into the rivalry between Antioquia and Bogota citizens.
R. I detest all that provincialism that confronts us. But it is that Bogotá is a very absurd capital, there, at 2,600 meters high. With a small court far from everything, cold and rainy, which became viceroyalty already in the agony of the empire. I don’t live there because I have too many friends and I am distracted, but if I wanted to go to court I would go to Madrid, which is more solid.
