“We must try to make the memory of the future from the present.”

It’s hot in Montería, Colombia, but… Leonardo Padura This does not worry him, as he knows how to live with humidity and temperatures His homeland is Cuba. He sits in front of the computer, greeting you warmly. “I have come to present the book, He dies in the sand (Tusquets) – explains his presence in the country of Jabu-. But it hasn’t arrived yet. It was late. Do you already have it in Argentina?”

I bring the sample closer to the camera and the man Mantilla gave a literary lifeHe smiles. “My place in the world,” he says of the Cuban Quarter. “You know, last year when I submitted my book Going to Havana, I realized something that explains a lot about this feeling of belonging to that place. In my yard, the house where I was born, all the dogs I’ve ever owned are buried.. And I’m a Man Who Loves Dogs – refers to the novel that made him the most famous Cuban writer since Origen’s generation. So, you can imagine what this place could mean.

On October 9 – according to the anniversary – the same day that John Lennon was born and the execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia, Badura turned 70 years old. “It’s also Chucho Valdés’ birthday,” adds the great Cuban musician to the list. “I was born on the date that my mother kicked me out. And you leave that place where everything is resolved to a place where you have to start resolving everything,” he recalls. “Because the first thing you have to solve is how to get to your mother’s breast. The problems start there, right? And there are mothers who have milk in their breasts and mothers who don’t have any, so things can get very complicated.” For me, anniversaries are not particularly important, but this time was different“I wanted to do something special.”

-Why was it different?

I have reached the age of seventy, and I have entered a period of my life in which we have a greater awareness, very clear, that we have more of the past than the future, and that the period of my life actually has spaces that are not infinite.

– Mario Conde (Padura’s detective avatar) says something like this when he turns 60 Transparency of time (2018).

– Yes, Conde is a year older than me… I was thinking about what it means to reach this age. I have seen it all, I have suffered it all, I have enjoyed it all; Pleasant, of course, and I suffered. When you’re 25 or 30, you never think something will end, but at a certain age it does. This time I wanted, above all, to gather a group of friends, because, as you will remember from my novel, Like dust in the wind (2020), I talk about the diaspora of my generation. I had to choose 50 friends to meet that day. The Mexican Ambassador has very generously lent us his residence, which is of wonderful size. He had been a friend for many years, and he lent it to me as a friend, not as an ambassador. Then I gathered those friends there, because there were so many others who would never be there. It is, on the one hand, a feeling of noticing losses, but it also promotes permanence. That’s why I wanted to do this celebration with these friends, and we had a great time.

It is the same generation that Badura has his sights set on He dies in the sandhis last novel. “I wanted to write a story about the ultimate fate of an entire generationShe worked, studied, sacrificed, and even participated in wars, and at the end of her life she became completely helpless, living a period of many deprivations.

A story of disillusionment and disillusionment, is how his new book presents. Two heroes are brothers, a kind of Cain and Abel. Someone killed the father with eight blows with a hammer as he was about to get out of prison. The first pages read: “A novel based on true events.”

“It is a father’s murder that happened in a family close to me. – Says the author who had a great influence on Hemingway, Dos Passos, Salinger, and Faulkner. The main house, which is the small house separated by a wall. This wall means the different lives lived by very close people that will determine their destinies. It all starts the moment Rodolfo, recently retired, receives news that Ginny, the murderous brother, will be released from prison and wants to live in his house again.

Among them is Nora, Jenny’s wife, who had an affair with Rodolfo many years ago when she was a teenager. A love story revitalized in old age. “In all my novels I talk about an existing reality. For many years I tried to create a kind of historiography of what contemporary Cuban life was like, and I always did it from the perspective of my generation, which lived through the whole revolutionary process,” he analyses.

– Is that why from the beginning of the novel you wanted to be somewhat direct with the situation experienced by the elderly in Cuba: “I defecated on…”, you wrote in the first line?

– There are a whole series of symbolic elements embedded in this story that are very realistic, almost naturalistic at times. And I wanted to make this intense entry into the reality of this generation because I think there’s an important element when it comes to writing these records and making them possible: we should try to make the memory of the future out of the present. The time will come when these lives, like the lives of these characters, so common and so ordinary, will be forgotten, buried, ignored and part of a very important reality. That is why at the end of the novel, the character of Raymundo Fumero (the writer who represents the generation of Cuban intellectuals who suffered from oppression and fear imposed by the regime) explains that he could have written the story of a father-killer, which is a very dramatic story, but no, he wanted to write the story of these beings without history. That’s why the novel has this very naturalistic tone, which begins with this character arriving home and the first thing he does is step on a cat and shit on it… He has so many things to shit on that he doesn’t know which one to choose. So everything is part of the whole, in that sense she is trying to write a possible historical narrative of what contemporary Cuban life was like. I always say that the character Mario Conde, who plays the title role in many of my novels, sees Cuban reality from the perspective of a Havana neighborhood at the level of a man’s eyes.

-Can we say that? Like dust in the wind and He dies in the sand Are they a couple?

-Yes, it was not my intention when I wrote it, but the result was like this. It’s like a diptych of those who left and those who stayed. each other’s fate. In this novel, there are those who stayed and those who left, as in the case of the heroes’ daughters. This is the very fractured Cuban reality. Between 2021 and 2023, approximately 1,200,000 people will leave Cuba. This means approximately 10 percent of the population. And from 11 million or so, we’re down to 9 million or so. It was in many respects the response that people gave to the material and vital problems, and even in some cases to the political problems that may have existed. What is most curious about this number is that these 1,200,000 were the ones who were able to leave, not those who wanted to leave. Because many of them went on to make the trip from Nicaragua, the Cubans could get to Nicaragua without a visa, and from there make what is known as the Coyote Trail. Central America until reaching the border with the United States. And I tell you until 2023, because when Trump comes to power, this path will be practically closed. A tour costs an average of $10,000. Those who got $10,000 were because they sold their house or the car they had or a brother sent them money. It is a number that indicates but does not reveal everything. Because they are the ones who can, not the ones who want.

– In his works, the topography of places and spaces occupies a relevant place and He dies in the sand Not the exception

– Whoever knows the neighborhood will realize that the topography of the house where the murder took place, the parricide, the streets through which the characters advance, and from which they exit, the road along which the bus passes, we say in Cuba, collectivism, you in Argentina; It’s mantilla. Spaces matter a lot to me. I need the characters to move in a frame that I know, and that I can move them in, and this is the element that stands out and enhances the sense of realism. Because realism as an aesthetic element is one thing, and the realism that you are able to convey in your story is another thing.

The author is from the largest of the Antilles and has also set foot on the African continent. He did it as a journalist to tell what was happening in the war for Angola’s independence. From that time, he remembers the Soviet AK rifle and four magazines next to his bed — if something were to happen, it was an Army reserve — and the irreversible acoustic shock in his left ear. “Look, I think this novel is stark realism,” he asserts, “and it also talks about that family tragedy and that difficult social and economic context that the characters live in. It also talks about deep emotions like fear. It talks about forgiveness and redemption. Of the walls that divide the characters physically and emotionally“.

-Even the sea is sometimes just another wall…

-He was a friend and an enemy. Ally and enemy. The relationship is very complex, but the presence of the sea is very important. Isolation also creates a certain feeling of confinement. And remember that one of the most famous lines in Cuban literature is the beginning of Virgilio Piñera’s poem (Al Jazeera in weight), where he says: “Fucking water conditions everywhere.” But the point is that ever since José María Heredia, the first Cuban poet, the sea has been a presence (“When the end of time approaches, / And to the desolate world / of utter old age, you, holy sea, / Will preserve your sublime youth…”). There is a moment in Death in the Sand where one character, a daughter who has returned to Cuba, says: “We have lost a lot of things, but we still have the sea.”

• Born in Havana in 1955.

• 2015 Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature, and has achieved international recognition for her detective novels starring Mario Conde: Past perfect, winds of Lent, masks, autumn landscape, farewell, Hemingway, yesterday’s fog, snake’s tail, transparency of time and decent people, It has been translated into many languages ​​and deserves awards such as the Café Gijón, the Dashiell Hammett Prize, the 2000 Islands Prize, the Brigada 21, the Barcino Prize for Historical Fiction, and the 2023 Pepe Carvalho Prize.

• The first gave rise to the television series The four seasons in Havana (Platinum Award).

• He is also an author My life novel, The Man Who Loved Heretics Dogs (Zaragoza City Award for Historical Novel), Return to IthacaHuge Like dust in the windA book of stories, in addition to several articles.

• In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from UNAM in Mexico.

He dies in the sandBy Leonardo Padura (Tusquets).