A bushy white mustache strides through the streets of Guadalajara Gallery, unconcerned with the impact it is causing on its surroundings. Then, a kind and curious smile is uttered, the mouth flowing between Catalan and Spanish with the same nature with which a bowl returns its contents to another. In the land of fanatics, this is not a fanatical Mexican man, like the beloved award-winning writer Eduardo Mendoza, who is still weighed down by the fatigue of the journey that ended the previous morning. “Next time, I will ask that the prize be tranquility,” says the fiery Princess of Asturias de las Letras de Camino in the literary salon that opens in half an hour. “Country” accompanies you to this and other activities of the day that everyone would like to exchange with a kiss, a hug or a few words of affection or admiration.
Mendoza leads the city delegation called to a meeting that has only so many good things to decide. “A festival is the opposite of war. People get together, negotiate, talk and drink some wine, and that sounds to me like civilization,” says the optimist. The Catalan writer is nervous about the speech he will give in the second part. He worries that time will be short, that people will get bored, and that there will be no choice but to make a decision. But his ingenuity and sense of humor point in the opposite direction. The 82-year-old Barcelona writer has reasons to rejoice. This year he was honored on the ground with the prestigious Spanish Prize, a bell that celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of his literary debut. The truth about the Savolta case Who overcame Franco’s censorship and laid the first and decisive stone on the path to success, although he resists thinking about it. “It’s time to do very rare things with people and books,” he says. “This book had a life of its own that I couldn’t control, and now we’re back to finding it: it’s the same thing, and I’m 50 years older than I am.”
Much has changed in these five decades, for example, “from above.” However, I want to think they retain “curiosity and want to learn.” Sometimes it is easy to be deceived at this time, because “one looks in the mirror and cannot see it”: one only recognizes the passing of years on the skin when one encounters a new image on the television screen. Something different is his cosmopolitan hometown of Barcelona. “There has been a lot of change, but all cities have changed very quickly. Cities are much faster than people,” he emphasizes. “I still don’t recognize the city I was born in, because nothing has changed about it. In the meantime, we don’t recognize it, that is.”
-Do you see anything from Barcelona then?
– No, I remember it, but I can’t find it, because it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. There are stones, streets, subways, but everything has changed: the relationships, the form…
To Barcelona, which is the scene of his life and his series, but also the protagonist of both and in this invitation to FIL, he dedicated the inaugural speech, in which he was a review of the city from the time of Epirus to the present day. “They will tell you things that are not in the databases, because they are false of course, but they are part of the collective memory, in the way Barcelona residents see Barcelona, and in the way you make them see it from the outside when they arrive. An imaginary history of the city,” he promised, and the audience was complicit and attentive. Many people will have to endure later to get their signature printed on some of their books, which are many and have created, as they put it, a club of “devoted and loyal” readers, which continues to be “renewed” with every generation.
But before that, he will receive the Carlos Fuentes Medal from the hands of Silvia Lemos, the always happy widow of the Mexican writer, who did not want to be overcome by physical difficulties. “How were Carlos Fuentes and Silvia de Guabos?”, Mendoza will say out loud as she leaves the party, satisfied, still immersed in the memories he shared with his friends and which she herself mentioned when handing over the golden badge. He will report: “I woke up the last time we saw each other, in Barcelona, at the celebrations of (editor) Carmen Balsells, who is the key to everything.” His old friend Carlos Ruiz Zafón, now deceased, will also come back to mind through a program in a country that honors him and makes his eyes light up and his eyes widen.
What scares the author City of miracles (1986), the writer later admitted that it was neither the serials nor the plots that took place in them. This is the succession and sound of the prayers, a severed and combined unit of measurement that nevertheless contains everything. “I’m only interested in the fact that the sentence lasts a long time. I don’t know the book, the sentence. When I have a sentence, I’m happy and I start writing it then, and then I write it. I read 20 books written, but always from sentence to sentence,” he reveals and then shades: “Good, and the sentences are inside someone’s structure, of a small speech, but the action is secondary, the important thing is the dialogue, the description.” He finally summarized that what she loves is “literature.”
There is also the Palomas, the famous Mexican cocktail made with tequila and grapefruit juice, which has been a cult favorite for a while, and where you will notice along the way that there will be a glue of followers who will meet you with cheerfulness and generosity, once again masking a fatigue that you will only recognize later. In line there are young couples asking to give away the “first book” they have already read at school. Sin news of sock (1990), the couples are mayor with a stack of books for themselves and all their companions. Ladies who trusted him with the “big illusion” that made them conscious and young men who came to line for the second time after having to read a copy of a different book. There are, finally, women who, with limited time, summarize what every reader actually wants to say: “Gracias por las historias, y por el humor.” He thanks you quickly, with a kind gesture and a laugh that opens your eyes until he finally disappears.
