The journalist Javier Valenzuela, author of the novel “Too late to understand”, in the Café Comercial in Madrid.Jaime Villanueva
“An incident journalist cannot trust the police,” says Javier Valenzuela (Granada, 68 years old), who has worked as a reporter and correspondent for four decades (three of them at EL PAÍS). As a freelancer, he is still involved in journalism today and has already written five crime novels. The inspiration for his books comes from the critical perspective he practiced as a reporter, which allowed him to debunk the police version in the case of El Nani, the first person to be disappeared by the police in Spain’s democratic history. These events form the background for his new novel “Too Late to Understand” (Huso).
Questions. Is the novel very far removed from journalism?
Answer. I believe that journalism and literature – the realistic novel – are two forms of writing. Journalism writes about real and verifiable facts, and the realistic novel is the writing that must be credible, that is, that it could have happened that way, even if it cannot be proven in court. That’s why there were so many journalists who were novelists and so many novelists who wrote for newspapers. I consider journalism a literary genre and have tried to practice it in articles, reports, interviews…
Q Is every journalist a frustrated novelist?
R. Many of us in my generation who started in EL PAÍS realized that the journalism we practiced was a kind of warm-up for writing novels. Maruja Torres and Rosa Montero were the stars of the newspaper at the time and had excellent literary careers.
Q Why crime novel?
R. The crime novel tells the dark side of a time and a place, a society. He tells it wonderfully well and allows you to tell things because it’s fiction that you can’t prove as a journalist, but you can under the protection of fiction. My previous novel, Death Must Wait, begins with a state sewer commissioner – who looks a lot like Villarejo – organizing a meeting in Tangier between the King Emeritus and Corinna Larsen to resolve their economic differences. Many journalists write crime novels because we want to tell things that we couldn’t tell in our newspapers.
Q What is the event area?
R. A section that tells about crimes and terrible things that society wants to hide from itself, and about the causes of these crimes that no one wants to investigate. People kill for a number of reasons: greed, jealousy, envy, anger and society doesn’t want to see them, but events allow you to. That’s why I asked to take part in events when I came to EL PAÍS in 1982.
Q What stories did you find?
R. In the El Nani case, the first person in the history of Spanish democracy disappeared due to police violence. He was a criminal whom the police arrested, accused him of a crime he did not commit, used the anti-terrorism law, tortured him, died in the cellars of the Puerta de Sol and made his body disappear. My merit was that I did not believe the official version: that he escaped in an open field, handcuffed and surrounded by police. And he was right, as a court ruling proved.
Q Has the police changed much since then?
R. Now he is using less of the brutality that came from Franco’s regime. But I believe that then, as now, the police continue to have excessive credibility in the media and in society; Everyone should be more careful when faced with police versions. Many sections of Events consist of reading the report of the National Police and the Guardia Civil without talking to the criminal, his lawyer, the neighbors… Everyone lies, but the police are on the dark side of society and lie more than others . It’s in your nature.
Q A historical series about black Madrid has begun. Because?
R. I want to do a series of Madrid episodes on very important moments in history. Surrounded and bombed Madrid in 1936 served as the setting for the novel Gunpowder, Tobacco and Leather. Then Madrid once again became a global reference with the Movida, an explosion of freedom, will to live and creativity that coincided with a period of civic insecurity, drug gangs, police brutality and heroin… If you look at the 20th century, two of them are particularly dramatic.
Q Is Madrid a city without memory?
R. Madrid, like all of Spain, is a city without memory because the transition was based on a voluntary exercise in forgetting. Amnesty has been confused with amnesia, forgiveness with oblivion, and people have no idea about their recent past, that the Movida was very bloody, that there were 12 or 14 deaths every day in robberies, for heroin, quinquis or in police stations, or in right-wing extremist operations. The Transition and the Movida were much more violent than what they tell us, and not just because of ETA and the Grapo.
Javier Valenzuela, at Café Comercial in Madrid. Jaime Villanueva
Q Was Movida’s Madrid freer than today’s?
R. It was freer and people fought more for their freedom. Many freedoms we have today were unregulated, but people took them and fought for them, and when they were banned, they protested. The desire for freedom was greater than it is now. There was also a lot of repression and censorship, but the idea that things couldn’t be changed was not accepted. And there was the support of the mayor Enrique Tierno Galván.
Q He wrote: “Madrid was a great nightclub back then.”
R. There were popular festival concerts and a lot of tolerance. At these concerts you could meet, smoke marijuana… And the venues were very cheap. Then the right took over the city and replaced freedom with making money. Today’s freedom consists in getting lots of euros at any price. Fun has to be paid for, revelry, parties and even orgies are privatized.
Q Why did you choose a female protagonist?
R. I wanted to pay tribute to the first great generation of women who came into newsrooms in the ’80s, young, very forward-thinking reporters.
Q Why did you choose Tangier as the setting for your first three novels?
R. The Tangier Noir trilogy surprised many readers who did not know that Spanish was still spoken there, that Tetouan was the capital of the Spanish protectorate, and that there are still names in Spanish on company names. The Spanish protectorate had its negative aspects – the killing of civilians and the use of chemical weapons – but since the 1950s it has been more benevolent, and Moroccans remember it more fondly than the French.
Q He was a correspondent in the Middle East. How do you see the situation?
R. Hamas is outrageous, but the product of desperation, someone who is beaten and emaciated and responds with a violent bite. It is 80 years of looting, occupation and apartheid for the Palestinians. It is very difficult when your house and land are taken away so that a Jewish colony can settle there.
All the culture that goes with it awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_