Paco Ignacio Taibo II accidentally came to Spain. He got the dates wrong when he was invited to Barcelona in February and is walking around Madrid with a certain sense of embarrassment these days. But he has two other good excuses: first, his detective Belascoarán (whom he killed and resurrected decades ago in Sherlock Holmes fashion) has been brought back to life thanks to a Netflix series; and the other is a Spanish edition of these novels by Reino de Cordelia. Born in Gijón in 1949, he has lived in Mexico since he was ten years old, where he directs the Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Question. You often say that you share something important with your detective Héctor Belascoarán: delicacies.
Answer. I’ve dedicated ten novels to Héctor and when you develop a character you inherit things from him. For example, he was born on the same day as me, January 11th. Which year? Imagine that.
Q So, congratulations to you both!
R Thank you, yes it’s your birthday and mine. The second thing that unites us is his love for delicacies, the shop windows that test whether a Spanish Serrano ham is better than an Italian one. Also his fondness for travel agencies. He never travels, but these offers of “seven days in the Philippines or Thailand” cause him a unique love, like me. And third, he reads the same books as me, so I know what he reads, why he reads it, and what reading does to him. And one more thing: His motor is not detective wisdom, but curiosity. In a society like the one I lived in in Mexico, where reality has nothing to do with the version of reality we know, curiosity is what draws you in. Our societies are icebergs, of which we only see the 10% that float on the surface compared to the 90% that is not visible. And the novel has to reach that 90% where journalism, sociology, economics or politics don’t. Only literature comes.
Q What’s the use of a detective like yours?
R To tell us the untold stories. To go further. In the last 30 or 40 years, journalism has only covered the surface, not the depth. Only the novel does that.
Q What does the series reviving your detective mean to you?
R A strange phenomenon.
Q Were you resurrected in a different way?
R Yes, and that cannot be avoided. I had to learn to see the show through the eyes of the viewer and not the eyes of the writer. Matching a film or television product with an author’s mentality is a serious risk. You can’t see well, you’re cloudy. All of a sudden I have friends who have been reading the novels for 30 years and they tell me, ‘Belascoarán wasn’t like that.’ And I tell them, ‘Damn, it wasn’t like that, because what you have in your head isn’t what the director embodied; the director embodied the one he has in his head. Let’s be fair.”
Q Did the series bring you back to life?
R He achieved something, yes. To my surprise, a phenomenon has emerged at book fairs that can be seen a lot in countries like Italy or Greece. The first three chapters have given great intensity to the essences of Belascoarán. Respect the essence of the novels: they kill women because they’re bloody poor; and the police is the most corrupt part of the system. Now come the next three chapters.
In the last 30 or 40 years, journalism has only covered the surface, not the depth. Only the novel does that.
Q Are you mexican and spanish today? Spanish and Mexican?
R i am very strange I’m very Mexican and Asturian at times. Funny, in Spain I don’t feel Spanish. But when I go down the mountains I enter the green and the sea of Asturias, in my childhood then yes. And doing Black Week for so many years empowers me. But I’m very Mexican, devilishly Mexican. 90% of my literary work originated in Mexico.
Q How has Spain changed?
R It’s getting rarer and every time I come back I’m more surprised to see how formal Spain is developing. I keep the feeling I shared with Manolo [Vázquez Montalbán] that the transition never went as far as it should have, that it was a clean slate that wasn’t true. It was a clean slate.
Q And today should I go further?
R If we can, and I put myself in the Asturian perspective, it’s hard work. One of my first strongest shocks, living here for two years and writing the story of the 1934 revolution, was seeing how it was possible for this Spain, built on migration, to see the republican exile in its own flesh, but not is hypersensitive to immigration today. In my dual situation as the son and grandson of exiles, it was recognition, not ignorance, to see an Argentinian or Senegalese at Black Week. I felt like family, identified with them. But I was very peculiar.
Taibo on his double status: “I’m very funny. I’m very Mexican and Asturian sometimes.”Samuel Sánchez
Q Are there still social classes?
R Nerd. They were no longer as we knew them. That neoclassical essence, so strong in Asturias and which I rediscovered when I returned to write about the 1934 revolution, has disappeared. It has become an emerging, weakened middle class.
Q But the inequality remains.
R It has shifted and is affecting other sectors. When I have returned to Asturias in recent years, it has been annoying to see the debt crisis, the banks and the evictions of a sector no longer identifiable with the working class but marginalized by society. Spanish society continues to generate inequality, but I come from Mexico, where inequality is even greater, despite the enormous efforts the government is making to level it out.
Q Does the left fail in this?
R No, he doesn’t succeed, which is different. We have learned that there are no absolute victories or total defeats. There are partial phenomena. I’m witnessing a very positive mass phenomenon: we’ve given away five million books, created neighborhood libraries, started reading clubs across the country, lowered the price of books… Reading is growing splendidly in Mexico, but it’s a sectoral security, peripheral
Q How do you remember Vázquez Montalbán?
R Despite our coincidences and literary differences, we were very, very good friends. We shared the idea that crime fiction was one of the most interesting genre spaces to be produced in the late 20th century.
Q And how would you define these differences?
R it was brilliant But I’ve always said: I prefer Manolo when he’s wrong than when he’s right. And he looked at me like, what am I doing wrong? (laughs) And I kept my mouth shut, keep it a secret.
Q Would Carvalho and Belascoarán have been friends?
R No no no. There is a defensive cynicism in Carvalho that Belascoarán does not share.
Q Should Spain ask for forgiveness as the President of Mexico is asking?
R No, because Spain is generic. Beg forgiveness… Those who think the conquest was a voyage that took civilization beyond the oceans must beg forgiveness, for it was not. Excuse those who think this is plundered territory, those of the transnationals who believe the Mexican electricity industry should belong to them and not the nation. These are the ones who need to ask for forgiveness, not the ordinary citizen who sympathizes with and suffers from the same transnationals in Spain or Mexico.
Paco Taibo, Mexican writer, at the Juan Rulfo bookstore in Madrid. Samuel Sanchez
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