Although he did not intend to, Pedro Simón (Madrid, 1971) wrote another work that resembles a self-help book. “What Follows” (Espasa, 2024) is the third novel in a trilogy, after “The Ingrates” and “The Misunderstood”.which makes readers stop and think with a retrospective look at the good and bad that each person has done or is doing in their life.
In his book, which will be presented this Sunday, at 12:00 p.m. at the Toledo Book Fairthe writer and journalist recounts the decisions of three brothers when they have to take care of their father, an octogenarian widower. The passage of time, death, parenthood, love and other universal themes of humanity allow the author to unravel the secrets this family hides, but it could be yours or any other .
-In recent years there has been a lot of talk about self-help books. Can your novel fulfill, in part, this function?
-It’s not my intention, but what I believe is that books help us, they are like breathing. They put us in the other’s place to understand them. For me, the books that interest me the most are the ones that tell you that you’re not alone, that you’re not that strange. Both when I write and when I read, I am interested in books that say this, that make me believe in the extraordinary that hides in the apparently ordinary. We all have a story to tell; We could all be the protagonists of a novel and we all have a part of our life that keeps us up at night, and it almost always has to do with an injury or scar. This book is about that, the passage of time and the inexorable approach of old age and therefore death. And it does so by telling the story of three sons who wonder what to do with Dad now, at a time when Dad is starting to be like a child.
-In the final acknowledgments, you say that you could not have written this novel without many people who shared their most intimate wounds with you. But what about you, what did you share with yourself to put it into words?
-Well, the writing process is always a somewhat harsh exercise in sincerity. The problem is that you don’t do anything else; You don’t live, you just write. It doesn’t matter if you’re in front of the computer or not, you have the novel in your head all day. It’s an obsessive exercise that has to do with self-solemnity because we always write from our backpack. In my case, this book concerns me, since I am around fifty years old, like the characters in the novel, and I have an octogenarian father, who still has his wife, who is my mother, and at the moment everything is going GOOD. But now the fragility is icy, everything takes you to the next Play screen, which makes you feel a little dizzy. All of this involves a process of gutting yourself. Although of the three books in my trilogy, this is the least like me, but there is also a lot of me in ‘The Following’. I am one of them, like many people my age, and I am cold because the passage of time is regular.
-The novel has many edges, but there is a phrase used by the daughter (Carmen) and the father (Antonio) that perfectly defines the arrival of old age, which is the leitmotif from ‘The following: “You know the end is coming when your daughter wipes your ass.” In your opinion, is it the main rite of passage to know that our parents are getting older or that we are getting older, depending on how we look at things?
-This is simply an image from the novel. You realize you’re getting old when everyone tells you you repeat things and you’ve repeated them a thousand times, when you realize your downtime is coming to an end. In fact, Antonio, at one point, says that he always wanted to die before his children wanted him to. That’s when you realize that you are like a nuisance, a kind of vessel that doesn’t have a very clear place to put it.
-Antonio says at the end of the novel that when you get old, you think that when you are old you will go to a nursing home, “but you never go to a nursing home, they take you to the cave of the old man,” as he calls him. . The coronavirus pandemic has made us see these places with a different perspective. Putting things into perspective, what can we do as a society to improve what we did wrong and fix the way we treated then, and still do today, our elders, those you call the PNM (Do Not Disturb) generation?
-The book is not an instruction manual. Everyone does what they can with their parents. There are many ways to act and they are all very good, whether you decide to keep him at home or take him to a nursing home, or even pass him on if at some point he causes you a lot of trouble. wrong. Either way, society is burdened by the treatment of our elders, even though there are things that could be improved, but I don’t see any burden of disapproval in that sense. I see worse what is happening to young people and how we treat our young people, whom we condemn to precarious jobs, we insult them by saying that they are “ninis”, that they neither study nor work, whatever their training is to pay them crap salaries, who cannot afford housing because the prices are exorbitant, … However, for the elderly, who are ten million voters, their pensions , their trips, their medicines, their tickets for museums, theater and cinema. are practically free. All this, despite the fact that the pandemic has been terrible for them and that the management of the residences has been very poor. But, ultimately, I believe there is not a problem with the treatment of the elderly, there is a problem with the treatment of the young.
-What your novel reflects is that the heavy burden of caring for parents and family continues to weigh on women, whether mothers or daughters, who are also the ones who usually carry “female guilt” (as you say her friend). Sonia tells Carmen). Do we still have much to change in this direction?
-We think we are a very modern country, but nine out of ten caregivers are still women. So, when we say that we talk too much about equality, we should take this type of data into account to realize how much remains to be done. And guilt is an ever-present feeling because we grew up with Christian morality. We feel it because of the way we raised our children and we also transferred it in one way or another to the care of our parents. Something that always affects women more, something that is reflected in Carmen, the girl who feels guilty if her father does not take his medicine, even when he is at his brother’s house, or when he is taken to the residence .
-Although a very deep gulf separates Antonio and his son Gabriel because of a tragic event in their lives, there is a moment, one of the few in which they speak, during which they agree on one thing: “How much people lie. journalists” or at another time, we say that “that’s what the press is for, so that your father can sit at the top of a newspaper on a bench”. You who are unionized, the professionals of this sector have such a bad reputation lately? Because?
-There was a problem with the last economic crisis, which ended up ruining everything, since economic power attacked political power and, in turn, the “fourth power”. Although part of the business also started to get screwed when we changed the readers to customers, who go with a gun in their holster, like the one that says, and are able to “shoot”, throw or to move a journalist because they don’t do it. I don’t like what they do, who writes or because they pay and threaten to cancel their subscription. However, people do not tell a surgeon how to operate or a baker what flour to use to make bread, but everyone tells journalists how they should do their job. The sector is gripped by fear, now linked to the low wages of many union workers, since a poorly paid journalist is afraid of losing his job, which harms the profession. This is why I am pessimistic, because the discredit of the politician almost always goes hand in hand with the discredit of the journalist. And ultimately our concern is not with what’s important, which is telling stories and building bridges, but rather tearing them down and labeling them, which is why our work is of less and less interest. fewer people. Many come to us only to endorse their own biases, with the press and media as polarized as they have ever been.
-It is striking in the novel that the two who have the most to talk about are the ones who have the least ability to speak or who voluntarily remain silent, and when they speak, they do so at the end. It’s paradoxical, but even though Antonio has stopped believing in God (lower case, as he put it), he makes his own final judgment before he dies. Because?
-I don’t know, you should ask Antonio. I guess in the end we all need to take some sort of inventory before we die of the good and the bad. What would be good is to be aware of showing affection on time, but also of the heroic nature of keeping silent about certain things, because many within the family keep silent about things that , if they were told, the tribe would suffer and be broken. . An enormous greatness and generosity from an anonymous and secondary hero who we discover in the novel, but of whom there are many spread across the world.
-No one knows when he will die and he fills this moment with euphemisms, but the last sentences that Antonio writes sound like a living testament and a philosophical moral for his children. Although we readers hope yours comes late, do you support these thoughts for the future?
-Yes, in the end, all you have left is your children’s passion and those of us who have it know that it’s true. Maybe being a father or mother is the most transcendent thing a human being can do in the literal sense, since you die, but they transcend. And behind it, there is the story and the exemplarity of a bus driver and an anonymous housewife, but who can be the same as a supermarket cashier, an auxiliary nurse or a baker who kneads the bread, whose transcendence can reach to be greater than that of the one who earns a grand slam tennis or a football World Cup.
-Finally, what meaning does the song “Amor de hombre”, by Mocedades, which appears so much in the novel, have for you?
-I couldn’t tell you, but it’s a song that moves me when I hear it. Ultimately, books have a soundtrack that is often not captured or reflected on paper, but resonates as we turn the pages. In fact, there will be a point where books open and play within a paragraph because the author connects an idea with specific music next to it. In the case of “Amor de hombre”, it is a song whose rhythm I like, with classical and old music from the 19th century, but with some allusions that speak of the soul and things important to me, like love. without compensation, which I think is reflected in my novel.
