Pilar Cavero was originally from Aragon and wanted her children to be from Aragon too. As she lived in Logroño with her husband, when the time of delivery approached, she went to Zaragoza and returned home with a new Aragonese offspring, quite naturally. She was the mother of Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, who collected this anecdote and others from his childhood and early youth in the book Linenwhich has just been published in Seix Barral. With this story of formation, the author also tells the reality of a country in the last years of a dictatorship and the beginnings of democracy. From his own memories, because in this work there is no more fiction than that imposed by the filters of memory.
Writing an autobiography when you are still so young is not very common, although he highlights Carlos Barral, who published his first volume in 1973, when he was only 45 years old. “I waited until I was 63, which is a reasonable age to say things,” he tells elDiario.es in Barcelona. However, his contemporaries have not yet addressed the subject, although he would like them to. “I think it is due to the influence of autofiction. They published their lives in books of fiction creation and, in the end, no one has written a memoir in the classic style, which is what I like to read,” he says. He wanted, like so many other people, to enjoy those of Javier Marías. “I think he would have written them at some point, because all British writers do it at some point and he was very British.”
Marias is one of the best-known names that appear in the pages of Linenalongside other colleagues from the guild such as Enrique Vila-Matas, José Antonio Labordeta, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Monserrat Roig, Bernardo Atxaga, Javier Reverte or Antonio Muñoz Molina. The author of Heart so white He is the protagonist of one of the most notorious editorial entanglements – as far as it is possible – of the end of the 20th century, when he left the publishing house Anagrama after accusing Jorge Herralde of having falsified the colonization figures of his novel. Tomorrow in battle, think of me in 1996. This meeting led to the writer’s move to Alfaguara and also the estrangement of Martínez de Pisón, whom he had taken as a disciple. He continued in Anagrama for many years until he also left, in his case, for Seix Barral “due to a disagreement with Jorge.” [Herralde]” he comments.
The Barcelona of the youth of the protagonist of these memoirs hardly resembles that of today. It was the city before the 1992 Olympic Games, when the Raval was still Chinatown, when the apartments in the Eixample were still paid for (even though there were already owners who divided them to make two apartments) and when the literate gathered to get drunk at night in El Séptimo Arte, a bar located near the house of Jordi Pujol, who was sometimes seen walking around at night under the surveillance of his bodyguards. Little remains of all that. “I am nostalgic for the Barcelona of the 80s, but because I am nostalgic for the young man I was then. I loved Barcelona, but I can’t complain about the next one because you have to admit that it is a great city that has wonderful things,” he says.
Of course, it also shows that life there is now worse than before. “When I talk about housing, I always remember that beautiful apartment that my daughter and I had on Calle Borrell, which cost us 12,000 pesetas. And when housing is cheap, life is much happier because you have enough money to go out and have fun. Now, go and find a cheap house in Barcelona. When the Olympic Games came, the Barcelona doesn’t look pretty of Pascual Maragall and mass tourism, the situation has worsened for the less well-off neighbours. Furthermore, the writer believes that nationalism began to erode the cultural life of the Catalan capital even before Cobi was born. “It began very slowly to permeate everything, and all that dynamism that Barcelona had in the late 70s and early 80s disappeared until Madrid took over with the Movida. Barcelona has not become again the radiant cultural centre that it was just before I arrived.
When housing is cheap, life is much happier because you have enough money to go out and have fun. Now, go looking for a cheap house in Barcelona
Ignacio Martinez de Pisón
— Writer
Bedding It ends when the author finally reaches adulthood, with the obligations and renunciations that this implies. The late nights with Vila-Matas and other night owls are increasingly spaced out, but not only for reasons of conciliation, at least in his case. “That happy life of the 80s suddenly begins to diminish, but because others reduce it. In Barcelona, I no longer go out at night because my friends no longer go out. If they called me for dinner tomorrow, I would go,” he says. He also attributes it to the reality of the city itself, which “is more boring than before.” “It is surely a demographic problem. Today, there are only bars for tourists, which are the only ones that go out. My generation gave up on the night a long time ago and the younger ones have had to move a little further away,” he reflects.
The view further back
Martínez de Pisón’s writing falls well within the limits of fiction, but in 2018 he wanted to put his own life’s memories in order, driven by the death of his mother and his age. The book begins with his trip to Segovia to consult the military archives of his father, who died when he was barely 10 years old. This mission involves the fear of discovering a sinister secret from his father’s professional past, who, after all, had been part of Franco’s armed forces. Although officially his functions were little more than those of an office worker, you never know. Fortunately, he has not discovered anything that could obscure his memory of him or, in general, of his own childhood.
“When certain key people disappear, we realize that there is a past that is erased very quickly. So I started to write free things and to do research on the past and when I finished fire castles (Seix Barral, 2023) I realized that these fragments were trying to organize themselves,” he explains. “Knowing that in many books I have talked about family conflicts, I thought about writing a novel about mine. “I can invent many families, but not this one and that makes it exceptional for me.” According to him, one of the models of this book is Family lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, which tells the story of the rise of fascism in Italy through the story of a family, with its little dramas and joys. “I think that’s what literature is about, creating interesting subjects that in themselves are not interesting,” he says.
I think literature is about making interesting subjects that are not interesting in themselves.
Ignacio Martinez de Pisón
— Writer
The most distant memories are in Logroño in the 60s, which began to modernize little by little, which translated into the construction of new buildings, changes in vehicles and household appliances. At that time, the Carlist grandfather, the uncle who became a priest or his own father still went on stage. Later, before Barcelona, the action takes place in Zaragoza, where the author saw his admired Luis Buñuel and met his wife, María José Belló, while still at university. They are sweet memories, without extreme situations or spoonfuls of sticky nostalgia. “I am part of a privileged generation and within it, I consider myself even more privileged to have lived my whole life doing what I like most, which is literature. “There can be no complaints in my book because there is no reason to complain in my life,” the writer explains.
In addition to having written novels, stories and press articles, Martínez de Pisón is also responsible for the film adaptation of his book. secondary roads and movie scripts like The thirteen roses (both work with Emilio Martínez Lázaro) or Chico and Rita with Fernando Trueba. Is there a possibility that Linen become a film? “Because it’s very personal, I don’t even want to imagine an actor in my role,” he says. In fact, when his editor Elena Ramírez asked him to be the narrator of the book’s audio format, he didn’t hesitate to say yes. “I couldn’t imagine a voice other than mine telling something so personal. I wouldn’t say intimate, because it’s not a book with a lot of intimacy, but it’s really mine.”
The writer still has a few years to feel proud of his work, but it is already clear that his career will be linked in one way or another to literature at the end of Linen. Since then, enough has happened to fill another 300 pages as a sequel to his autobiography, but he still doesn’t think he has anything important to tell. “Maybe in 10 years it will still be worth telling something from the 90s or the 2000s. Right now, the only thing I know is that if I wrote it, it would be called “City clothes”, concludes.
