The novels by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón tend to direct their gaze towards the past of 20th-century Spain, but never in such an exhaustive way as in ‘Castillos de fuego’ (Seix Barral), a major soap opera where the one from Zaragoza, based in Barcelona has reconstructed the desolate world of the immediate post-war Spanish period, marked by moral and economic misery, in which betrayal can wait just around the corner. Pisón applying the Pérez Galdós recipe points to one of the successes of Sant Jordi.
Did you have the feeling that you owed Madrid a novel?
Yes, it’s true, some of my characters had ended up in Madrid in other novels but I had never thought about a strictly Madrid one. This is meant to be a map of a city that is slowly rebuilding itself after being razed to the ground. About five or six years after the end of the war, people continue to starve and some of its inhabitants continue to sleep in the trenches of Ciudad Universitaria. He wanted to talk about Madrid in its entirety as a living organism.
His drawing of the city is that of an ideal place for betrayal, corruption and fear in which a few manage the lives of the rest.
It is that there are a few, the victors, who share out what little there is, which for them is a lot, and they force the rest to survive. It is the human being reduced to his most elementary condition: subsist on the basis of collecting chestnuts, trying not to get caught if you have a different opinion from the official one and if there is someone imprisoned for it, try to free him. It is a place where the law exists but it is applied in a discretionary manner and therefore it is as if it did not exist. We are almost in the realm of tragedy, before the human being invented the principles of civilization.
There are more than thirty characters that evolve over six years, from 1839 to 1945, in almost 700 pages. How did he organize it?
My idea was to create the characters and their stories and then quietly follow them to see how they unfold. In the end, the novel focuses on two characters who take on greater prominence: Valentín, a careerist who tries to purge his communist militancy, and Eloy, a crippled young man who tries to get his brother out of jail and ends up in the maquis. The lives of these people come together in a more or less spontaneous or natural way. For me, the narrative is still a great puzzle, a construction game that the Three Wise Men bring you as a gift.
And he follows very closely in the footsteps of Galdós.
And that I do not quote at any time, but yes. Characters like Basilio, a refined university professor, could perfectly appear in one of his novels. I am very Galdosian, I am reading it again and it is impressive. By the way, ‘Fortunata y Jacinta’ takes place in Chamberí, in a geography that is more or less the same as that of my characters.
In the realistic novels of the 19th century we always know what people live on. How lentils are earned.
And therein lies the money, or lack of it, driving the stories.
In the realistic novels of the 19th century we always know what people live on. How lentils are earned. And the great concern is how to make your way in life. I naturally do not abjure those origins because it seems to me that the realistic novel heir to the 19th century is still as healthy as it was 150 years ago, even though it has been given up for dead almost every decade. We need novels that portray the different times and the novelist has the commitment to transmit that image and the memory to later generations.
But don’t those books require a very dedicated reader? Don’t they collide with the lightness and speed of these times?
Is the reader willing to dedicate many hours of his life to a long novel? I think so. I as a reader am like that. And if you look closely, the last successful novels have been of this type, like ‘Patria’ or the latest by Almudena Grandes.
He talks about Almudena Grandes and I don’t know if he had her in mind when writing this book because in a certain way he is entering his territory.
I planned this novel long before I knew that Almudena was ill. The truth is that very little has been written about this period of the first Franco regime, the books by Almudena and some by Trapiello, such as ‘Madrid, 1945’, which has been republished recently. It strikes me that she has not been given more attention.
Franco’s opponents were incapable of imagining Franco’s ability to adapt to geopolitical reality in order to achieve the regime’s survival for 30 plus years.
The six years of the novel correspond to the course of the Second World War. It is the moment when, seeing the allies win, some delusional believe that Franco has little left.
The novel shows these individual stories of ordinary people who are at risk of the great story, of the great forces of collective destiny. But yes, they were unable to imagine Franco’s ability to adapt to geopolitical reality in order to achieve the survival of the regime for 30 years or so.
There is also a violence here that had not appeared before in his novels. Is the historical moment the one that commands?
That is. In my novels there are usually no weapons, but at this time there are. There are caches hidden everywhere, people who are not resigned to the fact that the war is over and want to continue doing it on their own while the Francoists impose their vision with violence. Never in my novels has there been as much death as here. But it is that the executions were the order of the day, there were more than 50,000 people. You were suspected just for not being enthusiastic enough about the new regime. If you were lukewarm, you could be an enemy and you were susceptible to being eliminated or neutralized. The most difficult thing was maintaining dignity.
The Franco regime was a great scam that lasted many years and its mark still persists.
What reading can be done of this novel in 2022?
The Franco regime was a great scam that lasted many years and its mark still persists. Spain is not a totally secular country today because the Church then recovered all its power and since then it has not let go. The setback of women also took a long time to push forward again, after the brake on the paths traced by the Republic in a few years, which were few but very decisive.
And you are not saying anything about the current polarization of Spanish politics?
Now we live in a virtual world and that is where that battle is fought. I don’t see polarization so much on the street. Now it seems to me that this polarization is a bit of cardboard because civil wars today take place on Twitter, which seems much better to me. It is better that than that we kill each other with bayonets.