2023-10-26 19:24:34
‘I won’t watch you die‘ talks about the strength of love and its mirages. It is a novel of nostalgia and the passage of time, but also of loyalty and betrayal. Antonio Muñoz Molina has borrowed a verse from a poem by Idea Vilariño to give the title to this book.
Inevitably I have to ask you what love means to you.
I think it is the central feeling of life. The feeling in which everything that one is, everything one desires comes together… The search for affinity and the encounter with another person, which encompasses everything, the most physical and the most subtle and the most spiritual. I mean, for me, I think, as a writer, but also as a person, it’s the central experience of life. Not love for family or children or friends, but love between people who fall in love. It is the central experience of life, the most educational, the one that can lead you the most to happiness or suffering.
Very contrary feelings caused by the same thing, love.
Sure, but human beings are like that. I have observed in my life that there are people who are more in love, let’s say more prone to passionate love than others. But I also know people who are good people and have sensitivity and enjoy it and all that, but they don’t know or don’t give that much importance to this.
Where does the story of ‘I won’t see you die’ originate?
Well, look, there are stories that have a clearer beginning and others that are more confusing, but this one comes from a conversation with an acquaintance of mine from the United States, who was visiting Madrid. I had met him for lunch one day and he arrived late and told me where he came from and told me that story in general terms. I really like listening to stories, that’s what literature feeds on. I think there are people who are willing to listen and who notice it and, then, we receive confidences that are astounding. While I was listening to what this friend of mine was telling me, I thought that there could be a story or a story there. After about five years, because I was doing other things, suddenly the story came back to me. One day a beginning occurred to me.
And the title ‘I won’t see you die’, that verse from a poem by the Uruguayan Idea Vilariño, did it appear before or after?
It was already there because that poem is one of those poems that accompany you. It has something that cuts like a knife and the last verse always impressed me because it seemed like the maximum of desolation. And it also has something like a bolero. When I was starting to write, the verse suddenly came to me. It was a joy because when you have a good degree and you have it soon, it seems that you have much more than you really have. Furthermore, with a title like this, when you have read the novel it seems that the novel is contained in it. That was lucky. I believe that to write you also have to be lucky because books are always on the verge of not being.
The book begins with a single 73-page paragraph. Why this start?
That was a discovery. At first it was like a surprise because I was writing very vehemently and I realized I hadn’t gotten to the point. But it wasn’t something I forced. The first day I was working on it, I stopped because I had to do other things and I left it there. I think I had such a strong drive that I didn’t want it to stop. That’s why I left it like that. Little by little I thought about the possibility of that continuing and that was important when it came to conveying a feeling of overflow. He sensed that this could fail, that it could not be sustained, but if it went wrong, he had nothing to lose either. I could go back. I also tell you that it is done in a way in which you can read it aloud and not choke because syntactically it is very well constructed.
One of its protagonists, Gabriel Aristu, leaves in the 60s for the United States, which appears as a totally different world. Do you still see it like that?
It was and is a different world. The United States has the paradox that we have a very great, and even excessive, familiarity with its places and the things that they present to us in movies or series. That familiarity is helped by a misunderstanding that he is from the dubbing. We see things dubbed and it almost seems to us that that is the way people talk. But it is a completely different country. It is a very large country, mostly rural and mostly very religious, in which life is radically different from European life. It is a very different world that has a very great capacity for attraction because it has a great sense of scenography and spectacle. And also because nature is overwhelming in many cases. The superabundance and scale of things is also impressive. There is a world completely foreign to us.
Another world also appears in the novel, that of a gray Spain, a Civil War that left his character’s father traumatized. Is there a difference between those who tell what they experienced and those who speak about it after years and from another perspective?
Of course, it is very difficult to know what the world is like that you have not lived in. As with the United States, we are familiar with this from documentaries, but it is very difficult to get the idea. Think now of Ukraine or Gaza, we are saturated with images, but it is very very difficult to know what people are feeling. Also, there is one thing that is that trauma lasts a long time. The trauma of war or the trauma of people who have suffered lasts a long time and is passed from one generation to the next. In this case, I wanted to tell that, I wanted to tell how a person is forever marked by a traumatic experience from which they do not recover and that this trauma, in some way, casts a shadow on the next generation, on the children. I have seen that a lot in the United States, in New York, where I have met not only some survivors of the Holocaust, but children, relatives of people who lived through the Holocaust, who lived through the war. These children have an inherited shadow. Even they are marked by that past.
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