2023-09-16 12:07:51
Antonio Soler (Málaga, 1956) has written the book I was a dog (Galaxia Gutenberg) and readers, like this one who interviewed him, have taken our breath away. It is about a character who can be associated with evil, whose way of being is, from the beginning of the book, dark and difficult, obsessive, extremely hard. The passion of this individual is to look at others, as if they were all his enemies, or his adversaries, an attitude that, in addition, he undertakes as if he were always right about what his friends, his girlfriend, his mother or his neighbors are like. . Until reaching violence that mixes disagreement, meanness and machismo. Soler found his identity in some pages that someone made available to him, many years ago. Rescued, converted into a primitive metaphor of a text that has 291 pages, it constitutes a contemporary testimony of what today would be an irrepressible sexist.
Without flight in the verse, as José Hierro liked to define simplicity, direct language, is also a testimony of the great literature that has served the author. to tell different consequences (war, the dark, the difficult, religious evil, for example) of human villainy or carelessness. Apart from Sacramento, His penultimate novel about a royal priest who used his pulpit to force his parishioners to orgy, his most appreciated books are, among others, The path of the English, Apostles and assassins y On.
To these literary qualities Soler adds an admirable calmness that makes him a human being whose conversation is as profound as his writing. Here, transcribed, is an example of this. The interview was done via Zoom, he in his house in the upper reaches of Malaga and the journalist in the heat of early last September, in Madrid.
This is a novel about evil, right?
It’s about a guy who wants to establish rules by which his environment should be governed. That is the authentic germ of evil, the one that led to the existence of characters like Stalin or Hitler, who wanted nothing more than to put things in order. Your order.
So the character hates anyone who doesn’t look like him. But he will also hate anyone who looks like him…
In him there is like a denial of the other. He does not want to accept the impositions of another, he does not want to be a lapdog, but he calls himself a dog. He has a relationship, but instead of breaking it off he tries to model in one way or another the one he meets, of whom he says that he does not want to be, precisely, his lapdog.
How did such a novel come about?
I tell it at the end of the book. I found some pages between some books. It’s true that I found them, it’s not a last page resource. They were diary entries from I don’t know who. A neighbor gave them to me, aware that I like books. Among those books were the pages on which the novel is inspired.
What was there?
The core of a personality that I found very disturbing. There was no literary intention there, because it was written in a fairly immediate way and without that pretension. But I did seem to detect the power of a character and an individual. I read and saved those pages and after a few years I looked at them again to realize what impression they still gave me. And they made the same impression on me: there was a very strong drive that could serve to delve deeper into the character.
A character who today would have to do with some, or many, who now make machismo arrogant evidence, like that of the character you describe here… A machismo that belongs to Vox and that, due to alliances, borders on the Popular Party…
That is a reflection that is not in the novel but is necessary. I get the impression that they do not do it in the PP even though it is at the root of what happened with the elections of July 23, when a society that is not eminently progressive, but that certainly He is not sexist, and he has seen in the attitude of Vox in some communities and in some city councils attitudes that have led them to vote what they have voted for.
In the case of this novel, its protagonist hates by believing that he is hated, he disgusts himself and is repugnant.
Yes, because he considers himself a victim. It seems to him that the world is at war against him and he barely agrees with anything. He even measures his friends to the millimeter: any gesture, any detail of the other, he interprets as an attack. It is obsession, jealousy; I think that comes from a great insecurity in oneself, typical of someone who lives in a very small world and also experiences social relationships as a danger. They are the people that we later see on the news having done something atrocious and about whom the neighbors go so far as to say that they seemed like normal people. It is the nature of the lone wolf, those who go out with a knife into the street or those who in the United States climb on the roof and shoot.
“It’s obsession, jealousy; I think that comes from a great insecurity in oneself, typical of someone who lives in a very small world and also experiences social relationships as a danger”
At the end of the book, this tendency to hate manifests itself brutally in the scene in which the character violently attacks his girlfriend. As if he had lost his mind and, furthermore, as if the infatuation that he boasts of was not something true.
Sometimes we tend to think that this happens due to dissociation with reality, but that is not the case. There is enough data to know that all of this responds to a specific relationship and real events… In reality, he is a moral dwarf and identifies with that cruel, lonely character at war against the world. He reads, but he is not a great exquisite; The books come to him thanks to a friend, who is an enlightened person… From him come, for example, the books of Pío Baroja, in whose literature there are individuals who look like him… And he has his girlfriend nearby, whom he hates , just like his mother, who doesn’t like him either because of the world he interacts with and that he doesn’t control. In the end, as is the case with many sexists, what is behind this individual is control and manipulation. What he wants is to control his little world.
“There is a strange virus stuck in the biological heads of some men who cannot stand the feeling of feeling displaced in this situation that is new for them and that implies the advancement of women in society”
He looks out from his balcony, sees the buildings, including the one where his girlfriend lives, as if they were threats and not just people who live in them. When he writes about it, is he thinking only about literature or the life we have around us?
I think about life around me. And as a consequence of life comes literature. Indeed, that building is the incarnation of Yolanda, his girlfriend. Neither cement nor bricks, the building is her girlfriend, whether there is light or not, it has something to do with her, with Yolanda. What is on that facade has a very direct impact on your mood.
He is a manipulator who wants to hurt, and he would hurt anyone. But he says that he is incapable “because I am a coward”…
Yes, it is recognized there. And at another point she admits that she admires a friend because he is very man. That concept of the masculine, that very vulgar machismo, is also present. He has it inoculated in his mind. What I am narrating happened in the 80s, but it is valid here, unfortunately it also happens now. There is a strange virus stuck in the biological heads of some men who cannot stand the feeling of feeling displaced in this situation that is new for them and that implies the advancement of women in society. So they take refuge on the old island where everything is solid and man’s nature is what it is and we must not give up on it. I believe that at this moment there is something of this in society.
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