2023-10-26 18:50:57
Félix G. Modroño has closed his trilogy about Bilbao with the novel that he wanted to write from the beginning, even before dedicating himself to this profession. The 58-year-old Portuguese author had “one unfinished business” since he was fifteen, when he left Euskadi with his family due to the terrorist threat. He never completely left and has returned to narrate crucial moments in the history of Bilbao, the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War. In ‘The City of the Silver Skin’ (Destino) he gives voice to “many people” of his generation through a young engineer who returns to the town after years of exile to work on the Guggenheim.
– Your book begins on August 26, 1983. How did you experience that day?
– I was in the town, about to enroll at the University of Salamanca, and I saw the flood on television as if it were a movie, everything was devastated.
– He had to leave Euskadi as a teenager due to the terrorist threat.
– I left when I was 15 in 1980. My father worked in a construction company that was in Lemoiz, then on the Bilbao-Vitoria highway, and they planted a bomb that luckily they discovered before it exploded in the toilets of the construction sites in Pobes. From then on I had to check the car in the morning, I was afraid… Many people had to leave because living with your family in that environment was very complicated. The peculiarity that Bilbao has is not only its reinvention, but that it was transformed within that framework, that environment. The quiet thoughts of the protagonist continue to be mine, and those of so many others. As a novelist I have wanted to reclaim the space of peace.
– He speaks of a society that “was trying in vain to live with its back to the violence installed in its streets and in its consciences.”
– They were able to restrict our freedom and in my case they succeeded. It scared me. I witnessed an attack in 1979 at the door of my house when I was going to school, they killed a civil guard who was the boyfriend of a neighbor. But I went to class, I tell it in the novel. We lived in silence, you looked away when I didn’t touch you directly. There is a lot of merit in having grown up in that hostile environment and maintaining a bit of sanity. In part it was thanks to the education we received from our parents’ generation, which was very harsh.
– A generation to which you pay tribute.
– It is fundamental, how people from humble towns in Castilla, Galicia or Extremadura came to look for a future for the Basque children they had, to educate them here and give up a little of their roots. In our generation we not only had to face terrorism, but also the loss of identity. We kept going to town in the summers, we were like something else, and suddenly we came back. It is a very literary generation because it accumulates many historical and emotional experiences.
– There are young people who don’t know what happened. Do you think the page has been turned too quickly?
– It makes me very sad, but I understand. When they talked to us about the Civil War it sounded very distant, one tends to forget that type of things. Terrorism was like our civil war when we were kids and now it seems very far away. But recovering historical memory is good.
– Has distance marked your way of seeing Bilbao, does it make you more aware of its virtues and defects?
– It makes me look in a much more evocative way, that’s why my returns are always a party. When I come to Bilbao, I see it with eyes that are absolutely in love.
The book ‘The Guggenheim Effect’
– He says that this story has always been in his head, even before he became a writer.
– I started writing when I was almost 40 years old. I worked in banking and came to see my friends and family, always with that feeling. Every time you saw a poster of those lost, your guts moved a little and you said ‘what a shame that there is still this’, ‘why can’t there be more tolerance’. When I started writing I knew I had unfinished business, a reckoning with my past. This is my ninth novel, I needed a previous journey to get here. I didn’t know very well how to approach it, but about fifteen years ago I read a book by Iñaki Esteban, ‘The Guggenheim Effect’, and that was the germ of the idea. I thought: the Guggenheim needs its own novel because it is a great museum.
– Is there a lot of you in the protagonist?
– Yes, sensations and thoughts. Álvaro Rey, an Idom engineer who was in Gehry’s studio in Santa Monica, helped me build it and told me about his experiences in detail.
– In the novel, Gehry himself receives a letter with threats from ETA.
– Occurred. Álvaro told me, he showed him the letter, although it did not come to light. Not even Vidarte knew, but he told me that Krens had also received threats. They lived with that and, despite everything, it was built. I am very grateful to everyone who has told me about their experiences.
– It portrays a city that is still far from shining, with the chocolate-colored estuary and “dilapidated by the subway works.” It seems like more than 30 years have passed.
– Is incredible. The good thing is that things have never stopped being done and there was a spirit on the part of everyone, society and the authorities, to continue moving forward. Every day there is something new, when it’s not the station it’s a bridge or the La Ribera market. We are a very stubborn society and that has to be noted too.
#peculiarity #Bilbao #reinvent #framework #violence