Marcos Giralt Torrente: “I loved my grandfather very much and admired him very much literary, but he was not a superhero”

Family and parenting, art and literature. New book by Marcos Giralt Torrente (Madrid, 1967), one day i will be a memory (Anagrama), brings together texts from different sources on these four questions that often intertwine their perspectives. Relatives such as his grandfather Gonzalo Torrente Ballester or his uncle Gonzalo Torrente Malvido parade his pages, as well as artists of the stature of Matisse and Kurt Schwitters.

— When your previous book was published, shed skin, He mentioned the importance he attaches to the structure and rhythms of the stories gathered in one book. I guess in this one day i will be a memory, which brings together pieces from various sources, will also pay special attention to their selection and order. What can you tell us about that process?

— I considered the structure a kind of thing collage stories. AND collage on paper, it has the advantage that the reader catches all the elements that make it up at the same moment, and can see the uniqueness of each of them and, at the same time, the resulting image that they all create together. IN one day i will be a memory this effect was impossible to achieve, because literature develops in time, not in space. However, he sought the same effect, that each text in the book has an entity of its own, and at the same time, in its interrelationship with other texts, be part of a larger cogwheel, an underground narrative. For this purpose, I had to make a selection of texts with the aim of not only choosing the best among my nonfiction texts, but among them, those who were able to connect with others in that dialogue between art, literature and life. and fatherhood that runs through the book. Because of this, I had to leave out many texts that I liked and that it hurt to remove, but that did not correspond to the spirit of the book. The last stage was to arrange them in a structure that would maintain attention and at the same time follow some kind of progression. The order, subtle, tries to mark a certain circular path. First there is a rush of autobiographical texts, they enter art little by little through my own experience, continue in the same way through literature and finally return to what is more strictly biographical.

— The world of the family and the world of art are presented as broad thematic axes of the book, two areas that, moreover, intertwine on the pages.

— Art, literature, family, fatherhood… These are, indeed, the four axes around which it is structured, and together they form a kind of self-portrait against the light. From my ideas about art and literature (my thoughts about plastic arts can be extrapolated to literature and vice versa) and from some important events of life such as spiritual legacies. This is where family and parenting come into play. This book, like a self-portrait or a collection of hobbies, also has something of the abstract legacy of father to son. That’s why my son appears on the cover, but also because he is one of the protagonists of the text that gives the volume its title, in which I recount the day when in the morning I tried to teach my son courage on the playground and at night I behaved like an absolute coward in the face of inexplicable aggression on literary entertainment.

— In the texts about your aunt Carmen and uncle Gonzalo, use anecdote, psychological portrait, nuance and reflection. How do you organize this raw material to give it a literary form, which sometimes looks almost like a story?

— In the case of those texts, it was, let’s put it this way, easy. The protagonists of both were very close and dear people, with a complex life story, but about which I have weighed a lot throughout my life. Being a storyteller, it’s only natural that when I start to “reflect” on life, that thinking flows in the form of storytelling. I like it that way and promote it as best I can. I polish the text, hone the dose of information, hone the structure… Even more so when it comes to texts that recount events that I haven’t internalized so much.

—The letter to your grandfather Gonzalo deals with his most famous aspect from your relationship with him, a perspective that is reinforced by its vocative nature, almost an interpellation. And it also shows how time and knowledge change our vision of people…

— I literally really like to move in those ambiguities that life offers us and, within it, the most immediate: our loved ones. Bad books, bad movies, provide us with Manichean panoramas of reality in which reality always seems to be either black or white. And it’s not true, if you want to color it, it’s fairest to say that reality goes through different shades of gray. I loved my grandfather very much and have great literary admiration for him. But he wasn’t a superhero, and the aspects in which none of us are superheroes must also surface in any literary approach to the character, even if he’s familial or admirable in other ways.

— Absence is essential in these evoked figures, like that of one of your childhood friends. To what extent does this absence affect, which turns those who were people into ghosts, already inhabiting the memory, in this case materialized in the pages?

— The ghost is a key figure in the literature of all times precisely because of this ambivalence of its condition. Theoretically it is a being that no longer inhabits this world, subject to memory, but for others it can appear, often with a message from that dead world in which it dwells. In this sense, we could say that every person from our past is a ghost to the extent that it appears in our memory. And we already know that memory is “recreational”, modifies us and modifies us, always comes with a message to be deciphered and we always do so in the light of our present experience.

— Another feature present in many texts is the use of revealing details: for example, the gold coin or the exchange of jackets with his uncle. At what point do you recognize how literary these images are, which for others might be just anecdotes, but which the writer turns into key elements of discourse?

— In this, I try to be faithful to Chekhov, although I also think that he abused himself a little by quoting that famous phrase about the nail. Each text, depending on its length and purpose, requires a certain alchemy. Sometimes we need to include just one revealing detail, and sometimes an entire melody is needed. A revealing detail is a detail that somehow summarizes the essence of the text. In that quote of yours, it stands as a symbol of forgiveness. Now, I don’t know how to identify them. What I can tell you is that when I am asked at writing workshops for advice on how to write, I always say that first of all you have to learn to observe, that if you don’t observe, you will never be able to write. That’s actually where everything comes from.

— Another problem is the concept of inheritance, tangible and intangible legacy. I think about my grandfather’s girls, but also about her advice and the consequences of actions or words, sometimes unintentionally. Here is not only its evoking, but also its reception, influence, assimilation or rejection…

—Those legacies I have called spiritual represent baggage that can be very useful when we face our own experience. If they are exemplary and if we assimilate them correctly, they can be very enriching. But even the richest inheritance can sometimes be or, in certain respects, a burden.

— Other texts were written for exhibition catalogs or conferences about artists. What role does their presence play in your life, how does it affect what you write, if at all?

— I grew up surrounded by paintings and through my father, who was a painter, I was introduced to the work of a plastic artist from an early age, which, like that of a writer, is a very lonely job. Thinking about painting, its deep understanding, is the decisive fact of my aesthetic education. Through my father, I could see how the artist’s work “grows”, I witnessed his evolution, his challenges, but also the doubts, crossroads and “mermaid songs” that were planned for him along the way. None of this is very different from the writer’s experience. That’s what I think in one of my favorite texts in the book, My life with Kurt Schwitterswhere I question the calling and function of art.

— He is currently in a literary residency in Catalonia, he writes.

— Right now I’m spending a month in the writers’ residence Sanià, on the Costa Brava. It was opened recently in the house where Truman Capote wrote In cold blood. This is the first time I have dared to be away from home for so long since I became a father (I was fourteen years ago!), and I am trying to make the most of the time, as I am in my usual residence, in Madrid. , exposed to the stresses of life, sometimes it is not so easy for me to find time to write. Using time means, of course, writing, but also reading, thinking, resting… I’m finishing, or trying to, a book that I’ve been writing along with for many years and that was already there when I published the last few. It is about a family book, about my mother’s family, with which I intend to close the biographical cycle that I opened with Time of life.