Every time I return to Madrid, like now when I return with enthusiasm to present my novel “The Golpistas”, published by Galaxia Gutenberg, I wonder why I don’t live in that city as a full-time writer and prefer to live on an island in Miami, enjoying the benefits of the climate, sleeping until one in the afternoon as if I were on vacation all the time or already retired, stubbornly appearing on television, without stopping writing fiction, a job for which I was born.
More than three decades ago, when I was not yet a writer, when I dreamed of being a writer, I moved to Madrid with the suicidal determination to spend all my savings, no less money that I had amassed thanks to my appearances on television, dedicating myself exclusively to writing a novel. I spent a winter, a spring and a summer in Madrid, near Retiro Park, occupying the guest room in the apartment of a friend, a wise writer who was like a father to me, who gave me advice: “Whatever you do, try to be your own boss, the owner of your time, and not an employee who can be fired.” Writing the novel in a notebook, I then felt that I was my own boss, the boss of my time, of the plot, of the characters and the dialogues, I felt the insolent freedom of playing at being a little vengeful god, recreating the world in my own way. Those months in Madrid, writing with my insides burning, with an incessant fire in my gut, settling scores with my enemies, I felt in a powerful and unequivocal way that I was condemned to be a writer. It wasn’t a choice. It was a tragic destiny, an unequal battle, a lost war.
I should have stayed in Madrid, as my friend advised me. I had enough money to write for a couple more years, without subjecting myself to the rigors of a job outside my vocation. My balls failed me. I thought: if I stay in Madrid, I’m going to squander all my money, no publisher is going to publish my novel, I’m going to have to look for a job. My friend, who owns an academic publishing house, offered to hire me as his assistant. He was a noble, generous, loyal man. However, I did not have the papers to work in Madrid. He had entered with a tourist visa whose term had expired. He was undocumented.
Meanwhile, the novel progressed as if it were carefully designing a time bomb. More than a novel, it was a conspiracy. I wanted to ambush those who had hurt me: my homophobic parents, my homophobic priests, my homophobic lovers. It was not a happy novel because happy novels have never interested me. It was sad and bitter, insolent and scoundrel, like life itself. I wanted it to end as our lives usually end: with desperate melancholy, without understanding why everything that happened happened.
I should have stayed in Madrid. I had to rent an apartment near the Retiro, continue writing as if the future were a fiction, blow up my savings in the wild celebration of being a full-time writer, risk everything for the utopia of being my own boss. My balls failed me. I was terrified of running out of funds and being forced to look for a job. I didn’t have faith in myself as a writer, I thought that no one would publish those fires. And suddenly the owners of a television station in Miami called me and offered me a program.
I didn’t want to live in Miami, doing television. I wanted to live in Madrid, as a full-time writer. That’s the truth. But I was afraid of finding myself without money, of my novel being ignored by Spanish publishers, of ending up serving drinks in a bar to earn a living. And the offer from the Miami channel was great: a talk show that would bear my name, generous financial compensation, a work visa, a new car. But the best thing was that the owners of the television station gave me absolute freedom to do whatever I wanted with the program. It was not a simple decision, free of doubts. If I was brave and unbribable, I should stay in Madrid, finish the novel and look for a publisher. If I was cynical and calculating, it was better to go to Miami, become famous, earn good money and continue writing the novel. It was a battle between my dreams and my worldly desires, between my quixotic ideals and the bills to pay. I agonized for weeks, trying to save the writer, fearing he would drown in the ocean of television frivolities. In the end I gave up. I accepted Miami’s offer. I silenced the writer to give voice to the television journalist.
Not because the program in Miami was successful could I say that I was successful too. I failed. I stopped writing the unfinished novel. The television circus completely fascinated me. The torrent of words he said on television were perhaps the words he stopped writing. In other words, the fame and fortune that television brought me were poisons that put the writer to sleep. I resigned myself to thinking that I would become a celebrity, a figurehead. I calculated: I will be rich, I will be famous, I will live in a mansion, I will buy a yacht. Then I remembered: but I will never be the writer I wanted to be, because I sold myself to television. I then felt like a sellout, a mercenary. The copious money from television had left the writer lethargic and silent. On sleepless nights, I thought: I should have stayed in Madrid, the money is of no use to me if I carry the sadness of being a frustrated writer.
The writer was injured, but not dead. Two years later, having saved a good amount of money, I told the television to go to hell and disappeared from the map, determined to finish the novel I started in Madrid. For reasons of papers, and because I was pursuing a love, I did not return to Madrid. I took refuge in Washington, near Georgetown University, where my girlfriend was studying for a master’s degree. I wrote again. The writer came out of a deep coma, was reborn, rediscovered his own voice. I no longer wrote in a notebook, now I did it on a computer. I spent two more years writing the vengeful novel in which I mercilessly executed all my enemies. I didn’t have to look for a job, because I lived off my savings, without depriving myself of anything. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was willing to spend all my money on the dream of publishing that novel against all odds. I thought: I will finish it, I will publish it and, if I run out of money, I will return to Miami, to television.
And so it was. The novel that I started one winter in Madrid, and left unfinished to sell my soul in Miami, and resumed two years later in Washington, was published by a publishing house in Barcelona and, against all odds, it was successful, which left me amazed. Once my wife graduated, our daughter was born, the novel was published, with few dollars in the bank, I understood that I had to return to television in Miami. I came back driving a truck, with all the furniture inside, and my wife next to me, teaching me French.
Since then, and more than three decades have passed, I return to Madrid every year, ideally to present a novel and sign books at the Retiro fair, and I remember with emotion that it is there where everything good began, where I jumped into the void of being a writer, without knowing if the parachute would open. Well, it opened and I fell dead. Because I have published many novels, perhaps too many, first in Seix Barral, then in Anagrama, then in Planeta, then in Alfaguara and now in Galaxia Gutenberg, where I plan to stay, if they support me, until the end of time, and they have all come out in Spain and America, as they have now released “Los Golpistas”.
Apparently, it was possible to write a novel every two or three years and, without mortally wounding the writer, work on television. I thought that to be a writer I had to hide from television. I was wrong. Now I think that my experience as a journalist on American television perhaps enriched my voice as a writer. Now I believe that, thanks to the fact that I have been a journalist since I was fifteen, I am also a writer. For the rest, the money I have earned on television has allowed me to write without worrying so much about money and its odious servitudes. Now that I return to Madrid, one afternoon I will ring the doorbell of the apartment of my wise friend, who hosted me thirty-five years ago and has since died, and I will tell his daughter: “If one day you sell this apartment, please write to me, I dream of buying it, because this is where all the good things began.”
