"We are in full battle. There are only shouts and dust" - The Province

A mosso d'esquadra, with a little holy past, serves Javier Cercas to give a blow in his career, move to the black novel and win the Planet Prize. Obey, he says, to a crisis of an intimate order and a collective one, the one that began to run the 1-O and that changed us all forever.

He assures that who has written this novel is a new Fences. Does that reinvention go through becoming a gender author?

I do not believe that there are major or minor genders, but rather major or minor ways of using gender. But yes, and I find out from the few readers who have read the book, this is how to start over. This is not one of my usual nonfiction novels, there are no obvious metaliterary games ...

... does Javier Cercas not appear as a character?

Not at all. This could be called pure fiction if that exists. And the issues it addresses have nothing to do with the questions I usually ask myself.

Good, The laws of the border and even Soldiers of Salamis They could be read in police code.

Yes, but here I address new issues such as the sense of law and the possibility of justice, which is what moves my protagonist. There is a character in the book that says "absolute justice can be the most absolute of injustices." On that edge the novel moves, how a good thing taken to the extreme can become bad.

His books have always been a good material to analyze and reflect on recent history. Is something like this allowed here?

It is not a police novel to use, but it is true that gender allows everything. When i wrote The shadow monarch, I presented my book in Bot, a small town on the Terra Alta, do you know the area?

As a tourist of the civil war scenarios.

It is a very arid land in poor Catalonia. In my novel, a character states "they only remember us to bombard us". Well, there the car door was forced on me, which made me meet a mosso d'esquadra, a guy from Barcelona transferred there who explained to me that he lived there well but the silence did not let him sleep.

Was it about finding silence in loud times?

That idea appears in the book, of course, but it affected me in a special way. That was in July 2017 and then October arrived. I couldn't write in those months, just anguish myself like everyone else. Because then we live a moment that we never thought we could live. In December I returned to the novel that had already begun and I realized that I was different and the novel was different. I felt a lot of horror around me but paradoxically I felt good, like in an antiatomic shelter.

He retired to the winter quarters of writing.

Something like that. But as soon as I finished the novel I realized that the underlying theme was precisely that feeling.

So inevitably the you process He ended up leaking into the story.

Yes, but it is filtered as fiction. Do you Metamorphosis Is it about a man who becomes a beetle? Man, yes, but fuel is his existential uprooting, his inability to live.

That its protagonist is a mosso who in the past was a criminal, could it be interpreted as a metaphor for the contradictions the body is experiencing?

In making the book I have made many friends in the regional police and they have read the book because I cared that they did. I have met very professional people who have suffered the unspeakable, which has been placed at times in a situation of impossible solution.

After the announcement of the award, it did not give the feeling of wanting to talk much about politics.

I have already spoken to satiety. And it seemed disrespectful to the prize and my books. I understand that there are people who can disrespect my books, it would only be lacking, because that's why I publish them, but I'm not going to miss it.

What do you think of the sentence?

Have you read it?

Not yet.

Well, I have read it, but I will not value it because it seems premature to do so. When they ask me, especially abroad, that if I am going to write about this I say that it is too soon. Now we are in full battle, there are only screams and dust. We do not know what this means, how it has affected our lives. It has changed me without me having made the effort, it has been reality that has reinvented me.

Does it weigh you too much to have come to the fore?

I'm telling you the truth? Absolutely. It only bothers me or it hurts if it has weighed my family, which is fantastic. I would like to have hurt her. But I have not known how not to do it. My son sometimes reproaches me for not hiding my opinions, because "everyone does it."

Have you felt currency exchange between Penguin Random House and Planet?

I'm stunned when they talk about it. Penguin Random House has dedicated a collection to me. All my books are there. This week I wrote for them a prologue. My editor, Miguel Aguilar, understood perfectly that this book is something different from what I usually do.

Did you warn them, therefore?

Of course. And they understood. Someone told me that Miguel Aguilar was sad, but if he wasn't, I would be pissed off. They have behaved like gentlemen. I can only say that I don't know where my next book will appear.