"I have never been obsessed with a single issue; rather, I am interested in many diverse topics, I am a tastaolletes," laughs journalist and writer Alba Muñoz at the bar, as she sips a gimlet and lets Mulatu Astatke's vibraphone set the rhythm of the conversation, as the night takes shape and fills the Bar with its faces, secrets, and essences.
A vocational chronicler, indefatigably restless and, as dictated by the canons of the best journalistic tradition, a seeker of quagmires to get fully into, Alba Muñoz shies away from the temptations and comforts of stability. "It doesn't interest me, I don't like to get bored, and I am satisfied to have known how to accept this adventurous nature, sacrificing an accommodating slavery to be the owner of my time. It is something I have fought for and continue to fight for a lot, like any freelancer in this country, but it is my way of life and I wouldn't want another."
In her early twenties, freshly graduated, she already knew that she was not going to end up macerating "in a newsroom of dinosaur journalists." She wanted to move, hit the streets, travel far in search of great stories: "With boots and a laptop, I could conquer the world."
Her blue-interrogative gaze shines, living with the same intensity that promise she made to herself almost two decades ago and which she has been able to fulfill in these years, working as an independent reporter in various parts of the world for mastheads such as El País, the BBC, or El Mundo, "and touching many journalistic fields, although I have ended up specializing in chronicles and documentaries." Her debut work in the genre, Now you are a woman, won the audience award at the FIRE!! festival in 2019, and the regular warns that she is preparing new projects.
The story arrived in extra time
Fresh out of journalism school, Alba Muñoz received a gift from her mother: "She paid for a university expedition to Bosnia, where a few novice journalists and I went in a van, looking for stories." During the three weeks of that trip, she spoke with countless people of all kinds about the traces of a war that still weighed a decade and a half after its end; she looked for "that big story that was going to catapult me to the top of the journalistic establishment," she laughs. But there was no way. It seemed that the scoop eluded her until the last night, just hours before having to get on the van to return to Barcelona. "That night I met Darko, a prototype of a Balkan bad boy, with whom I fell in love. Without thinking, I got into a taxi and went with him because I felt that, if I did, I would finally find that story worth telling." And it arrived, in extra time.
"A few days later, through Darko, I came into contact with a secret apartment where women who had been victims of sexual exploitation were taking refuge. Then I knew I had found what I was looking for," but that coverage ended up yielding much more than a report. "Many things moved inside me that had to do with me, with my life, with my relationship with family, with friends." And she talked about it with the then head of international news for La Vanguardia, Félix Flores. "He told me that the real story was in what was behind the story, in that vital adventure."
It was then that Alba Muñoz decided to sacrifice the report and give it enough time to mold it, breathe it, chew it, digest it, until it took another form that has ended up being the book she has just published, Polilla (Alfaguara): a novel of absolute non-fiction that reflects those days of love, violence, fear, rapture, and danger in a Sarajevo plagued by poorly healed shadows and passions of all kinds, low and high. A world lived, remembered, suffered, and enjoyed that oscillates between heaven and light and sewers and darkness.
Driven to constant forgetfulness
Somehow, the journalist remains in love with a turn-of-the-century Barcelona that was a haven for anarchists and spiritualists. That bourgeois and port city, full of prostitutes and shopkeepers, mystical and prodigious, which in 1888, in addition to hosting the Universal Exhibition, also hosted the International Spiritualist Congress, while the shape of the Rose of Fire was forming until it deflagrated in a Tragic Week that would mark the soul of European anarchism of the last century. That is the Barcelona she likes to think about.
"But it has ceased to be spontaneous," she laments. "It is being colonized by massive tourism that kills its street soul and ends up being an urban stage for people who come to party and exhausted people trying to survive and still afford to live here." And she sips the last drop of her gimlet, before declaring: "That leads Barcelonans to a constant amnesia." And, caught in a reflective silence, she rolls a Golden Virginia cigarette to go out and smoke on the street.
---What cannot succumb to amnesia, because it is impossible to forget, is the quality of our gastronomic offer, in case you want to try some portion, as we still have the kitchen open.
A crooked smile appears on Alba Muñoz's face, who has just rolled her cigarette with parsimony and, after a few seconds, determines: "At this time of night, with the nuts you put with the cocktails, I'm good." And she goes out to the street, but at the threshold of the Bar's entrance she stops, turns around and, almost speaking over the notes of Mulatu's Way to nice, asks:
---That's right, with the nuts, give me another gimlet!