"From a literary point of view, I avoid analyzing myself too much. I would only tell you that I don't consider myself especially imaginative, but rather an intuitive writer. I think I connect things well." Álex Chico sips his freshly poured beer, while the notes of Crazy feeling by Lou Reed fill the incipient nightfall of the Bar. "A bit like the 'delusions of relation' that Sebald alluded to," he adds. And he laughs, leaning on the bar.
"Writing gives you a patina of protection, it wraps you in a cloak of autofiction that allows you to be more comfortable in a reality that kills, and from which writing can save you," he reasons. And that explains, at least in part, the work of an author who always relies on realities ---factual or perceived--- as a handhold on which to build poems and novels where the synapses established in his head form the physiognomy of the story.
Born in 1980 and of Plasencia descent, Álex debuted at the age of twenty-eight with the poetry collection La tristeza del eco and, since then, he has been accumulating a literary corpus that includes various poetry collections and essays, a personal literary guide to his city ---Barcelona, mapa infinito--- and several novels of what he calls "fiction essay." Titles such as Los nombres impares or Un final para Benjamin Walter in which the obsession with real characters and events intertwined within the framework of a fiction that feeds on infinite literary and cultural references converge.
In this sense, his recently published new work, Geografía escrita (Candaya), transcends the condition of a travel book to delve into the literary panoramas of Roberto Arlt, Pessoa, Alfred Döblin, Capote or Mónica Ojeda. Walks through Guayaquil, Buenos Aires, Quito, Berlin, Lisbon... Streets, landscapes and people described through the pens that glossed them. From the eyes that loved them, from the skins that lived them, from the ears that heard their rumors, and captured all that on paper.
Adolescent epiphany
When he was six years old, Álex Chico would wake up early in the morning and go into the living room "to draw and write small stories." When he was fifteen, during one of those long and tedious summers, some volumes from the Alianza 100 series fell into his hands. There he experienced two literary epiphanies: "reading The Childhood of a Leader, by Sartre, and shortly after The Pursuer by Cortázar, through which I also ended up entering the world of be bop through Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie."In high school, he wrote poems and song lyrics and, suddenly, at seventeen, everything aligned. He had it clear. "It was a golden moment, a time full of stimuli in which I started writing a lot and began to glimpse a future as a writer, at all levels." It was like clearly connecting with the purpose of his existence.
"I ended up studying Hispanic philology in Salamanca and there I went from being the weirdo for being the one who wrote to the weirdos being the ones who didn't write," he laughs. Since 2005, he has been teaching in a high school and practicing literary criticism for the magazine Quimera, of which he is part of the editorial board, "although in November the current members of the board are going to leave the editorial staff, which will be taken over by other people who will give it another approach. It is always necessary to renew projects of this type."
And, of course, above all, he continues to write, keeping himself safe from that world that kills. "Right now, in addition to a new collection of poems, I am working on a new fiction essay focused on the figure of the artist Ricard Opisso," he announces, regarding one of Barcelona's most illustrious cartoonists and graphic chroniclers.
Una discussió entranyable
"Barcelona is the city that has shaped my way of seeing the world, the one that accepts me the most and rejects me the most, the one that has made me enjoy the most and suffer the most, the place I want to return to when I am somewhere else," explains the parishioner, who has also lived in Plasencia and Granada. "Barcelona is, as Josep Pla describes it, a heartwarming discussion".The city, which has a presence throughout the author's work, is the object of his adoration, although, like a good Barcelonian, he cannot avoid that partial component of hatred, "for its ruthless forgetfulness, for how it forgets many of the names that have cemented it, remembering only a few and ignoring all the others," he laments, finishing his beer in a last gulp and rolling a cigarette that he is going to go outside to smoke.
--- What should not fall into this forced amnesia is the gastronomic offer of this Bar. I don't know if, given the time it is, you'll feel like having something from the menu for dinner, some tapas or a sandwich…
Álex Chico smiles. The festive rhythm of Centro di gravità permanente by Franco Battiato hovers over the atmosphere of the place. The night gets livelier.
--- Come on, I'll have some tapas--- decides the writer, affectionately recalling his time in the best and worst bars of Granada.