"Breakfast, you say? For me, it's already lunchtime." The writer Aro Sáinz de la Maza laughs. He wakes up every dawn around four, "sometimes, depending on what phase what I'm writing is in, at three." It's now half past ten in the morning and lunch is far off for him. "A sparkling water," he asks, sitting on the Bar's terrace to accompany the drink with a La Paz cigarillo. Then ---he announces, regarding whether he will eat something, and what---, we'll see.
--- Well, no matter how early you go to bed, you must not sleep much.
--- Yes, I sleep little, but I sleep well ---he replies, satisfied.
"I was a strange creature, but it was the others who seemed strange to me," he explains about a solitary childhood and adolescence marked by monumental shyness. A stage in which he became engrossed in the world of books until, at fifteen, and to his family's astonishment, he already knew he was going to be "simply a writer, because literature is my refuge, the territory from which I, who don't fit in with almost anything in my environment, can deal with reality."
He confesses that he tried to quit up to three times, "to have a more or less normal life, but fate conspired so that I wouldn't quit, because no more than two days after each of those times, an irrefutable offer would come to me that would lead me back to writing." Providential offers that have allowed the author, who treasures a corpus of about forty works, to improve the lives of thousands of readers with powerful characters like Inspector Milo Malart, of whom he is writing the fifth installment, and whose cathodic version will soon see the light on Netflix with Ciudad de sombras.
At the same time, Destino has just reissued his second novel, La mujer de Judas, originally published in 1998. "It is one of the books I am most proud of. Its strength and its good endurance over time still surprise me. In it are all the ingredients that have defined the rest of my work." Perhaps that's why he has complicated his life a bit more –"writers are like flies, we hit the glass again and again"– and starts a series based on the protagonist of that novel, Jabo Ciendones, "who is like the reverse of Malart."
The next installment is also cooking and will arrive after the inspector's fifth adventure because this is, essentially, non-stop. An atavistic need to get into new troubles, avoiding comfortable formulas, and that is, where is the fun in jumping into a pool knowing beforehand that it is full? At this point, the writer quotes a maxim from Ecclesiastes that he has made his own: "If we are to live the fate of the fool, why then be sensible?" And he laughs again.
The light called Beatriz
In Bárbara, Aro Sáinz de la Maza found his accomplice, the best friend of his life, "the woman who, for the first time, made me feel that I fit into something, beyond my personal world, and who has been an inexhaustible source of support, faith, and trust." The moment of writing La mujer de Judas coincided with one of the happiest of his life, when their daughter, Beatriz, was born. "She changed me completely, because she is also very social, and that led me to learn to be more sociable, more open, to overcome my shyness." And his gaze, his gestures, do not deceive. "My daughter is my light and has given me life," he says, not only with words. "Now she has given it back to me by making me a grandfather."
--- All this, how did your parents experience the fact that you were so clearly a writer?
The parishioner sips a drink of sparkling water. "When I was young they didn't understand it and tried to make me study other things, but that made no sense." He takes a few seconds, and continues. "Then, in 2001 I wrote the young adult novel El jugador de frontón and my father, who was already old and very cognitively deteriorated, fell in love with that story that took him back to his youth, when he played frontón." And he remembers, there also with words, gaze and gestures full of affection, that man who had learned entire passages of a story he lived as his own. "And I realized at that moment the great power of writing to improve things."
Like one of the family
For the writer, Barcelona is "like one of the family, whom if I criticize it is guided by affection, but never by hatred." It is also a character with a strong presence in his work, as is the case with the Malart novels, although it was not always so. As a young man, he detested it, because he felt pressured and suffocated by its streets and its people. "But when Beatriz was little and we started to sail through it together, I fell in love with this city that is, at the same time, kind, rogue, ungrateful, generous and full of all colors. That it is alive. That, moreover, has light and sea. That it is at the same time infinite, but with an ideal size. And that it has the best possible urban development, which seems simple, but, as in all simple things, behind these there is always a very complicated process."
--- What also has a lot of work behind it is our gastronomic offer. In case you finally decide. Despite the time, we can make you a menu, a combined dish, some portions…
Aro Sáinz de la Maza cannot contain a laugh. "If I'm honest, I have a purely functional relationship with food. For me it would be ideal if we could feed ourselves in a few seconds with astronaut food! Besides, I don't like sauces or spicy food or frills in general. I don't like stridency and I am very, very conventional."
--- Man, but you'll eat a little rice, won't you?
And there his face changes.
--- I love rice in all its forms, so of course I do.
And he smiles under the spring sun that, accompanied by a light breeze, bathes the terrace of the Bar.