"A gin and tonic. The soft gin. Spices if you want, but, please, with moderation. So it doesn't look like I'm sticking my head in a julienne soup."
It's getting dark when Carlos Zanón arrives at the bar and orders his drink with a kind smile and his gaze fixed on different places, some of which are here, but not all, because there is only one head and the open fronts are many.
"I am a writer ---he asserts---. Only that. I don't know how to do anything else well. My head is messy and I barely know how to do anything that isn't fiction. I write novels, poems, articles, record and book reviews," explains someone we all know is something more, much more, than he says: nothing less than the commissioner of BCNegra, one of the most prestigious festivals dedicated to crime fiction in Europe, a position inherited from the hand of the mythical and longed-for Paco Camarasa.
The most significant thing is that Carlos has gotten where he is on his own. "What I have hasn't been because of having godfathers, because of selling my soul to the devil, because of pleasing the master." From a working-class family, this fifty-something Barcelonian who defines himself as "obsessive, very competitive and, I suppose, increasingly unbearable," is proud of not having incurred debts with anyone.
I was Johnny Thunders, and also Pepe Carvalho
When it comes to talking about key moments, those that change your life, your perspective, your goals, your roadmap, he cites three: "Writing Tarde, Mal y Nunca and it reaching the hands of Rosa Mora and Paco Camarasa; when I won the Hammett for Yo fui Johnny Thunders and when I signed with Editorial Salamandra."
Curiously, he doesn't talk about that suicidal mission in which he enlisted with the blind recklessness of a mercenary in the Congo jungle to emerge, besides alive, unarmed and victorious: to pick up a burning torch like that of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's mythical Carvalho, and bring him back to life through Problemas de Identidad; a reinvention of the mythical detective who (allegedly) killed Kennedy, who masterfully avoided a mimicry that would have condemned the project to a seismic failure and, instead, managed to maintain the basic essences of this character so Barcelonian and, at the same time, so universal.
The narrated city, the lived city
"There are many Barcelonas, and two languages to make them speak," says the author of works as local as No Llames a Casa or Taxi, before wishing "that the capital of Catalonia would move to Girona and leave us Barcelonians alone for a bit."
Carlos Zanón says he doesn't love his city. He doesn't even know if he likes it, he assures. "Now I like it better, when not everyone says it's wonderful and rich and greedy. I like it now that they call it ugly, old, sick. A city is people here and now." And he likes it more now that "it's neither Catalan enough for some, nor Spanish enough for others."
Be that as it may, the tough, inhospitable, cruel, sharp, cunning, treacherous, rheumatic Barcelona that Carlos describes —that he writes about— has managed to win the interest, if not the love, of thousands of readers around the world. A city lived in nameless days and endless nights, explained with meticulous truth by someone who denies being a night owl, but masters the embers of our humid and gloomy metropolitan dawn.
With a special dislike for its "idle and uncultured bourgeoisie, its classist supremacism and the dregs of its local quinquería," to illustrate how he sees the city, he refers to the eloquence of a historical episode: "In the civil war, the anti-aircraft guns placed on Carmel mountain were intended to defend the city from Italian aviation supporting Franco. They never shot down any plane. But, in their eagerness to defend the city, the ammunition they fired fell on it. That is, both those who attacked it and those who defended it harmed it. That is very Barcelona."
---Are you going to have anything else?
---Yes, another Gin and Tonic---, he asks, as he takes out a pack of blond tobacco to go out and smoke.
---And then, do you want to have dinner?
---Come on.
---I have a menu and also very tasty portions today.
--- Menu, please. The portion thing, like snacking at a bar, I don't understand. I like to sit down to eat.
---We also have combined dishes.
---The combined dish is something that should be directed to the Penal Code.