Carmen Rigalt: "Journalism today is a joke, and people no longer believe in it"

It's going to be a bitter interview ---I announced. Normal, having just finished Carmen Rigalt's Noticias de mi vida, a book of "loose and deliberately jumbled memories" that she decided to write in the silence of the pandemic, recovering from a heart attack: "They had fired me from the newspaper (El Mundo, which after 30 years billed her with a stroke of a pen or a 30-second encounter with its current director, in the midst of post-infarction depression the columnist), and I owed a book for 15 years to the publisher (Planeta)." Rigalt, a grand dame of mundane chronicles and any chronicle, and also of interviews (also and much to her chagrin, because she disavows the genre and considers it impossible: will she be a traitor?); known for her biting verb, the sharp touch of her adjectives, her accuracy in speaking and the eloquence of her silences, couldn't think of anything better to do.

But any prediction would fall short. The interview or the genre in which she no longer believes ended in tears of nostalgia (I will ask Planeta if this is included in the lot, the tears): enveloped in that mist that begins to creep into August mornings and evenings, pressing the rewind button of time. It happens every year, it's not news, but for those of us born in September, the white thickness of its light plunges us into nothingness. Carmen Rigalt (Vinaixa, Lleida, September 13, some 70 years ago): a Catalan woman who is not at all pro but irremediably Catalan.

In the book in question, we find a woman victim of many more phobias than were known about her, from her chronicles, such as the elevator of her publishing house in Barcelona (she was a Planeta finalist for Mi corazón que baila con espigas), the tunnels of the peripheral ring roads or planes without benzodiazepines (on one occasion she fled down the aisle when the flight attendants were already raising gadgets to the rhythm of their mime, and this is told in the profession). But you used to pull out your eyelashes one by one out of fear, since you were a child, and you suffer from agoraphobia! How many more unconfessed, Carmen?

"They can be enumerated, but it's better not to count them. I was a very nervous child, they continuously took me to the doctor and kept me in bed as long as possible, while they gave me those Luminaletas that... Yes, that could be the origin of everything. And when my grandfather died, I was 8 years old, I pulled out my eyelashes for the first time. I suppose agoraphobia is the mother of all my phobias, but now they are placated, latent: there are many things I don't do so as not to awaken them."

--- There is also a young journalist striving to make it, and this is perhaps more shocking, given that you have always boasted about your indolence. Pardon?

--- I don't recognize myself there. I have always liked to write and I have fought to do things; but I am very indolent, in many ways.

Carmen Rigalt was, indeed, the queen of the indolent interview, until she resigned back in 1995, because it tired her, she said. She had invented a genre that many later emulated, few came close to her (let's just remember her chat and cigar with Mariano Rajoy, still a minister, or the tie of a Jorge Valdano without talking about football). It's not easy to hide the anger when Rigalt herself now says that "journalism is at odds with the interview" and, although she may be right in a strict sense, can you swear that you never found anyone behind so many characters? (although what I would like to ask her is: what the hell are you and I doing here on a summer Sunday afternoon?!)

"I have a very bad opinion of the interview: it's a genre that is very poorly cultivated today. There was a time, that of the Sunday supplements, with Sol Alameda, Rosa Montero and so on, when they were done well, but that ended: magazines implemented very rigid formats in which it is impossible to do a good piece, and newspapers despise them."

Carmen Rigalt was the queen of the indolent interview, until she resigned back in 1995, because it tired her

In this disorder of memories, the renegade interviewer talks about a time when journalism was a tribal affair("Pick up that phone!, damn it, it could be news!", it was shouted in newsrooms, we have all heard it).Is journalism still possible?"To me, it seems like a joke, it seems very strange to me that it exists. People no longer believe in journalism." There was a time when those Sunday supplements began to resemble an advertising catalog, "yes, now the ads are not for washing machines but for ideas; you find an ad for UNHCR, let's say, and you can't distinguish it from the report on the next page." Until ending up today in this uppercase, political or financial journalism, so programmatic, "yes, and uniform. Parliamentary chronicles no longer have substance or are vibrant, they are contained and identical to each other."

Carmen, a masthead, a medium, has always been an attempt at power, but what happens when it is only that, a center of power and nothing more? "A newspaper has to be a center of power, it is from the moment it is founded. Now I don't know where they are going or where they are arriving. I don't understand it either."

"A newspaper has to be a center of power, it is from the moment it is founded. Now I don't know where they are going or where they are arriving"

No answer. Let's talk about his book then, as the master would say (Paco Umbral, his greatthreshold, noun). What did you want to write in these news of yours, which you say are an attempt to "settle accounts with my past"? "I have tried to explain myself to myself. And those who know me say that I am the one in the book, always suffering.And this makes me wonder: is it true that I have suffered so much? Well, yes.I come from a Victorian family in which I always found myself out of place, always running away in search of small spaces of freedom. I was already a child swimming against the current; at 8 years old I would run away from home, and when they sent me to boarding school, 5 minutes from where we lived in Barcelona (Mercedarian nuns, early 60s), I felt freer than in my own family. And the worst part is that I later recognized myself in that family; in fact, I participated with Rosa Villacastín in a book by Ymelda Navajo titledHelp!: I'm starting to look like my mother.She and I never verbalized the love we had for each other, nor did we understand it, and the day she died I cried so much... Because I had never told her I loved her, we never talked about those things.I felt like a wretch. I have cried a lot writing this book." And she continues to do so, right now; the outline of her eyes, which only half see what they look at, has reddened behind her large, heavy glasses that magnify everything. Silence: "I was even afraid to think."

--- Carmen, did that fierce self-criticism about your family, and about yourself (you define yourself as "dry and untamed"), give you the experience to be such a fine chronicler?

--- My father was very scathing. Perhaps I inherited it. But the Lorca-esque family I refer to is my mother's, with whom we usually identify more. And I have to admit that I have turned out like that lineage, what can we do.

--- Continuing with the chronicle, Umbral used to say that to insult without offending, one had to write very well, because a well-placed mockery does not offend. Do you think you have had that carte blanche to ironize?

--- I don't know. I remember the first time I did a pirouette to write something not correct, in Pueblo. I used the verb "escoñarse" (to screw up) in an article and the next day some colleagues protested because I had been allowed such a thing, "you don't let others get away with it," they said... I don't know how to answer you.

"I was already a rebellious child, at 8 years old I ran away from home, and when they sent me to boarding school, 5 minutes from where we lived in Barcelona, I felt freer than in my own family"

Rigalt paints in her disordered memoirs an austere, inexpressive Catalonia, like the image of her grandmother Mariana in the mirror. Vinaixa, where Lleida meets high Tarragona, land of olive oil, a strenuous and harsh landscape under the unremitting cold. Wasn't this surly character of Catalans a cliché? "No, it's real.My grandmother was a dry lady who made us enter the house with our hands behind our backs so as not to stain the walls.And my grandfather, from Tivissa, there where the nationalists crossed the Ebro, was very severe; he had one daughter who was a teacher in Scala Dei (the most rugged, depopulated, and miserable Priorat then) and another, who joined the Sección Femenina and lived with another lady in Madrid, but back then nothing was said about those things."

She flees Barcelona, barely sets foot in it; after winters in boarding school comes university in Pamplona, and from there she picks up speed towards Madrid. And she still says that "Barcelona never seemed like a good place to live to me." Was Madrid, or is it? "No, not either. But when I first arrived in Barcelona, I came from Zaragoza, where my father had set up a soap factory, and I went straight to boarding school, and the few times I went out into the street I wondered: will there be children here? I barely went home some Sundays, to eat, and that question always accompanied me: where will there be children who can be my friends?"

She never found them then. And she ended up establishing her group and her family in Las Rozas de Madrid, like Umbral and María España, and others, for example, she often mentions the Pérez Rubalcaba and Pilar Goya, the women always with their first names even if we write the women.

--- I open quotes to finish: "I never gave myself the opportunity to be happy." How can you formulate something like that? Isn't it unfair to your loved ones?

--- I don't have an explanation, but it's true. And my small family, that is, the one one brings into the world, cannot boast of being very affectionate either. We never kiss, we have never treated each other with affection, and we have been grumpy. Antonio (her husband) and one of my children are absolute thistles. And me, what do you want me to tell you, I admit that I am rather unpleasant and not very affectionate.

I will not end by saying that Carmen Rigalt says these things and remains so unconcerned, as one imagines her when reading her. No, Rigalt continues with reddened corneas, and this seems like a funeral of old friends. See you soon, I'm leaving too, to continue crying elsewhere.