Everything indicated that Eduardo Mendoza (Barcelona, 1943) was not going to write any more books after finishing the trilogy starring a character named Rufo Batalla who resembled him a bit. Or so he himself had assured. But, of course, the moment came when he thought, "and what do I do during the day if that's what I like?" Then, he told himself, "I'm going to start writing a novel in any way and we'll see." From this has come Tres enigmas para la Organización (Seix Barral), the latest adventure by one of the authors who has most explored contemporary Barcelona and who now dares to do so in one that is crammed with tourists and yachts of super-rich foreigners.
With "the most absolute impudence," as if he were "in injury time, if a goal is scored, fine, and if not, nothing happens," the writer Eduardo Mendoza began to let a plot flow with some detectives who were not at all sexy, clumsy, and bad-tempered, but absolutely charming and human, feeling as free as when he conceived El misterio de la cripta embrujada (1978) or Sin noticias de Gurb (1990). "When I started writing it was as if it wasn't serious, I had already finished, it was someone else doing it who was pretending to be me. I really said I was quitting, therefore, now I'm like a singer who retires but in the summer goes to local festivals and does whatever he wants," he recounts.
Without caring one bit about political correctness, he wanted to give a twist to the detective stories that now abound and have become the most popular genre, although before "they were junk food and somewhat marginal." He, who started with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and every time he stayed home sick as a child read an Agatha Christie novel, has never stopped reading crime and mystery novels ---he always has one on his nightstand---, and is somewhat annoyed that current protagonists take what they have in hand seriously, which is nothing more than an easy excuse to entertain. And he thought: "I'm going to do the same foolishness, but without disguising it, so it's clear it's a blunder."
Eduardo Mendoza has felt as free with Tres enigmas para la Organización as when he wrote El misterio de la cripta embrujada or Sin noticias de Gurb: "Now I'm like a singer who retires but in the summer goes to local festivals and does whatever he wants"The troop that occurred to him officially fits into a governmental organization born during the dictatorship that no one remembers anymore but continues to function, ignored among a morass of "organizations, organisms, and organs."The Organization, as it is called, inhabits an office in the Eixample that is by no means high-class, where an absurd secrecy reigns, destroying all minutes as soon as they are drafted and only trusting the fax because it is boomer, stumbling more than once and making star signings like an ex-convict or a taxi driver who wants to have a podcast. "Not only could an organization like this exist, but I am sure it does. What does it do? I don't know, surely they don't either," declares its literary head.
To make matters worse, Mendoza, who claimed to be retired, decided that fabricating a single case for the Organization to solve was not enough and chose to throw three at them, without an apparent logical relationship, but that's the least of it. "The novel is not based on real events. There's no need to look for meaning outside of it. It is what it is, it begins and ends. I would like it to be read this way, as if a few of us got together to play Monopoly, we go broke or get rich, but when the game ends, we are all the same as at the beginning," he reflects.
He describes everything, and probably lives it, with a caustic humor that oozes from every line of this new novel, as well as in the previous ones. "I always have a good time," he admits, although he warns that the task of being funny is not easy for him, "it's not that I'm always ha, ha, it's a complicated job." "Humor is a bit like cooking, it has its point, if you get too clever, it doesn't work," he details, with a serious face, continuously betrayed by an overly sharp gaze.
Eduardo Mendoza doesn't know if there will be more adventures of the Organization, he would prefer not to because he is afraid of repeating himself, but one shouldn't pay too much attention to him. "Too many times I have said things I shouldn't have said, so now I don't know what will happen," he anticipates. What he does confirm, or not, is that he is not plotting anything new because writing is "like childbirth, time has to pass." "When you finish a book, there's the temptation to start the next one, but you shouldn't do it, you have to let it rest for a while," he says. Besides, he is very busy with the presentations of Tres enigmas para la Organización and he needs order, constancy, and tranquility to get down to business, even knowing that he has at least a week ahead to write: "If I know I have something on Thursday, I'm already limping."