Fiction is a comfort in the face of reality

With a unique stylistic approach, Diego Ameixeiras (Lausanne, 1976), a prolific narrator and a true hidden gem of crime fiction, delivers a tour de force in Un anarquista (AlRevés), an immersive fictionalized narrative about the Scala Case that, more than being read, grabs the reader by the neck to drag them through its thrilling narrative currents. The result is a fresco of a Barcelona straddling one regime and the next, where everything is possible, the best and the worst.

Free love, life on the margins, a world of comics, expansive drugs, strident music, and collective couplings, but also of violence, blood, state terrorism. Of steppe wolves who, knowing they are at their last, die killing so that those above may shed their skins for those of lambs.

--- Let's start from the beginning, for those who don't yet know Diego Ameixeiras. Tell us in your own words who you are and what you've been doing in life.

--- Well, I'm a writer and journalist. My job fundamentally consists of writing. It's my way of relating to the world, and I try to do it in the best possible way. Fiction is a comfort against reality. I've always really liked the settings of noir novels, which is why most of my stories belong to that genre. I'm quite a mythomaniac. What I would really have liked to have done in life is move to Hollywood in the 1940s with Barbara Stanwyck or Gloria Grahame, but I haven't managed it.

--- You have to explain to me how a Galician living in Santiago de Compostela has managed to give birth to such a profoundly Barcelonan novel, capturing so many nuances of the city. And don't tell me you have good informants!

--- That's how it is! People are very generous when they tell you their experiences. A lot has been written about Barcelona, and many of the writers I admire have set their novels in a city that has always welcomed me very well. During the writing process of the novel, I dedicated myself to reviewing those voices... and in many cases, of course, discovering them. They have managed to reveal the soul of streets that are literarily inexhaustible. One always writes trying to emulate their favorite authors. It's a form of gratitude.

--- And how did the idea of writing about the Scala Case and the libertarian environment of the time come to you?

--- I have always been very interested in the historical moment of the Transition, perhaps because I was born just after Franco's death. The Scala Case is one of those dark episodes that do not fit into an official history that tells us about years of great consensus and reconciliations, when in reality things were very different. In the streets there were people fighting tooth and nail against what the deep State was organizing, an operation that we could summarize with the well-known phrase from The Leopard: "Everything must change so that everything remains the same." There were unimaginable advances in a short time, of course. Many burdens were shed, but a democracy full of holes was also built.

"I have always been very interested in the historical moment of the Transition, perhaps because I was born just after Franco's death"

--- Well, I would have liked to, but his death prevented me. Yes, he is one of the names, along with that of the police infiltrator Joaquín Gambín, that always come to mind when the event is discussed. His book El Caso Scala: terrorismo de Estado y algo más reveals a tough and sometimes contradictory character. He was very young at that time, like almost everyone involved in a tremendously unfortunate event. Let's not forget that the Scala fire claimed the lives of four workers. Cañadas' testimony was very useful to me in writing the novel.

--- In your book, the fascist attack on El Papus is mentioned, attributed at the time to a non-existent Spanish Triple A, and which, like the Scala Case, also has all the hallmarks of state terrorism…

--- Yes, the entire social and political context of the novel responds to real episodes. The State was up to its tricks, of course. That attack you cite is paradigmatic. Many influential people didn't want jokes and were willing to take action. Checking the level of political violence of those years, by reviewing the newspaper archives, is surprising. Especially if one thinks that everyone, after Franco's death, was hugging in the street and singing Libertad sin ira. Well, no.

--- The novel also represents a quite radical stylistic gamble. There are no paragraph breaks, and that, contrary to all prejudice, manages to drag the reader along the current of the story. How it flows! Explain to me a little more deeply the whys and hows of this narrative audacity.

--- The novel includes some sections that approach historical chronicle or reportage. I wanted the leap from fiction to that other type of narrative procedure to be as natural as possible, so I decided to take a risk: not to use paragraph breaks, to use three different voices, and to expand the text without restraint. My goal was for the text to offer the reader a certain feeling of a forest in which they immerse themselves and cannot leave. Also, that they should be clear that this strategy requires an almost continuous reading. I hope I haven't suffocated anyone!

"I decided to take a risk: not to use paragraph breaks, to use three different voices, and to expand the text without restraint"

--- El ciervo y la sombra was published in Castilian a year later than the original Galician edition. Un anarquista, on the other hand, has been published almost simultaneously in both languages, and in Catalan. Perhaps that's why it seems I wrote this last one very quickly. In any case, I try to work with a certain constancy. It's not a desire to produce; it's a need to order my life through fiction. If I don't write, if I don't have a story in progress, I feel an enormous void.

--- And the million-dollar question, of course: What are Diego Ameixeiras's next steps?

--- Well, I have another novel in progress, of course. A classic-style noir novel, à la James M. Cain, with its crime and its subterranean passions. If you like, I'll stop by again another day to let you know how the murder is going.