"I once made a fanzine, which was called Flandis Mandis. I made it with Fernando Muñiz. It was the time when the CCCB held the exhibition on trash culture curated by Jordi Costa, an ideologist of this kind of artistic revolution, or of taste. It was the last underground I fully experienced. Let's say its official organ of expression was the fanzine Mondo Brutto. All of that caught me in real time. Artistically it was very subversive. Today, the creators of that fanzine would undoubtedly be in jail. I interpreted it as a cultural guerrilla. It consisted of converting what one liked and was culturally discredited into an instrument of sabotage. Then all that passed. Other things came and we got older. But I believe I come directly from there. I never felt more artistically identified with something."
Javier Pérez Andújar sips the black coffee he has just been served and asks for another. Meanwhile, he requests that the radio play "some long-haired rock for flute and mellotron."
--- Well then, let's go with Caravan's Nine feet underground!
The author of such diverse titles as La noche fenomenal, Diccionario enciclopédico de la vieja escuela, Catalanes todos or Todo lo que se llevó el diablo, smiles at the selection and continues: "In November of last year, I was awarded the Herralde Novel Prize, for El año del búfalo. And I am very satisfied for obvious reasons. One of them, and a very important one, is that it is precisely a book written from mondobruttismo. From the deepest part of its aesthetics and philosophy. And that has made me think that we were not wrong when we believed in all that as an aesthetic and artistic current. With all that art has of vital commitment and political revulsion."
Now he claims to have returned to routine: "Working for the media and promoting the book. The remaining time I dedicate to rereading books I liked a lot as a teenager. And I love it. Now I'm with Jack London's Assassination Bureau, Ltd."
A life that began between pages
From a very young age, Javier Pérez Andújar already wanted to write, "but he was more fascinated by literature, by books, than by life." With Mondo Brutto he claims he discovered himself. "I understood what I felt. That everything I had lived had a creative and biographical meaning. And so I began to be fascinated by feelings and tastes that until then I had disowned, believing they had no value. And yet, I was made of that very thing: of recorded songs, of hours of television, of afternoons lost in the cheapest bars... With that I had to work to explain what I felt." That's where the writer he is, today, the parishioner, was born.
"Very soon after I had the other great revelation, when Emilio Manzano invited me to collaborate on his Betevé program, Saló de lectura. It was love at first sight. We understood each other perfectly. And our friendship continues, of course. Everything I had learned in the 'brutto years', Emilio allowed me to put into practice in his literary program. He is an extraordinary reader. Very cultured. Very refined. And very sensitive. The section we dedicated to El Quijote in the year of its fourth centenary was nothing more than a brutta reading of the book. I felt like someone who came from that world of mass culture, I grew up watching TV and reading comics, and who surrendered to Martí de Riquer, to Francisco Rico, to the great experts in El Quijote, because he also loved that world. And that book. Cervantes had become a friend of ours!".
--- I suppose now they would define you with that hateful word, freakies.
--- Bourgeois peace has imposed its dictatorship and now freedom is called frikismo, which is the fetish word of the mediocre.
Barcelona on a beach
Saddened by a city "where only the posh thrive, which is increasingly falling behind in the world, where those who have nothing are afraid of losing what they have been left with," the writer unequivocally defines himself as Barcelonan. "It's my city. I'm trapped in it. I have no escape. Any attempt to flee would be pathetic. There are many cities that I love and I have sometimes dreamed of living in them. But I am made of Barcelona. From El Víbora to the Banda Trapera del Río. From Bruguera comics to underground passages with people shooting up. Night buses. Bookstores. Cinemas. The vacant lots you see when you leave on a commuter train. The sea, above all."
The parishioner takes a breath to outline his city. Then, he resumes speaking: "Perhaps Sant Adrià beach concentrates all my Barcelona. All the history of that beach, all that it has been and has happened there is a kind of biography that I feel I have had. I go a lot. To walk. I like to see it now full of people strolling. Normal, ordinary people of all kinds. And to see the cormorants sunbathing on the remains of the bunkers."
After these words, he closes his eyes and searches his memory for the moments, the mirages that define him and his relationship with the city. There are two. Two images. "The General Strike demonstration on December 14, 1988, with Paseo de Gràcia packed to the brim, full of workers crowding it, people who had come out of the factories, from the neighborhoods, occupying the city center. Imposing their reality on another." And then the other image: "Sants station when the former members of the International Brigades came and the people at the station receiving them as if the Republic had been proclaimed again. Anti-Franco militants who had been in prison, people who had gone hungry after the war, now, in that station, receiving mythical creatures."
--- What is truly mythical are our portions and menu. Don't you want to eat something after so much coffee?
Javier Pérez Andújar casts a wide gaze, full of an old gastronomic certainty: "Sandwich. Always sandwich. Sharing a sandwich is the height of intimacy. They carry all the baggage of going to school, going on excursions, going to work... It's the provisional and at the same time the daily, the everyday. You can only eat a sandwich alone or with a person you appreciate or love very much. A group sandwich no longer has mystery, it even seems a bit anthropophagic. So many people together filling their mouths disorderly. But a one-on-one sandwich is always a journey that begins," he declares.