"I am a worker of the word. I like that phrase, which I don't know where the hell I got it from, and on top of that, it's true." Leaning against the bar, with his freshly served Fernet Branca, Matías Néspolo reflects aloud, while Bill Evans, Marc Johnson, and Joe LaBarbera envelop the aperitif moment with the delicate notes of Quiet now.
"I have done and do a bit of everything," he continues: "cultural journalism, editing, teaching, content creation, communication, and a long etcetera. Even now I earn my living with several things, some much less intellectual, but always related, in one way or another, to that precious and perfect object called a book."
Born in Buenos Aires in 1975, Matías arrived in Barcelona at the end of 2001. "I remember that vital moment with a certain tenderness. I was undocumented, I worked in hospitality more than twelve hours a day, from Monday to Monday, my girlfriend had left me, and I was in a bad, very bad place… I saved peseta by peseta and bought a pioneering generation laptop, a white Toshiba that weighed a ton and ran on pedals, to transcribe my poems." One dawn, a little drunk, in front of the flickering screen of that contraption, he made a vow to himself, "in the style of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind": to make do with what he knew how to do.
"I was in the oven, alone and eleven thousand kilometers from home. I hadn't done anything useful with my life, I was a useless for everything and I didn't know how to do anything but write. Then I told myself that that was precisely what it was about, that by pounding a keyboard I was going to get ahead, I was going to get out of the hole, and here I am," he recalls. And he fulfilled that lucid drunken vow. He has published the poetry collection Antología seca de Green Hills, the novels Siete maneras de matar a un gato and Con el sol en la boca, and several short stories in various anthologies. His work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Dutch, and German.
Now, he returns to the arena with Una fábula sencilla (Candaya), which presents a very Barcelonian story about migration, displacement, friendship, betrayal, and solitude, underpinned in the form of a parable with an almost police-like plot. His gaze on the fauna and atmosphere of his city, "which, like everything, I explain better through fiction."
The craft of putting words together
A deep hater "of that mythomania of writers who always construct an initiating episode for themselves, inventing scenes in which their destiny was branded with fire," the parishioner's approach is clearly artisanal. From pecking one letter after another, chaining phrases, verses, chapters, sonnets, stories, books, until erecting a corpus that still has a lot of steam ahead. A work of literary trench "from which to launch slogans like this, so simple and direct: Read poetry, bastards!".
Eager "for short distances, for writing stories," the next step is to put all his stories into a single volume. "That's what I want," he announces. He sips a drink of Fernet after which he continues: "Also, with a narrator friend, Diego Sasturain, we are preparing a course on the strange Latin American short story that we will dictate four-handed at the beginning of this 2025. That's what I'm doing right now, and it excites me."
"I tell you with all sincerity that I am very proud of my four daughters"--- I say you must be proud of this entire literary career…
Matías cocks a smile. "When I have more than half a dozen novels, perhaps vanity or ego will force me to answer something else. But right now I tell you with all sincerity that I am very proud of my four daughters: what talent, what intelligence, what sensitivity." Another sip. "You don't know her? Well, wait and you'll see..." He laughs.
Inhabiting the elusive soul of the city
As a good Barcelonian, the writer does not hide a love-hate relationship with a city that he finds elusive, changing. "A million years ago, very close to the Rambla del Raval, almost opposite the mythical Casa Leopoldo, there was a dive bar more or less where now stands the imposing glass and steel tower of a five-star hotel. That smelly place was a refuge for marginal people of all kinds and I like to think that, in another era, Jean Genet, for example, drank there. The thing is that, in that den, in a kind of grubby inner courtyard under a trellis or something similar, at dawn there were wild open-mic poetry gatherings, with guitars and excesses of all kinds. I don't know if my memory makes you fall in love with the city or not, but I confess that places like that marked me," he narrates. And something changes, immediately after, in his face, which is tinged with a melancholic sadness.
"It disgusts me that the dive bar in my story no longer exists, that where there was a bookstore there is now a fast-food place or a clothing store." Brief pause. "It sickens me how quickly Barcelona is becoming more and more like any city in the world, because they are all the same with the same franchises and the same consumer nonsense."
He finishes the Fernet Branca and ventures: "Perhaps it's me, clinging to places and things, and no longer able to inhabit the elusive soul of the city."
--- What, on the other hand, is unchangeable is the offer of this Bar, in case you want to eat something. We have everything, and exquisite: menu, tapas, portions, sandwiches...
"Full menu, with carajillo and dessert!" exclaims Matías Néspolo, as if the doubt offended him and suddenly recovering his smile, while the notes of All mine, by the Parisian trio of Bill Evans, add a melodic touch of magic to the moment.