A year ago, Daniel Vázquez Sallés, son of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Barcelona, 1939-Bangkok, 2003), was called one day by José Colmeiro, an expert on his father's work. He told him they had to meet and didn't want to reveal anything in advance. They met on a Friday, they recall, for coffee near the Biblioteca de Catalunya, where the professor of Hispanic Philology was processing all the writer's material that the family had ceded and made available to researchers. It was then that he told him he had found an unpublished novel by Vázquez Montalbán.
"For me it was a surprise," Daniel recalls, considering that no one was aware of its existence, neither the family, nor friends, nor the literary agency. Having assimilated the astonishment, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's son found himself with a novel written before he was born and was able to delve into a universe he only knew by hearsay, opening up the opportunity to discover what books his father read and what songs he listened to at that time. But also to understand what the clandestine struggle against the dictatorship meant to him and how he managed to circumvent censorship in the sixties. "It's like meeting your 24-year-old father. It's more than a photograph you've seen a thousand times, it's an explained photograph. As if you took a time machine," he maintains.
The discovery of the unpublished novel has been even more revalued by the fact that it is the first novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who died 20 years ago. According to Colmeiro, it was written between 1962 and 1965. It is fully inscribed in his time in prison, where he spent three years for having participated in student demonstrations in support of the Asturian miners' strikes of 1962 and was convicted of Military Rebellion by Equivalence. He spent the first three months in La Modelo, incommunicado from his wife, Anna Sallés, also arrested in the demonstrations and sentenced to six months in prison. Then he was transferred to Lleida prison, where he spent most of his sentence. It is not surprising that this city appears recurrently in his texts referred to as Aridel (from Lérida).
Admunsen's Papers, presented this Monday at La Modelo and already on sale, stars a young intellectual frustrated because he cannot become a writer after spending three years in prison. Calling him Admunsen is one of the tricks Manuel Vázquez Montalbán used to mislead Franco's censorship, as well as setting the story in Leiden, a small city in the Netherlands that only has the name and is clearly Barcelona, with its Raval, port area, and fair. The first alter ego of a writer who had many is an anti-hero, "a filter to confront reality," says Colmeiro, mixing fiction with autobiographical elements and laying the foundations of what his literature would be. It has a complex structure, remarks the University of Auckland professor, resorting to daily chronicles but also to the introduction of the advertising world in which he begins to work: "It's very pop." Furthermore, it is very modern, talking about topics that were not discussed at that time, such as criticism of patriarchal society or consumerism.
Navona publishing house has been in charge of publishing Vázquez Montalbán's new book. It thus continues the task of recovering his works, says editor Ernest Folch. Completely essential, especially considering that some are difficult to find. Thus, it has republished titles such as Autobiografía del general Franco, Los alegres muchachos de Atzavara, and El estrangulador. This year they have also published Crónica sentimental de la transición. Next year will be the turn of Erec y Enide.
The novel was found among the 70 boxes of documents accumulated by the writer, which now rest in the Biblioteca de Catalunya. They came across a manuscript written with Vázquez Montalbán's Olivetti, complete and bound, even with corrections made by the author himself. It is believed that he first sent it to editor José María Castellet and then to the Premio Biblioteca Breve of the Seix Barral publishing house, as stated in the endpapers. In fact, Castellet's name appears crossed out so that it could be reused and submitted for the award, as it was not as easy then as it is now to make copies. Seix Barral must have returned it to him, and that's when he revised it. And he ended up putting it in a drawer.
For Colmeiro, the time for its publication did not arrive. It was not possible during the dictatorship, and when censorship ended, the writer had changed his initial more experimental style, self-proclaimed as subnormal, and was already in another phase starring Carvalho. This may be the explanation why no one ever knew anything about Los papeles de Admunsen, especially considering that Vázquez Montalbán worked at different speeds and many of the books he published had been written long ago. The most important thing is that he did not destroy it, as he did with what he didn't like, so he wanted to preserve it and, who knows, perhaps send "a message in a bottle," as Colmeiro says, to his future readers.
It is not believed that there is a new novel among the 70 boxes, but personal materials such as letters addressed to Salvador Espriu or Sara Montiel are being found. "There is work for many future doctoral students," Colmeiro warns. The only thing that would be a miracle to appear, his son indicates, would be a collection of poems that the writer lost long ago on a Greek beach.