Jorge Fdez. Díaz, Nadal 2025 for ‘The Secret of Marcial’: “When he learned that he would be a writer my father prophesied the misery and gave me lost”

Did he get to know his father, after writing this book?I learned to value things that he told me indirectly, not direct. Reviewing life, taking a note of the movies and remembering things that he told me using them in an outsourced way. I value that I could have found that black and white TV, which was the only window to the world that waiter and we, the poor Palermo. And use that resource to try to temper a little an emotional device that did not allow him to communicate with his children. I think that, like so many parents of that generation, he did it with his old masculinity. They were not trained, nor did they have the emotional elements to really talk with their children. They were becoming enigmatic, more in this case that he had in front of a matriarch of the Spanish north, typical, that was occupying everything, which was the cousin Donna of the family, my mother. And my father was moving outside the margins of the family; I do not know whether or did not accept those limits and lived more outside the house than inside.

It draws a notable difference between the role of a mother and that of a father.The father’s enigma, who is always huge, who was our father, is a question, if not rusting, subversive. We cannot know our father, we cannot see it as a desiring father, we do not know what he does outside our gaze. We know that it carries other lives, not necessarily loving. Instead, the mother is more affordable, is present, sometimes for better and sometimes worse. My mother was my teacher, my mentor, she taught me everything. My father was an enigma, someone who couldn’t know. After reviewing about 200 films, -I mean the Hollywood of the 40 and 50-, which we saw in a cycle of Saturdays on TV, I remember it as one of the greatest joys and experiences of my childhood and adolescence. We are not only what we eat, but what we saw when we were children and adolescents.

As a father who is, what has he done for Marcial’s secret not to be Jorge’s secret?I have always spoken directly with my two children, who are already great; I have emotionally connected with them. I never gave them for lost, as my father did with me, which was an act that I justify. It was a forced immigrant. When he learned that I wanted to be a writer, he prophesied to me misery and how it hurt so much, he gave me lost. I always took that issue to therapy. The Argentines are going to therapy a lot and that challenge was very strong. I wanted my father not to be right and that prophecy was not fulfilled. I became an addicted worker, challenging that prophecy. I try for my children to do what makes them happy. Maybe it’s a bad father. Because I’m going to tell you something: my father’s challenge built me ​​and brought me to where I am. Who knows whether or not being a good father.

This literary exercise has finally reconciled to him? Have you settled your debts?In the background I wanted to make this book to continue living with my father. I feel that he has accompanied me throughout this trip, maybe I invented it to be with him. It is not a problem of settlement, but of recovery.

Marcial’s questions are a bit of everyone’s? Or in other words, do we have all mysteries that we will take to the grave?Of course. Freud says that every family has a consensual story, that is, a chronology, more or less, desktop. We all know what happened more or less. But if we put a magnifying glass … There are silent things that are not said, that happened outside. Freud calls him ‘family novel’. It is a story, it is very interesting to investigate not because it is something morbid, or ancient history, but because that garden we find ourselves. We spend our lives trying to understand and know what our identity is. We live a continuous present of multitaskingof automatic pilot and forget the great tradition we carry inside. That is why I have fascinated me so much to think about my family, books.

Talking about oneself opens many wounds?This is a search novel, with respect to the previous one. I wrote Mother 20 years ago and then my parents were alive. My laconic father, as always, spoke little. Suffering of that forgotten Spain. Today would not have been interviewed, as my mother did. In this case I did not know how to write this book, because he was already dead. My father took his secrets to the grave, and others were not going to tell me. Ten years ago I try to write it and I just realized that what I had to do was write a novel that was very autobiographical, but that allowed to fiction. Many times, fiction tells the truth better than biography and journalism. It is now called self -fiction. I discovered it when I saw the movies my father used to communicate with me. I learned things from amazing movies. I ‘shocked’ see what I saw in childhood. What I discovered while writing this book is how much influence the melodrama had in our life. We have been raised in the melodrama, from children’s stories, films … and that fills us with misunderstandings and superstitions.

Do you have any secret, matter or not of literature?(Sigh). Love issues, no doubt. Who has not walked in the shadow of hiding in love. And then I spent 45 years doing journalism, 35 trench. I have lived incredible things, but not everything can be counted.

Emigration occupies a star role in his book. What do you think of the political winds currently running?I feel a lot, a lot of shame when some Argentine comes to give lessons to the Spaniards. We have been a real disaster for 50 years. Vargas Llosa said that it is one of the inexplicable decay of the history of the West. In any case, we were a laboratory of errors and evils. The only thing that did well Argentina and I say it with absolute honesty, even people I hate, like Perón. It was the process of integration of immigrants. It became unattracting, rationally. My parents to go had to have a call letter from someone, they checked the penalties and made a health exam. It was something scheduled and it went well. And all those communities, poor, lived. I would recommend not turning this into an ideological prejudice, but it’s too late. When one does not take a cause and the cause, by prejudice, he continues to see in the surveys that this cause worries not politicized people, be careful because you give the cause to a madman. Better grab the cause, not sentimentalize it, but to work from a legal point of view. Turn it into a matter of state and not with cheap demagogy. Tear the clothes for a poor … We can all do it, it is also free. Then you have to see how to solve that situation.

Have you thought about establishing itself in Spain more or less permanent?Many times I thought about living Spain. I am the first Spanish of a family that arrives in Argentina and I feel a great affinity with the Spanish journalistic and literary community. Maybe more than with Argentina. However, I find in the stories of Spanish writers and journalists much of what interests me: Pérez-Reverte and his sense of the epic, Manuel Vicent, and his precious. The idea that writers can do journalism in newspapers. In Argentina it is not so much because the ghetto of journalists and that of writers does not usually touch. Here they live in the same table, I love that, I am both. I have no souls separate. When they go to Buenos Aires I try to take them to the radio, present them at the Book Fair … This comes from 30 years ago. My link with Spain does not have much to do with emigration, but with culture.

Cinema, is the salvation of all our ills? Are we hiding behind the heroes we have imagined?I believe that the movies had so much influence on me and then in literature, as fiction, just as John Wayne that Conan Doyle. I work in this book to a special moment of cinema that will not return, although I do not miss the lost paradises. It is like the Spanish Golden Age, it is unrepeatable. In Hollywood, between 40 and 60, there were geniuses, magnificent filmmakers … It was a moment where, as Garci says, they lived in the same John Ford neighborhood, Hitchcock, Otto Pre -agigo. It was impressive. I really like Scorsese, but I couldn’t film Laura If it is not in three hours and Pre -aged did it in an hour. The ellipsis, the details, the way things happened … was incredible.

A resource of his book is that the characters are appealed to them, with names of illustrious actors, such as their own sister, whom he calls Susan (as Hayward). If I tell you several characters, do you dare to relate them to a movie?Pedro Sánchez: El cardenal Richelieu. Trump: Jack Nicholson, en He Radiance;It is scary and the house is empty.Javier Milei: It already called me an ackommade several times, it pursues me with its media minions, I have to be careful. I see it as Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. The touch of madness, but with the representation of social rabies, a hidden rage. Pope Francis:I dreamed of being Perón and not Pope. Francisco operated as head of Peronism. He was a film character, who always went out with his: Kevin Spacey in House of cards. Gardel:I assimilate it to Sinatra, they both sing better and better. Messi: Harry Potter. YMaradona: Spencer Tracy en Jekyll y mr hydde. Both are antagonistic, two ways of being Argentina, two talented, an expansive and cloudy. And the gushed and shy gold. Talented too. I am not as football as Argentines. Precisely, with my father it happened that if I had been a football, that would have united us, and not the cinema.