Rosa Montero: “It is in the social margins, in the shadows, that life manifests itself most real”

She has been a “groupie” on the most important rock tour in Spain, that of Miguel Ríos, and has written page after page about the 23-F that, like the entire country, left her crying with rage and uncertainty for a whole night. She has visited Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theatre, which they called the cabaret of the poor, the Nani Trial, the murder of the lawyers of Atocha, the heroin epidemic. Rosa Montero (Madrid, 1951) has lived a thousand lives and has been close to many others in that time when she was a restless journalist who went from here to there and dictated her chronicles by telephone to the editorial office of El País. At 73, she has tired of that journalism in which she burst into at 19 and of which there are hundreds of chronicles, articles and reports, which are now collected in the recently published “True Stories”. Literature flourishes in every true event and Montero’s pen remains intact, as if time had not passed.

QUESTION .–She wrote these chronicles between 1978 and 1988 and is now returning to them. Does it make you feel a bit embarrassed to read Rosa Montero in her thirties again?
ANSWER. -Not at all, not at all. Look, it has surprised even me because I have changed my mind on some things over the years, but all these chronicles that appear here, of which I have not modified anything and have only corrected the typos, flow with me without any problem. I feel completely close, without any kind of break, or shame, or anything with that very young girl. There is total continuity.

Q.- Which of the chronicles are you especially proud of?
A.- Well, proud… I still don’t know how the hell I managed it. I don’t think I could do it today. Things as difficult as the story of the 23-F Coup d’état. We all remember how it caught us, I was going to a meeting of the association of feminist organizations on Barquillo Street where there was a girl at the door telling us to leave, that they were carrying out a Coup and, of course, that headquarters had already been attacked by the extreme right. So I ran to find a phone booth to call the newspaper (El País) and they confirmed that indeed that was happening. I asked them if they wanted me to go and they told me no, that there were already too many editors, that I should go home and stay on “standby”. I went home and like all Spaniards I spent the night without sleeping, completely desperate and crying.

The next morning they asked me to go to the editorial office to relieve them and I told them that it was okay, but that I hadn’t slept at all. So I got there and they sat me down in front of the typewriter to write a fictional account of what had happened and they started bringing me teletypes from all the newspaper’s collaborators in Spain. I started to write but, of course, without knowing what was going to happen because the Coup ended at about 12:30 or so and I was already there at 10:00. As I was finishing, they took the sheet of paper from me and took it to the roller because they were going to publish a special. So there I was writing in those difficult conditions, without having slept and you read it now and it seems that they have continuity, as if I had thought about it but I didn’t even have time. Now I read that and I say: My God! Now I wouldn’t have been able to do it, I suppose that’s what youth gives you, that ability to write about vertigo, the edge of the knife, I admired it.

There are important themes in these “True Stories” – the Coup, the murder of the lawyers in Atocha, the issue of drugs, the heroin epidemic. But the ones that really surprised me and made my heart beat were the lumpen world, that world in which society begins to enter the shadows and almost go to the abyss, which are Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theatre, which they called the cabaret of the poor, and the one of the fighters of Campo del Gas, who were fighters of those who went around disguised as Mexicans. They were all people who lived in such difficult situations without any kind of protection or social rights, in such a dark world, and they were so wonderful that it still moves me.

Q.- You tell me a trick, you say, a bit dirty but necessary that an “old dog” taught you when you covered the Pope’s visit to Spain. Was journalism more exciting before?
A.- Yes (laughs). Before, chronicles and reports had to be dictated by telephone to the newspaper and depending on where you were and the influx of media, it was impossible to get a line. You can imagine when Pope John Paul II visited Spain… So what I did was go to a phone booth and call collect to El País. One of the secretaries in the editorial office, who were the ones who took the dictation, would take it, and then I would hang up the phone and go to cover the news with the line already taken. Then I would arrive with only my notebook and my notes and I would find a bunch of frantic colleagues because every time they picked up the phone, the secretary of El País would answer.

As to whether it is more or less exciting, well, it depends on where and what you do. Now, with new technologies, I know people who are also doing wonderful things, I don’t know, women’s magazines from who knows where. But what is true is that the model has changed and what has not yet been completed is the crossing of the desert of traditional media. Now there is a little hope that when the platforms teach us to have to pay for content, people are starting to subscribe, but there is still a lot to do. In the 2008 crisis, the media was the second most affected sector, losing more people than anyone else. In the last 20 years, 95% of newspapers have been lost and this is such a huge impoverishment… not just of the media, but of democracy.

“Strong journalism is essential for a strong democracy”

Q.- These are bad times for the profession…
A.- These are bad times. The media have become slimmer, they are run by far fewer people than before, people are required to be men and women, to do things for print, for digital, for YouTube… Seniors are fired and juniors are hired with slave wages, in short, you can’t do good journalism like this. Strong journalism is essential for a strong democracy . It’s a bit of a distressing reflection, but in the last 20 years there has been a deterioration in democratic credibility throughout the world and in legitimacy, and at the same time a crisis in the media, and I think they go hand in hand.

Q.- You have written about so many things that it seems that you have no events left in the history of Spain… Do you miss any of them?
A.- The truth is that I don’t remember, you can’t write about everything, of course. Most of the topics were suggested by me, others were told to me, but it’s not that I miss any of them. It is true that I have always had a special interest in the social margins, in keeping the whispers of society heard, those that are not in the centre or illuminated by the spotlights. I have always thought that in those margins, in that shadow we were talking about before, life manifests itself in a more real, cruder way, while in this more conventional life, of the middle class, everything is more disguised.

Q.- What is it like to write something similar to a story about something real?
A.- It is much more difficult than writing fiction because you need to do a lot more research, and you also need to make sure you don’t know the details of the more or less conventional news, because all that meat you put around it you have to do with research because journalism is like that, you can’t say or write anything that a notary can’t confirm is true. If you say in one of these stories that Fulanito crossed the street, went into the Bar Brillante and had a carajillo, it’s because you went to the Bar Brillante and you were told that Fulanito crossed the street and what he had to drink, and if not, you can’t put that in. It requires a huge effort of research, that’s why we don’t see them now, because companies don’t pay for that effort.

“I wouldn’t know how to live without writing fiction”

Q.- Is Rosa Montero more of a novelist or a journalist?
A.- They are two different things. Like most novelists, I started writing as a child. When I was five, I wrote my first stories about little mice that talked to each other. Since then, I have never stopped writing fiction. I am a journalist because of my ease with writing, and I thought that I could dedicate myself to it to earn a living. It is very rare for a writer to cultivate only one genre. Octavio Paz was an essayist and a poet, for example. I consider myself a writer who cultivates journalism, because for me it is a literary genre, the essay and fiction.

For me, journalism, which I have done, which is being a journalist, seems like a wonderful profession, very intense, which allows you to live a thousand lives, many worlds, not only geographical but also internal. But it seems like a job to me, it belongs to my social being and that is why I was able to leave it, I have grown tired of doing journalism, I only write articles and I don’t want to do anything else because I started when I was 19 and I don’t want to do it anymore. For me, writing fiction is not a job, it doesn’t belong to my social being, it belongs to my most private and personal self , ever since I remember myself as a person I remember writing and it is part of who I am. It horrifies me to think that it could end because I wouldn’t know how to live without writing fiction.