A turbulent flow of cars, thousands of cars, countless cars that get tangled together, trying to escape from Madrid on a Friday afternoon when it rains a lot and people abandon work by dint of blows. That metallic mass gets stuck around shopping centers, cranes, residential complexes, open fields or that famous nightclub where the taxi driver claims to have once seen Guti, the footballer. This is the city, this tangle of people and desires and metals, this chaos orderly enough to be called civilization.
The discussion is relevant because Martín Caparrós (Buenos Aires, 68 years old), writer and journalist, publishes a book about a city, Buenos Aires, his city, and about cities in general. It’s titled OX (Random House) and it is a strange artifact where phrases blown in the wind and the lives of some are mixed together citizens (NO citizens), reflections on this gigantic mess that we say is the city and a plot about a house in which the rise and fall of an Argentine family of Italian origin takes place during the 20th and 21st centuries. “A dysphonic symphony of people, voices, situations and stories capable of giving the sensation of the wonderful chaos that is the city”, according to the author.
After an hour and a half of bumps, you arrive in Torrelodones, which you don’t know if it’s countryside or city, but where you would see the greenery if it hadn’t already fallen into darkness. There, Caparrós, aboard his motorized wheelchair and behind his iconic mustache, welcomes guests into his house with garden and the darkness of his computer. He is accompanied by his cat Tita, who has leopard skin. On the shelf a framed title, a lot ad hocrecognizes him as an “illustrious citizen of Buenos Aires”. In other words, he knows what he’s talking about.
“I, who have traveled a lot, have always thought that the really difficult thing was to count the block from my house, because that’s where you have to learn to look at everyday life. Now there are the 5,000 blocks of my city”, he says in that silvery, serious and honeyed voice. The city and its possibilities, those that interest the author so much and which, in his opinion, have led human beings to build all kinds of religions, superstitions and cosmic orders, to have the sensation that things don’t just happen, even if they often do. “The case is lurking,” he repeats leitmotif of the book. Much of Caparrós’s work consists of all-encompassing and ambitious books that attempt to explain almost the entire world: in The world then tries to distinguish the present from the future, in The story tells the story of an invented civilization, all of Latin America Americaworld hunger hunger…And now also the city, the entire city. “I find it hard to leave things out… maybe it’s anxiety. I envy people who can focus on, I don’t know, a cockroach, but I haven’t been given that,” he says.
Caparrós has lived in many cities, but one day he decided he wanted to live in a more rural place. It was when, coming from Zambia, with a stopover in Johannesburg, he stayed in the house of a Greek couple in the suburbs. He wanted something like this and found it in Torrelodones, where he has been for about eight years. “The city is a tremendously busy space: we live with people above our heads and under our feet, we look out the window and there are more people, it’s a bit disturbing if you think about it, even if we’re used to it,” observes the writer. Furthermore, cities are becoming something else. “The cities, the privileged cities where people want to live, are turning into environments that look a lot like Rome or Barcelona. And that means people can’t live in those cities,” he says.
In one of his novels, InfiniteCaparrós invents a virtual reality technology through which you can travel without leaving the bathroom: perhaps this is the solution to the problem of mass tourism that destroys cities, at least living cities, as Caparrós says in Buenos Aires: “Now people travel to see something very different and find something worse than the supermarket next door,” he says.
In recent times Caparrós has spoken a lot, and with great courage, about his illness, ALS, which is causing him to lose control of his body, reporting from that vital trance (just as another writer, Juan José Millás, spoke of the journey of old age and the approach of death). “I don’t get tired if I can help others suffering from this very rare disease against which nothing can be done. In recent weeks I have had to talk about the law on ALS, which is not applied. But I also like to talk about all the things I have done in my life: having ALS is not my greatest merit”, he jokes. The future sometimes seems like something foreign: “It’s strange to think that in a few years, with a bit of luck, I won’t be here anymore, I won’t be here anymore.” And it’s rare for a person to have so much passion for what happens in the world. “I know at least one thing about the future: that the next day there will be an obituary,” he jokes.
a cruel man
Javier Milei, anarcho-capitalist and rocker, has won the Argentine legislative elections again. Explanations? “He is a cruel man, I have no explanation. I suppose that Argentina, which considers itself a country of solidarity, is not the country we think it is,” says the journalist. “Whoever had governed before was catastrophic, something different was needed. The question is why unfortunately Milei was the new one.” To his credit, Caparrós has the digital and interactive novel Lives of JMloosely based on Javier Milei’s childhood.
The crisis of democracy is due, according to the author, to the fact that several generations have experienced how this system has failed to satisfy their legitimate expectations. One solution: that politicians stop insulting each other and ending up in judicial labyrinths, as Caparrós describes Spanish politics, and that they talk to the people. “Zohran Mamdani spoke to workers, to the marginalized, to women, to migrants, to young people, why does he miss being voted mayor of New York? Sometimes old political habits work. Trust must be regained.”
We said it OX It is a rare, hybrid and poetic, fragmentary artifact. It’s not just what matters, but how you tell it; It’s not just what he expresses, but what he tries to feel. “We have come to think that literature is limited to telling a story,” he explains. According to him, after the attempts of the avant-gardes of the 20th century, writing has returned to what it was many years ago. “The other arts have moved on: music is no longer like Liszt or Chopin, no one paints like Delacroix. But we continue to write as Balzac, Hugo or Baudelaire wrote, we are anchored to what was 200 years ago,” he says. Literature, for Caparrós, must transcend the plot and seek new formal paths, an idea that contrasts with the controversies over the latest Planeta awards (the Argentine won the Latin American edition in 2004) and the defense of Juan del Val, the latest winner (one million euros), of literature for the people versus literature for the elite. “It seems very nice to me that he wins an award for making churros out of paper, but we’re not talking about literature,” he says.
Caparrós is a very prolific writer. He has around 50 books to his credit (not counting his daily journalism) and boasts an overwhelming collection of awards, recognitions and doctorates. honor causeeven if what gives him pleasure more than recognition is “finishing a sentence well”. recently launched The true life of José Hernández (Random House), with his illustrator friend Rep, which becomes the story of the author of the Argentine national poem, the Martino Fierrotold in verse by Martín Fierro himself. Another strange thing.
He doesn’t stop: he is preparing an essay (even a strange one) on this era, which he wants to call the Western Era, where everyone is governed by the hegemony of a small portion of the world, from political ideas to music or clothing, and in which, in its dark reverse, people have been killed like never before in history. “Even if an Eastern era comes, it will be led by the Chinese Communist Party, which is based on an idea, communism, created in the West,” Caparrós says. And he has “five or six” unpublished books that he wants to publish. “I don’t feel particularly prolific,” he says, “now my health doesn’t allow me to do many things like walk or travel too much, but there are few things I enjoy more than writing, and I’m lucky enough to be able to continue doing that,” he concludes. Outside, in the distance, lies the city, full of possibilities.
