Víctor Recort: "It's very difficult for a heterosexual man to listen to you."

BarcelonaThe screams, a novel with which Víctor Recort (Sant Boi de Llobregat, 1990) has won the latest Documenta award -shared ex aequo with Irene Zurrón—, begins with a man getting into an elevator that is one of those "modernist jewels that the City Council has classified as a heritage asset of the city." tomato girl". The story progresses in two times: that of the countdown to get rid of that lifeless body and that of the memory of the last summer that Eloi spent with his wife and two children.

Your novel has reminded me Pulp fictionWe found three men in designer clothes cleaning up the remains of a crime in a luxury apartment and transporting a body in a trunk.

— Funny you should say that: I spent my teenage years obsessed with Quentin Tarantino. Not only for his films, but also for him himself: my room was full of his posters. When I was 15, I spent five days in the lobby of the Melià Hotel in Sitges trying to get Tarantino to sign one. It was 2005 when he came as a producer of Hostel.

Did you get out?

— Yes. When the time came, everything happened very quickly. With Tarantino, I stopped being a mythomaniac. I've never asked anyone for an autograph.

Still, do you recognize a certain influence of Tarantino in this novel?

— Since Tarantino, any trunk on a corpse makes us think of his films. I must say that it also takes me back to the beginning ofOne of our own, of Martin ScorseseI loved cinema so much that I studied chess. When I realized that it could take three or four years to get a film off the ground, if I ever managed to, I started writing fiction.

For years, you've combined writing books with journalism. You also organize activities for the Finestres bookstore. And, as your bio says, you're the father of two children: parenting, therefore, sustains you...

— Every book I've written is my way of capturing something I want to explain quickly and giving it shape. I try to quickly grasp a topic that concerns me or is very much on my mind.

One of the important topics in The screams It's how, aside from the crime plot, Eloi reflects on masculinity. Eloi is a slightly different model of man than the one represented by Milan and Coco. All three of them managed to earn a lot of money thanks to television, and that, in a way, has debased them.

— My grandmother had good intuitions. Once, when they were doing a TV report commemorating I don't know how many years since Elvis Presley's death, she said: "Do you see what the money brings?"It's extremely difficult to manage assets built up very quickly without losing your mind or developing addictions.

The trio of protagonists of the novel received two and a half million pesetas each night, according to what we read in The screams, "to say the name of the pig to a whole parade of Mexicans, of quinquis, of faggots who only come out of the closet if they can sell the exclusive to a laundry magazine."

— This is the real amount that the collaborators of Martian Chronicles in the late 90s. If they worked from Monday to Thursday, they earned ten million pesetas a week, a figure that exceeds the annual salary of the majority of the population.

I thought about what would have become of a collaborator like Eloi, twenty-five years old...

— ...and everything was leading me to write a crime novel like this one.

The apartment where Milan murdered a 25-year-old woman known as "the tomato girl," the daughter of a bullfighter and a bacalanera who had filled celebrity magazines and trashy TV shows, is known by the nickname Thailand.

— When Gaslight closed, people like Milan had to go somewhere. Back in the show's days, an apartment like Thailand was the ideal place for bacchanals. Now things have changed, and there's just a guy with a dead woman inside. To solve the problem, he calls two old colleagues and offers them money to help him.

Eloi's voice warns: "A straight man listening to you attentively is like a perverse sexual practice." Why is it so difficult?

— It's very difficult for a heterosexual man to listen to you. When he does, it's because a series of preliminaries have taken place, and in return, you'll have to listen to him afterward. In informal or relaxed encounters with men, I've missed the fact that it doesn't get more down to earth. Maybe you know each other's individual problems, but instead, you tend to pick on each other or talk about nonsense. Women create much healthier spaces for conversation and friendship than men.

Although Eloi, as he grows older, doesn't notice younger girls—he only allows himself to be attracted to mothers—he has inherited toxic behaviors through his father and doesn't hide it.

— He puts things bluntly. Even when he tells you he's only attracted to women his own age, he does so in a troubled tone.

Perhaps it's a legacy of having gone from being a commentator to an opinion columnist for a newspaper.

— Opinion columns have a certain amount of fantasy and literature. Columnists should be able to take certain liberties... Getting angry at an opinion piece is like getting angry at Darth Vader.

Javier Marías managed to make a lot of people angry.

— Perhaps because most of the columns I wrote were sexist and, on top of that, boring.

In the novel, Eloi is an atypical father for his generation: he is much more involved in raising children than the other men.

— Yes. When you see a very young child glued to their cell phone, you can't help but think this. It shows that there are no resources: instead of singing a song, you play the song on your phone; instead of telling them a story, you put on a YouTube video. A few days ago, I was outraged to see a mother watching... reels Instagram on the subway at extremely high volume while her son was sleeping in the stroller. What effects could this have on the child?

"We're a more ornate, I don't know, even sophisticated, version of our parents": Tell me about a family legacy you've tried to break.

— I've wanted to nurture the bonds of friendship. At home, when I was little, they told me that if I wasn't interested in going to see a movie with my friends, I shouldn't go. Maybe the movie itself didn't interest me, but I wanted to watch it with those people. My parents are part of a generation that stayed very locked up at home, with their quirks and problems. For me, my "chosen family" is also important.

How's parenting going? Are things going well at home?

— I'm in the third season of the series of my life. It's not a particularly dramatic season.

This is hopeful news.

— Typically, when the media talks about parenting, they usually invite people who have one-year-old children. It's a stage in which everything is very organized. The more independent a child becomes, the more they become disoriented, both literally—the house can be embarrassing—and in terms of preconceived notions. You have to constantly reinvent yourself.