"Show me how your kitchen is and I will tell you who you are"

BarcelonaManuel Vilas (Barbastro, 1962) has reached that point in his career where he can combine the publication of the new novels he writes with the recovery of out-of-print books that he feels he wrote "in another life". This year he has released Islandia (Destino, 2026), where he reconstructs, without sparing a single detail, the separation from the writer Ana María Merino and, at the same time, vindicates "the anti-bourgeois voice" of the desperate and funny narrator of Zeta, which Páginas de Espuma is putting back into circulation more than two decades after its first edition by DVD Ediciones, divided then into two volumes, Zeta (2002) and Magia (2004).

"It is a book full of desolation and tenderness –Vilas now recalls–. I wrote it while I was working as a high school teacher in an institute on the outskirts of Zaragoza. Until then, Spanish literature had portrayed cities by sticking to realism. It seemed to me that it was necessary to take a step forward and turn Zaragoza into a kind of Gotham City inhabited by vampires, prostitutes, ghosts, and lonely men". A devotee of Franz Kafka since his adolescence, Vilas knew how to inflict the anguish and perverse sense of humor of the Czech author into the situations experienced by the characters in many of the stories. In one of them, he examines a peculiar workday for the staff at a Carrefour and those at a McDonald's. When they get tired of working, they undress and begin a "martyrological copulation", letting out "iron screams" that scare the customers: "It was a spectacle of wonderful pornography –the narrator writes–. There was an exchange of bodies based on brutality and flight. The bodies levitated and flew. Aerial fornications. They moved above the ground, two or three centimeters, and held insignificant conversations".

Kafka in Teruel

If he had to define what kind of author he wanted to be at the end of the 90s, when he had been making his poetry known for a decade —he started with The old days (Cave Canem, 1990)— and wrote the narratives of Zeta, Vilas asserts that he was "a Kafka crushed by the octopus". The book begins by summoning Lou Reed, but Robespierre, the Sex Pistols, Parmenides and Kafka also appear, whom he imagines living in Teruel. "I am convinced that the most Kafkaesque city in Spain is Teruel —he asserts—. It is far from everything, it is invisible and very difficult to define. The people of Teruel themselves claim that Teruel does not exist".

"I built Zeta from heartbeats that came from almost ancestral visions –says the author–. We had just bought an apartment with my wife in a neighborhood that was supposed to be called King Ferdinand neighborhood but ended up being christened as Actur, because the urban planners' blueprints said «Urgent actions». Now about 70,000 people live there, but at that time it was still under construction". The ugliness of the periphery is omnipresent in the book. "The apartment many of us could afford was not only small and far from the center, but it was ugly", comments Vilas, who dedicates stories as much to the geography of the city as to some of its workers: plumbers, electricians, civil servants, truck drivers and clinical assistants. "Home appliances also have a prominent role there —he continues—. Show me what your kitchen is like and I will tell you who you are. I can define you by reading only the brands of the appliances". The kitchens that appear in Zeta are small, with an extractor hood with an inch of grease, mid-range refrigerators and microwaves, and pans worn out after so many years of use. Dishwashers are still not common there.

"At that time I was writing without thinking that readers existed, and for many years I continued like that, playing rock'n'roll in a garage, drawing little attention —he recalls—. Then I published Ordesa [Alfaguara, 2018], and that changed my life". Of that autobiographical novel that spoke about the death of parents, Manuel Vilas sold more than 150,000 copies in Spanish, and it did not take long to be available in twenty languages. "Since then I write differently because I feel I have a responsibility: readers are my freedom and also my family –he states–. I am curious to know what they will think when they now read Zeta. I believe that if 100,000 copies of a book like mine were sold, this country would be different. It would change, of that I am sure, and I think it would be a change for the better, because it would mean that it has more humor and is more tolerant".