Daniel Vázquez Sallés: "When the far-right governs in 2027, Barça will once again be Catalonia's unarmed army"

BarcelonaWhen the writer Daniel Vázquez Sallés (Barcelona, 1966) was 37 years old, his father, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, died at a Bangkok airport. At 55, his 10-year-old son, Marc, died. He now tries to honor the memory of both with the life he leads – far from past addictions – and with the books he writes: the latest, Los felices ochenta (Folch i Folch), in which he paints a caustic, uncomfortable, and funny portrait of a decade marked by great leaders (Pujol, Felipe, John Paul II, Reagan, Thatcher, Samaranch, or Núñez), but also by AIDS and drugs.

Were you happy in the 80s?

— No. This is where the joke of the title The Happy Eighties comes from. I was happy and not happy, like my whole life. Happiness is a very overrated word.

What dreams did you have?

— I wanted to be a film director. I wanted to be Francis Ford Coppola, but I realized that, with my abilities for cinema, I would have ended up being a version of Ozores. And I quit.

And did you tell your father?

— My father was a fantastic person, a man of few words, but they went straight to the point. I've had crises over the years, and that one seemed like a tough one, so I told my father, solemnly: “Dad, I'm quitting acting.” And my father only asked me one question: “How can you quit something you haven't even done yet?”

In one of your books, you talk about another phrase that, in this case, you say to him: “Each one lives life as they can”. How would you say you have lived it, you?

— As I could. Nobody is born knowing, you fumble along, you tend to think you would have done it differently, but at those moments I didn't know any better. I've lived quite a bit, honestly. I am who I am because of very painful experiences, I am who I am because of the women who have passed through my life, I am who I am because of my travels, I am who I am because of my family. I feel privileged to be the son of whom I am, because it allowed me to experience things that many people haven't been able to. And I think I took pretty good advantage of it. That I complicated my life afterwards, that's already part of my brain.

What do you mean by complicating your life?

— So I discovered at 52 that I had the disease of addiction. Everyone thinks an addict is someone who drinks alcohol or who takes... No! An addict is someone who has a conception of life in which there are never any grays. It's either black or white. Either all or nothing. And I put this into practice with everything around me: romantic relationships, personal relationships, experiences... You never have enough, because the brain never says enough.

What would you say have been the best years of your life?

— Now they are very good years. They are very good, after having suffered the worst that someone can suffer, which is the death of a child. My son died five years ago, he was ten years old. And this makes you relativize everything. Now I enjoy things that I didn't give importance to before.

You entered a detoxification center eight years ago. Once you left, have you never touched alcohol or cocaine again?

— Never again, never again. Look at us addicts, my partner is a sommelier and my father-in-law has a well-known wine shop. My partner, Meritxell Falgueras, takes great care of me. She can even call a restaurant so they don't serve me wine glasses. But now I don't even see it, alcohol.

You have written nine books, some are very good. Do you think you have been recognized enough as a writer?

— Uff, I don't like saying about myself that I haven't been recognized enough.

But what feeling do you have?

— I think there have been many preconceptions about what I have written because I am the son of a figure like my father, obviously. It has sometimes been more complicated to face my father's theoretical friends than his enemies. I have good books and some that I don't like. When I write a book, I try to like it enough to be able to defend it when I'm interviewed. Otherwise, I would be incapable. I have experienced these things since I was a child. I remember I was taking a photography course in what was then the Barri Xino, they asked me to do a report and I handed in something that was a disaster. The guy told me: "With the father you have, how can you bring me this work?". Thirty years later I met him again and he apologized.

I think it was Sergi Pàmies in La Vanguardia who spoke of you as “the eternal promise”.

— Yes, but in an article where he spoke very highly of the book and said that he had ceased to be the eternal promise. It is the book I dedicated to Marc, when he died, The Prince and Death. I spent five months writing it alone, on a very small Greek island, with a very ordered life, as they had taught me at the addiction center. I was very excited by what Sergi wrote, because he is a person I love very much.

How have you dealt with being the eternal promise?

— I just don't feel like it. My father was an almost Renaissance man, who touched many fields; I am simply a guy who writes. Who tries to make books that I am happy to have written and to offer them to whoever wants to read them. I have never tried to eclipse or whatever the figure of my father. But it has cost me a little, and it still costs me.

You define yourself in the book as a nepo baby boomer. What is that?

— Before, they called you daddy's boy or mommy's girl. Now that Anglicisms are so important, we are nepo babies. But at my age, I baptized myself as a nepo baby boomer. Being a nepo baby is good because it means you've had parents who have done well. Sometimes, it's not easy because there's a certain level, but you also find that they don't even give you the chance to prove that what you do, you do well. It seems easier, but sometimes it's harder. Especially if it's a figure like my father, very politicized, who is well-liked, but also very infuriating.

Son of two communist couples, how do you define yourself ideologically?

— I declare myself an independentist. Look, I wrote for El Mundo from 2009 to 2017. One day, at a party, the deputy editor came up to me and said: “Daniel, they told me you've become an independentist...”. And I said: “¿That I've become an independentist? I've been one my whole life!!”

You've never been a communist?

— No, no. The first party I voted for was the CDS.

A party founded by Adolfo Suárez, after the UCD. This made a big impression at the faculty.

— Even Pau Arenós came to see me vote and told me: “Because you are a good person, otherwise I wouldn't be your friend.” My mother got very angry. On the other hand, my father looked at me: “I think it's very good that, at your age, you question the things we have taught you at home”. I became more left-wing when I lived in the United States, because you see the contrast. I really like politics, I am quite disillusioned with it, but people cannot stop voting or stop getting involved, because otherwise what will come will be terrible.

Returning to your book The Happy Eighties, there are three figures who governed for many years: Jordi Pujol, Felipe González and Josep Lluís Núñez. What relationship did you have with them or what relationship did you see at home?

— Pujol was the politician who always left everyone out of the game. I remember my father arriving one day after the 50th anniversary of the PSUC's founding and saying: “The best speech of the event, the most well-constructed, the most informed, was given by him”.

The only one who wasn't a communist.

— And this left people out of the game. It could bother you how he spoke, when he entered into the role of Joan Capri, but intellectually he was very powerful.

Did you not grow up in an anti-Pujol environment?

— They were not pro-Pujol, but neither were they anti-Pujolists. I have never voted for him.

Felipe González, what?

— It's the big deception. It's the guy who, when he gets older, shows what he is, someone on the right. I remember that in 1982, when the PSOE won, I was with my parents at Raimon and Analisa's house, and I was surprised to see how they no longer trusted him that night.

Josep Lluís Núñez.

— It was a cigar in the shoe. Dalí said that what he liked most in the world was to go all day with a cigar in his shoe, arrive home and take it out, because it was the most pleasant thing there was. The caricature that has been made of Núñez has hidden a quite sinister character. He destroyed a lot of modernist architecture in Barcelona. The Barcelona crowd voted for him. He was a man who entered Barça to destroy its identity, although he could not. He wanted to turn “more than a club” into his slogan “For a triumphant Barça”. And at the same time he is a character who describes an era of the city, that of the builders, the destruction of certain neighborhoods, Olympic Barcelona...

In the book you dedicate a chapter to Joan Antoni Samaranch and say he is a cork.

— It is a virtue, because they always float. He managed to be the most Falangist of the Falangists and remain as the emblem of modern Barcelona.

Well, without Samaranch I can't imagine Barcelona having had the Olympic Games before Madrid.

— Sure, sure. He should be given the value he deserves, but that shouldn't hide the fact that in 1949 he and Pablo Porta were going around universities intimidating students who were not addicted to the regime. He hasn't managed to get a street in Barcelona. Until a whole generation that suffered the political Samaranch dies, he won't have a street named after him.

Dani, taking a phrase from Pujol, do you think you are still in time to spoil your biography or improve it?

— When my son died, I thought I couldn't live without him. In the end, you manage not to follow him, you get up in the morning and move forward because you come to the conclusion that, since he cannot live, you have to lead a life that would make Marc proud of his father. This is the future I want: that he feels proud of my life.

In these 23 years that have passed since your father's death, and leaving your children aside, what would you have liked him to have lived through?

— The first thing that comes to mind is Barça. Núñez lived, Gaspart lived, and he died just as Laporta had won. I went to the 2006 Paris final and thought a lot about him.

“Barça is the unarmed army of Catalonia”, your father wrote. Is that valid for now?

— It will be valid again in 2027 when the far-right comes to power. Barça is the identity of this country. It has its bipolarity, the all or nothing, common sense and madness, there is never an intermediate point. Either we are the shit or we are shit. But complicated times are coming for us.

You take for granted that there will be a PP-Vox government in Spain.

— Yes, yes. Perhaps this tendency comes from my Galician grandfather who, when I turned 20, gave me a niche. It was my first private property. Generally, I see the bottles half empty. We will have to use everything that is part of the country's identity, like Barça, to be able to survive.

Why did you take the first line of cocaine?

— To try, at night, for fun... Don't think that you'll do a line of cocaine and end up like you ended up. There were two types of drugs in the 80s: cocaine was the snob drug, which came from cinema, from the United States, and there was the lumpen drug, which was heroin. One was like for winners and the other for losers. The problem is inside your brain. But I don't like to give moral lessons to people. Trying to have a life outside of all this world teaches much more than giving lessons.

Dani, what would you like to happen from now on?

— May the pain I have in my neck go away. I would love that.