Kiko Amat: "I come from a culture of intemperance. No one drinks for the sake of it."

Kiko Amat (Sant Boi de Llobregat, 1971) has more than a hundred tattoos and, while he talks, he adjusts his mustache and earrings. He says he likes the constant repetition of movements, like the jokes and words that recur in his books and the movies he revisits over and over again, and it has always worked for him. He speaks out against "series culture" in his podcast. Pop and Death, published his latest book in February, Dick or the sadness of sex (Anagrama), and this November will be one of the representatives of Barcelona literature at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.

You have many theories about food.

— Bullshit subjective theories. I don't have a theory. all-encompassing, universal. But I have a natural suspicion of the gastronomic obsession of our times, which we could say has four legs.

It serves us.

— First. In my house, when I was a child, there was a delirious combination of apathy-parental-grandparental control. In my adolescence, for example, I could come home at 5:00 a.m. slice like a monkey, with one eye hanging out, and nobody said anything to me, but I couldn't skip Sunday lunch. Sunday lunch was beyond It was catastrophic to skip it. Like in many working-class homes, food was sacred. Also because my grandparents came from the Civil War, the hunger... I have a fucking trauma about sitting at the table.

Because?

— It creates a heavy uneasinessI associate it with those almost mass-produced lunches where every dish had been prepared by my grandmother, who had worked her butt off going to the market four times in a week. It seemed like having a hangover and not being able to eat the shrimp was like spitting in the face of my grandmother and all her values.

We already have the first leg.

— The second part is that, during a period in my family, from 82 to 90, many family meals were tinged with a very particular kind of tension in many directions: marital, parent-child, heavy. Heavy not "social services intervention." But I spent a decade dreading sitting down to dinner. I didn't want to leave my room, where I read Spiderman, I either masturbated or listened rock and rollA meal was synonymous with conflict.

Still today?

— Although my grandmother and mother were great cooks, these experiences created in me an instinctive reluctance to consider the seriousness of meals, to consider the sacralization of food. I've overcome this somewhat now, having had children and raising them in a loving atmosphere. But, equally, I've found a loophole at every opportunity to avoid sitting at the table with my children. All for the sake of not having a serious meal. We're together, we're happy, we'll watch an amazing series, but there's no need to be at the table.

Let's go for the third leg.

— For a variety of reasons, perhaps because I was a chubby, unathletic kid, perhaps because an ultra-sleazy girlfriend told me I was "fat–which I wasn't, and it traumatized me– I had a period of body dysmorphia. Not extreme, not at all. I didn't go to a specialist, or be hospitalized, or anything like that, but I did lose weight noticeably. This ended up forming an ambivalent and not entirely friendly relationship.

And the fourth?

— Working-class culture, the culture of my friends and mine, is a culture of shitty food. I eat peanuts and sunflower seeds for dinner. I liked it. I was very happy eating peanuts and drinking beer. It was a cornerstone of my diet. That's why, when I encounter an approach that I believe is elitist and sacralized gourmet food... I don't give a damn. I really have no connection to food culture.

So a €150 tasting menu…

— Wow! What are you saying? Not 150 or anything. I think it's crazy. Really, I could do without anything, until I got scurvy. In the series Black books There was a character who had the theory that the mirrors in the fruit and vegetable section aren't there to help you see the produce, but to make you see the bad face you make and say, "Wow, I should eat an orange."

And does the same theory apply to the world of wine?

— The same. Everything I've said about food is perfectly applicable to wine. I come from a culture that's not just about beer, but about industrial beer. It's a culture that precedes the culture of craft beer, which I respect, although it's a bit of a challenge. fifty-something that needs a project. It's like fermenting berries. It's not my thing. My culture is bad beer.

And "bad" do you mean…?

— Industrial beer without any pretensions. The kind that's mass-produced. Specifically, the kind from Barcelona for life. And even white-label beer. In reality, there isn't a huge difference between brand-name industrial beer and white-label beer. The only problem is that they have a lower alcohol content, and if you want to buy the punctilio necessary to forget about everyday tragedies –which is three beers–, you need more alcohol.

Is alcohol part of your daily life?

— The culture I come from is alcoholic, in the best and worst sense of the word. Drinking spirits—not wild, without leading to morbid pathologies—is fine with me. The kind that doesn't cause drinking and driving, nor kill people and such.

In A restless man You wrote that "the life of non-drinkers must be terrible."

— This is based on a quote from an Englishman I can't remember now. One of my Englishmen. "I feel bad for people who don't drink because when they wake up in the morning and get out of bed… It's the best they'll feel all day." I think alcohol, with all kinds of precautions, can have benefits as a citizen and as an artist.

As a citizen?

— Alcohol can put inconveniences into perspective. In life, one must know how to distinguish between inconveniences and problems. Often, inconveniences seem like problems. I assure you, after three beers you'll see what it is. inconvenience and what is it problem Very clearly. The problems will continue after three, ten, fifteen beers, even magnified. The inconveniences become small. For me, it's a good laboratory test.

And as an artist?

— Alcohol—in my case, beer—encourages abstract thinking. It's a total myth that you can write while drunk. You can write, but poorly. It requires focused concentration. But if I'm drunk, beer suddenly makes me create associations I wouldn't otherwise.

Another quote: "Thanks to bars I am what I am."

— I also come from an oral culture. Don't underestimate the power of a teenage suburban boredom. In parks, in plazas, in schoolyards, in bars, you talk, you talk a lot. Talking and telling stories is the absolute basis of everything I do and everything I write. More than my reading, more than my literary influences, my first learning experience was being with rhetorical people. People who told their shit all the time. More than that: who not only told their shit, but told it all with humor. By default, they transformed grief into anecdotes, to go through it. It was universal: there was no one who told grief as grief, grief as victimhood, fear as fear of fear. Everything was filtered through the anecdote and the comic; you edited the story to make it explainable and entertaining, to make it funny within the tragedy. This creates an appearance of healing. My language comes from there.

When we talk about wines, what do you think of?

— In the incredibly strong wines of Terra Alta. They remind me of when I was a child and my grandmother and grandfather carried carafes of Gandesa wine. They filled the wineskin. Not when I was little, but I drank it when I grew up.

Do you have any preference?

— I don't know anything about wines, but I suppose that having lived in this land for many years, I can distinguish between incredibly abject and bitter wines and something that's just right. I've lived among humans and had to show that I was like them. But it's true that, sentimentally and emotionally, without thinking about it, I think of my grandparents' strong wines and of muscatels and mistelas.

Just drinking with friends?

— I have friends who, who knows, perhaps because they have plenty of time, have dedicated themselves to screwing themselves over in the world of natural wines. I respect that too, and I think it's cool that they bring natural wines to my house. And I must admit, with great regret, that some of them have given me considerably less of a hangover. So maybe the myth is somewhat true. Which doesn't justify the outrageous prices.

So you associate wine with a hangover.

— Yes, but because I come from a culture of non-modernization. Nobody drinks for the sake of things. They drink for the punctilio culminating in a slice horny, not pathetic.

Would you drink wine if it didn't get you drunk?

— The other day I asked a friend of mine, from a completely different class, and he said he liked the taste of wine so much that he wished it didn't get him drunk, because he'd drink more. I think it's one of the few times in my life I've gone several minutes without answering. I didn't even understand the frame of reference of the sentence. How? What? Why? As Sheldon Cooper says in The Big Bang Theory: "These are rotten staples!". It's nothing more than rotten grapes.