"The Estanyols have made me famous and rich": Ildefonso Falcones resumes the saga of 'The Church of the Sea'

Naples"What does it mean to be lucky?", cries a street vendor outside the church of Santa Chiara in the heart of Naples. In his hands he holds a handful of key rings with bunches of chillies hanging from them, which are actually small horns; they are supposed to serve as a good luck charm. We pass by, following the writer Ildefonso Falcones (Barcelona) complaining about the homeless. Six centuries ago, in 1448, Santa Chiara was already this Gothic molar of imposing dimensions but simple appearance, "a simplicity, prelude to the majesty of the interior, similar to that of Santa Maria del Mar," writes Falcones. In love and in war (Rosa dels Vents / Grijalbo), which hits bookstores on Tuesday, February 18.

Nineteen years after the resounding success of The Church of the Sea, the writer resumes the saga with a third installment of 750 pages that takes place almost a hundred years after the first. Now it is Arnau Estanyol, general of the armies of King Alfonso the Magnanimous and clean of that bastaix that raised Santa María del Mar, who stars in a story that wants to portray "the cultural clash that occurs between the end of the darkness of the Middle Ages in the Crown of Aragon and the beginning of the Renaissance." SinceThe heirs of the earth (2016) that Falcones already knew that "if he wrote another novel in the saga, he would move on to Naples", where he had left the king battling to break through the Anjou defenses. The novel contrasts the character of the Catalans (as the Neapolitans called the conquerors) with the "more cultured, gentler and more courteous" character of the Italians of the time. The Catalans, according to Falcones, were seen as a "greedy nation, as Dante already said in the Divine Comedy, some money-grubbing, self-interested people." Even "the king was fed up with the Catalans taking refuge in their rights and privileges," while "he made Naples the capital of European culture."

An unrepeatable success

Falcones walked around Naples last week with the calm of someone who knows that the stratospheric success of The sea church "It's something you won't repeat." "Well, I'd be very surprised," he says, "because the circumstances are not the same, the market is not the same, in 2006 people were throwing money away..." His was a reward for "stubbornness," because he spent seven years writing the novel and another five insisting that publishers publish it. That lawyer turned writer has sold 11 million copies in Spain today, dozens of translations around the world and two television series. So why is he returning to the Estanyols? "Because they have made me famous, they have made me rich. I dedicate the novel to Arnau Estanyol. They are part of my literary background," he answers. And he also adds that they are "convenient protagonists, people like them and the publisher goes crazy, and that is nice, attractive and profitable, let's stop the nonsense," he says smiling.

In love and in war It appears after the author overcame cancer (diagnosed in 2019, when he was writing The painter of souls, and from which he still has physical after-effects) and metastasis, and also after being acquitted of the accusations of tax fraud. And, even so, he says that it has not been a happy writing, because he does not live the creative process with romanticism but with discipline: "I am happy in my life, but when I am writing I do not enjoy it. My work is interesting and attractive, intellectually it is beautiful, but, on a day-to-day basis, at my age I would prefer to be on the beach. high "I'm not going to be able to do it," he admits.

Uncensored sex scenes

The author admits that, as part of the saga, Barcelona and the famous church "had to appear", but this time "against the Estanyols". The disagreements of the protagonist's family with their arch-enemy and stepbrother Gaspar Destorrent are still very much alive, and are one of the driving forces of the novel: dishonour and revenge. Another driving force is the double love lives that the king and the men of the court who live away from their arranged marriages shamelessly maintain (official lovers, legitimate and illegitimate children, platonic lovers and homosexual relationships), as well as sex as a weapon of war and a show of power.

The novel has very varied and explicit sexual passages. "These are scenes that I like, I'm sorry, and I don't think I'm a pervert. When someone takes a plot to a time when they will obviously have relations and it's the height of it, it crushes me as a reader. There are bloodthirsty novels but when it comes to telling that a guy goes to bed with one guy, the guy, the guy, the guy, the two guys, or two guys, or guy, or two guys, or guy gets one or two. The women that Falcones wants to portray are as attractive as them, they are not docile or simple, but they occupy the place that the era marks: "Women were educated to submit, or they got married or entered a convent or ended up on the street."

Reliving 15th century Naples

Going to conquer Naples also allowed him to tell "a story that has not been told." The geopolitics of war, which in the 15th century has many open fronts in the Mediterranean, is another of the driving forces of the plot. In fact, when the soldier Estanyol returns to Barcelona for a few months it is only to obtain more funding for the king's war campaigns, which are opposed by the feudal lords of the Catalan crown, who see how their money is leaking into building a great empire that will not benefit them at all (and in fact, Naples would end up in the hands of the king's brother, Juan). When the lords' property is seized by royal order, the remensas take advantage of the occasion to give them more florins than the Catalan owners and this is how, in exchange, the new king of Naples and Sicily suspends the misuse of the serfs.

Meanwhile, in the small mansion of Els Estanyol in Naples, the great humiliation takes place in the dark and treacherous manner, of which Arnau's favourite daughter, Marina, is the victim. Falcones places the house in what is today a dark alley that offers the typical Neapolitan image, with clothes hanging on both sides of the facades, very close to the Capuana gate, the first one they manage to subdue in the siege. "I imagined it on that side," he points to the journalists, "but each one can put it wherever they want; from there, imagination," he says. Falcones already knew Naples and has set foot there again while writing the novel, with a camera in hand. Last week he celebrated the 66th anniversary with the whole family. "The beauty of Naples," he says, "is that you can still touch what happened in that era," six centuries ago.

Reality vs. fiction

Near Cales Estanyol is the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore, the epicentre of religious life at the time, right next to the street that all the city's tourists tread on, the Spaccanapoli, which cuts through the city from end to end. Falcones describes Arnau Estanyol's entry into the city leading a party of two hundred soldiers through the network of underground aqueducts that Naples has, guided by a young boy, Paolo, son of a baker. In fact, history says that it was two master bricklayers who opened the way for the Aragonese, as the author details in the endnotes.

The documentation has once again been dense and expensive —"of each book I read I perhaps use 5%," says the author—, most of it in Italian. The writer wants to make it clear that his rule is always "that the plot adapts to the story and not the other way around." That is why he notes the rigor in facts such as the king's young lover, a seventeen-year-old page whom he favored with titles and income. Or he also goes into detail to "end the discussion" on the existence of "the right of thigh" in Catalonia, which is "the cornerstone of the saga of The Church of the Sea", and there are those who have disputed its existence, something that he refutes with the vehemence of a lawyer. "The reader who finishes the book should not start studying to find out if what I explain is true: fidelity to historical reality is fundamental for me," he says. in the Sala dei Baroni, an example of unquestionable Catalan Gothic with which "they intended to resemble Florence," he points out. anguish at the end of the century, when the writer also puts down his pen Although Falcones always has the next book in hand. The series of The Church of the Sea"I don't consider it and I don't rule it out," he replies.