'To narrate is to drink another's blood': Leonardo Padura

Ir a La Habana , the most recent book by Leonardo Padura (Havana, 1955) , is a song of love and hate for that ghost town that in recent years has become a metropolis full of reggaeton and dilapidated buildings.

Winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature (2015), Padura wrote this biographical essay –as he defines it– as a territorial conquest, to expose the multiple layers of the island. So this book –which intersperses memories and fragments of his books, chosen by his wife, the scriptwriter Lucía López Coll– begins with the first memory of his neighborhood, Mantilla, where he appears as a dog-killing boy (a dog's paw, as they say in Mexico) who soon fell in love with the streets and their atmosphere.

Then come the steps of the teenager who discovered baseball, romantic corners, rebellious music and his beginnings in writing, like when he started as a literary critic in the magazine El Caimán Barbudo .

Although in 1983, “while the process of creating a socialist city within the historic and republican city was advancing,” the members of the Young Communists diagnosed him with “ideological problems” and denigrated him to a newspaper reporter, in the evening paper Juventud Rebelde , where he had to re-educate himself politically. Luckily for him, that place was only an unexpected platform for literary journalism.

What is your relationship with Havana? we ask the creator of detective Mario Conde and author of The Man Who Loved Dogs . “My relationship with Havana is complex and contradictory. This book is the expression of a relationship in which there is both love and hate.

Havana has had, in the last 40 years, a process of halting its physical evolution: few buildings have been built, and an incontestable maxim is that the cities we know are those that are built when there is money. And the lack of money has made Havana stop in a ghostly space, because the people and situations have changed, but the space remains the same. Cities are living organisms, they evolve, grow and even, eventually, disappear,” he tells Excelsior .

Do you still recognize that city that is in your books? “Havana has become filled with garbage dumps, potholes in the streets, gutted sidewalks, peeling buildings, propped-up balconies and missing paint, and all of this makes the behavior of the citizens very inappropriate.

There has been an accelerated loss of civility that also includes a lack of respect for the rights of others. Today, Havana is suffering from a noise invasion. It was always a bustling city, but now it is filled with motorbikes and people go around with their mobile phones, a Bluetooth speaker and they give the world reggaeton at the volume that comes out of their balls," he laments.

Can literature recover a city? “To recover a city, money, political will, civic education are needed, and the writer only reflects what exists. The value that literature can have in this conflict of interests (economic, political and educational) is to fix this image of the city and provide it with a memory, because many times these processes feed oblivion, and literature can rescue these elements from forgetfulness,” he points out.

What role does the narrator play? “The writer is a storehouse of memories. Novelists are like ticks, we feed on other people’s blood. I have to feed on as many memories as possible, because I cannot live the lives of all my characters or live through all the times they have lived. The writer’s role is to preserve memories and give an image of the city. With this we do not solve material problems, but we preserve a spirit that does not have to be the property of any political structure or system.”

Finally, he talks about Donald Trump. “Cuba and Mexico are two countries that are too close to the US and too far from God. What happens is that the US cannot live without Mexico and although he is very bully, he always goes to the side. But Cuba is a point that is handled as domestic policy, because there is a lobby in Florida that decides the foreign policy (of the US with Cuba) and this will have an effect on our country.”

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