In spite of knowing the signs, RBV was unhappy in the ceremonies and we could say that, in what has of ceremonial the memory of an anniversary, he would stir uneasy, even counting that in the last years he had gained some public patience for these things. Because there are so many reasons for uneasiness that we do not focus on the right ones. And this is what would bother Vidal Bola\u00f1o the most now: that having so many causes to die, we would shudder at the lack of verbenas. It would piss him off if we exchanged bread for mirrors and he would have time for a cruel comedy with influencers, naysayers, good people doing evil and bad people for whom evil is not a moral qualification but a way of subsistence.<\/p>
There would be another thing that could be cause for Mr Clown’s reproach against us. In spite of all the warnings he gave us, in spite of the sharpness of the portrait he left us, we continued to drive the van in the opposite direction. We gain a few meters, lose a few kilometres. We are once again distracted by the urgent while the important things are taken away from us and we want to disguise the misfortunes as tragedies so that, at least, we can say that we did something important.<\/p>
Because the issue is what Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o did with his work. What did he do as an author, director, actor, illuminator, daredevil, van driver and whatever he had to do to arrive one day in Ribadavia to premiere O desengano do Prioiro<\/em>. Why did he take on so many pains and troubles if it was not, in addition to having a mission and a profession, to leave us the most complete portrait that any writer of the end of the century in Galicia had made. Our portrait, which we were already there, is the portrait of a country that deceives itself so much. In the works of Vidal Bola\u00f1o, it is very clear that Galicia is easier to imagine than to live and that the fact that we Galicians are so well known for saudade and daydreaming has an obvious argument: we do not like reality. And a less obvious one: we do not know how to change it. And another very uncomfortable argument: we see ourselves as more capable of resisting than of changing. We seem better as martyrs than as heroes. This political resignation made RVB uneasy and that is why he did not want to be a writer, he wanted to take some action in every place and do something with his hands, which is a task that in Galicia, where Bola\u00f1o came from, was understood as a task for good and generous people.<\/p> For a series of decisions made by Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o, in order to talk about him, it is necessary to explain the here. Here <\/em>is a basic word. Like mom and dad, who say everything and say nothing. Out of all the semantic fields they represent, nobody can say what they mean by the last consequences. <\/p> Here<\/em>, for Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o, meant Here <\/em>and you all know what it means, even though between the first here <\/em>and the second here <\/em>there is a country in between. But not in the abstract. Because RVB said here and, pardon the joke, he was talking about space and time. Those two coordinates that, when talking about a country, are inseparable and cannot be conceived alone. Also. Also because the theatre is always here. Where it happens. Where it is. Where it exists.<\/p> The Galicia that RBV inhabited before portraying it was marked by some of the great transformations of the twentieth century. An obvious, if somewhat cosmetic, political transformation. An obvious social relocation due to a not-so-obvious but very marked economic transformation. Appliances arrived, television arrived, traffic lights arrived. All things of domestic and social organization that, in practice, left us with an effective sensation of full incorporation into the 20th century. We must not forget, and RVB didn\u2019t, that in some parts of Galicia the bathrooms inside the houses only arrived ten years before the first cell phone.<\/p> Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o’s theatre portrayed the Galicia of that change, the Galicia that went from being a terri\u00f1a <\/em>to being a terrace. The Galicia that, from the same mentality, went from being mother and mistress to Xacobeo event. It went from fleeing the mountains to living in a townhouse and then returning to renovate the family home. A transformation that left monsters, and there is born the political and social portrait of a society overconfident in the power of the brick and in the intensive cementing of the past.<\/p> The resulting portrait was perhaps not planned by the author. It came out as a result of observation and the need to write from a point that did not change and that is not as common in the country as it might seem: the idea that the stories that need to be told are those that matter, those that are in our environment, those that affect us but, above all, those that explain us. Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o wanted to explain us and we can say that he succeeded. Another thing is that the whole parish is comfortable with the results. RVB knew that the theatre gave the measure of things, that it would offer the most human portrait, if we do not understand human <\/em>as a noble description.<\/p> RVB’s theatre, to put it crudely, began with the symbolic, the festive and the popular and ended in the confrontation with reality through parody, comedy and sententious drama. Vidal Bola\u00f1o confronted many of the double-bottomed arguments of contemporaneity. RVB was very confrontational.<\/p> A part of those confrontations launched Vidal Bola\u00f1o an image that his work did not correspond. One thing that happens with writers is that there are too many measurements: if they write beautifully, if they work in a newspaper, if they are directors of a publishing house, if they have an Instagram with the right filters, if they are friends with the minister. But we should judge writers, if necessary, by their arguments. Better conceptista <\/em>than culterano<\/em>. I vote for the arguments without neglecting the diction and right here is where the work of Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o has in itself another dimension that rather they did not want to grant him.<\/p> I know that the great Galician novel is a parody. A kind of cultural complex that we have and that instead of reaffirming ourselves for what we are, tries to find support in the assimilation of what others do. We have been sheltered in this resignation for a long time. But if we want to accept the idea that great stories require great novels, which is like believing that what is important in a theatre is the building, we would have to realize that the great Galician novels were written for the theatre. Some of them, moreover, were written by Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o. But asking to evaluate an author by his plots is too much to ask. Let the Antroido not decay.<\/p> I know you all know the complete works of Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o, but I still have some time left and I wanted to cite some arguments to show that RVB may well be the most representative writer of Galicia in the late twentieth century. I don’t say playwright, I say writer.<\/p> Let’s suppose that Animali\u00f1os<\/em> was that sarcastic novel about that new class that was born in fin-de-siecle Galicia when the village houses or student apartments were replaced by townhouses in the suburbs. I am not being realistic because there is not so much sarcasm in the Galician narrative. Not evenirony. The petty bourgeoisie and its great obsessions, weapons of minimum destruction and how, come what way, we kill above our needs.<\/p> Also, this classic idea that when pointing out the monsters, the monsters are us. It is true that Criaturas<\/em> was a comedy, but it was no longer sarcastic, there was a graduation because RVB knew that humour is a tool of knowledge. But in the stay of the monster among Galicians, the tenderness was put by the monster.<\/p> In Galician literature, in the narrative, there is also a certain fondness for the lumpen. Somewhat stereotypical. Sometimes romanticizing. I will start giving titles when everyone has subscribed to Piso Franco. In spite of all this, I believe that nobody was able to mix in the same story the proletarian lumpen with John Coltrane. Not even in the United States. Saxo Tenor<\/em> may have been weighed down by circumstances. But the change of focus he offered for the literature of that time (which hesitated between narcos or civil war) was really worth to be taken into account.<\/p> But, but, but, but… how are you going to talk about narrative if you don’t talk about historical novels, period novels or those in which the vintage decorations are just another character in the story. Sorry, sorry, sorry. How could I miss such an important element in escapist literature. I don’t know where to start. For what’s closest, because I’m seeing storytellers overturned with the abundant supply of the Camino de Santiago, looking for paranormal phenomena, Russian conspiracies and all kinds of plot tricks that border on the ridiculous. And there went RVB with As actas escuras<\/em>, proposing the method of an investigation beyond the police against the myth of fantasy. The reason against the legend.<\/p> And in the same branch could enter D\u00edas sin gloria<\/em>, which is still the battle of the unbelievers when necessity presses. A battle as long as a road, without confessing the desire to believe. It is another vision of faith, when it seems as useful as the movies.<\/p> And of course, Franco also had to be killed. For that alone, Doentes<\/em> could have been a novel. The victims of history try to kill Franco through dandruff and the survival of Compostela. It’s a plot. And it has a movie.<\/p> I could still say something about Agasallo de sombras<\/em> and the Rosal\u00eda biography. If RVB did not take a leap forward in the reinterpretation of the figure and also in making about her a literature that would reveal before mythologizing, we will not be able to know who took that leap.<\/p> If these arguments do not justify the literary work with more intention to portray Galicia, contemporary Galicia, without filters, live, without concessions, what arguments are there to have? They are all those who are there, but not all of them are there. The prisoners are missing.<\/p> There are afternoons when I think that only Rastros<\/em> would justify the classification. And let’s say that the work could have been a novel about how a naive generation bursts against reality. And tries to live ignoring and disregarding the victimizer. A story in which the cynics change floors and the innocent pay. And the women. A novel with armed struggle and tripe. A work that had a very clear present and a great game of connection with reality. A novel as a sentence. Fortunately, Vidal Bola\u00f1o said in an interview that he did not have the grace of narrative.<\/p> If the literary art of Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o was the social portrait we know that Galicia has been 20 years without a reliable portrait, if we ask the right questions about what we did in these two decades with what RVB explained to us, we will have to anticipate that his next work will be uncomfortable. Bola\u00f1o knew that theatre is a magnifying glass that magnifies our gestures, that subjects us to the amplification of acts. When thinking about what RVB would do we should feel the weight of that magnifying lens on us, the scanner putting our tricks in evidence. Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o faced a Galicia that changed course in the direction of storms. The storms he announced are these, they are here. If RBV were now to premiere we would have to face ourselves with some of the Santiago environment as a background, with the confirmed disenchantment of having missed the opportunity, with the weariness of seeing again how we exchange rights for beads. I could again point out that territory between cynicism and hypocrisy that tinges on almost every social relationship. That changes all decisions. It would illustrate the role of the Bolivian soldier character.<\/p> I could make a comedy that would appear to be absent-minded. The same absent-mindedness that can allow a writer with four novels to be considered as such and representative of his time and a playwright with 50 arguments not. This is neither good nor bad, it only explains how we are. How we are here.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At this point in the 21st century, I do not know if it is appropriate to ask ourselves what Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o’s work is like, how it evolved, what traces he left behind, how much of his decisions were artistic or practical, or how many of his life circumstances were decisive in making certain choices or others. Perhaps the appropriate thing to do in September 2022 is to ask ourselves the same question he would ask us: what did we do? What did we do in the last twenty years in general and what did we do in these twenty years with the work of Roberto Vidal Bola\u00f1o in particular. I am sure there is a verb that would summarize a large part of the answers and, even if true, it would still be escapist: to resist. Resist, we all resist and we are here, although this here would have nothing to do with RBV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":273796,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fatiga-ocular-en"],"acf":[],"post_template":"reportaxe","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"In spite of knowing the signs, RBV was unhappy in the ceremonies and we could say that, in what has of ceremonial the memory of an anniversary, he would stir uneasy, even counting that in the last years he had gained some public patience for these things. Because there are so many reasons for uneasiness...","reading_data":{"word_count":"2125","reading_seconds":"510","reading_time":{"minutes":8,"hours":0,"seconds":30},"reading_string":"8'30''","reading_human":"9 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":""},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Eye strain","id":191,"slug":"fatiga-ocular-en","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273824"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299634,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273824\/revisions\/299634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/273796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}