Category: Cover

Here’s the thing: while we debate the coming winter of discontents, while we focus attention on the basket of commodities trying to correct problems at destination when they should be corrected at origin, someone opens Wikipedia (which keeps asking for contributions to the common knowledge) and finds that there are nine countries in the world with nuclear armament. That there are nine briefcases in the world with nine buttons like nine doors to an end with apocalypse. The difference now is that one of those nine has just warned that for weapons to be good for something you have to be willing to use them.

He always wanted to have a word with the world. But the world had a certain mania for avoiding him. So he would climb up on some wooden sticks, sometimes with a clown’s nose and sometimes not, and he would talk to the apostle as well as to the universe. I don’t remember that he …

At this point in the 21st century, I do not know if it is appropriate to ask ourselves what Roberto Vidal Bolaño’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 Bolaño 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.

Roberto Vidal Bolaño is not a Chilean writer. September 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of his death, which, by all accounts, was early. He was 52 years old and had an extensive and varied career as a playwright, director, theater and film actor, as an advanced film critic, as an agitator of majorities and a definitive weight in the fact that the Galician theater went from being a more or less eccentric dedication to a professional, demanding and enforceable exercise. The dimensions of Vidal Bolaño (Santiago de Compostela 1950-2002), who never published in Anagrama, were large in physical and literary terms. But playwrights are more concerned with the day-to-day life of their characters (and feeding the performers) than with the archive of their literary works. Thus, there is the suggestive paradox that Vidal Bolaño is one of the writers with the most work and with a more varied, more contemporary, more participatory work, and yet, despite the much he wrote, he is less taken into account than if he were a storyteller with less than four novels.

Roberto Vidal Bolaño wanted Galicia to have its own theater that handled its own arguments. He defined a way of writing for the stage and his decision was decisive for the launching of Galician professional theater. There was a theater to be invented and someone had to start doing it. It was Roberto Vidal Bolaño who began to articulate a self-sufficient Galician theater, capable of explaining itself while explaining the country to which it belonged. A theater interested in achieving majorities and connecting the languages that were to come with those that had survived the years of repression. RVB was a practical man and a multitasking playwright. He was precocious and serious, argumentative and ironic. He turned a dedication into a craft, but it was not magic or union power: it was stubbornness and skill.

A collapse is not an accident. It is a process with a bad end. A process that ends badly even though everyone knows along the way that it is going to end badly. In many ways, a collapse is the result of not wanting to understand the symptoms correctly. The electoral ones, the economic ones, …

And where do you live: in reality or in fiction? Wherever you are, the same thing happens: an almost permanent manipulation of the discourse so that the universal condition of the spectator that is to be a citizen can feel calm and surprised. Even surprised at their own tranquillity.

Xabier P. Docampo disappeared last week. Memory brings back to us his attitude as an all-stories storyteller as well as that humor he practiced to bring down the saints and bring up the people. (Four years ago of the text and a few more of the stories, but continue, they remain the same).

When the Constitution arrived, Star Wars was already here. The galactic western with confusing paternities arrived in Spain before the great text. When Luke still did not know who his father was, I was leaning out of the Xesteira cinema’s gallery in Ourense. It was 1977 and now it is frowned upon saying that the …

One of the great armament advantages of the Ming emperor over the earthlings of Flash Gordon’s time was the curved beam. In spite of being a conventional weapon, it had the property of firing on enemies protected in the corners. There was no point in hiding because the beam came out of the weapon, advanced in an irregular line until it reached a spot, turned and located whoever unwarily relied on conventional physics. The sentry boxes had ceased to be a shelter. It cannot be said that the USA, Russia, Israel or the British Prime Minister is not testing weapons like the curved beam. But it exists.

Melancholy can kill. In fact, it kills. The facts are not known because no one thinks it is relevant or worthy of change. Melancholy kills like sillines kills or ignorance kills. Or poorly attended healthcare. It kills like miscalculated accounts kill. Let’s not get dramatic either… It kills as life kills, but in this case, we don’t give it the importance it has. We are at war against melancholy, but we don’t know it because we are losing.