Inside Baztan we were in Baztan, interviewing Miguel Sánchez-Ostiz – hereinafter MSO –. Excuse the temptation, but what do you want? In particular, in Arraioz, the town where the Azerbaijani writer resides in recent times. Lekaroz, Zozaia, now Arraioz, but since 1995 Baztan: “Baztan has been the place that I’ve lived best in my life, the place where I’m most comfortable, freer, better connected to the environment.” He left in 2007 to return to Pamplona, but retired at full speed. Now he doesn’t want to know anything about Pamplona, “an increasingly strange city.” He has once said: “If I think of Pamplona, it resembles something that is more and more dead in me, just a literary motive, a stage of memory that no one would know.”

Baztan, therefore. However, our corner – and forgive the second topicry – does not hide the brumas: the sun in front of us, the sky bleu glacé, making more bucolic a place as cruel as any other: adultery, suicide, violence, murder have explained to the MSO, all of them “very literary”. Our corner, like that, but not like that song by Mikel Laboa: “A song of terrible melancholy, like those rainy days in the low clouds where vegetation takes on a heavy weight.” And you don't know if the word melancholy is the most appropriate, but the mood of the SOM is not as sunny as the mood of the outside: “I don’t know”, “I don’t care”, “I’ve forgotten” without interruption. Although on more than one occasion he said that the time to live is the present, the only one that exists, there is no room for nostalgia, that is, for bad poetry.

It comes from making a great effort, a great literary, intellectual and, why not say, personal effort. A 36th war trilogy in Navarre dedicated to evil, a project that has taken hours, days, years, beyond 1,200 pages, a health pox. “Exhausted, I am left with the empty force, with a great discomfort. Since I finished El Botín I have not raised my head.” One thing is writing about the War of 36 from New York, and another thing is doing it right there. “The names that appear are not, like Dovstoieski’s, Russians, but your family, relatives, friends, comrades, countrymen.” That changes everything. “You don’t talk about abstract things, but about things that happened, of landscapes you know very well, because they are yours.”

They say the war happened, but not: “Here it is, otherwise I would not have written about it.” It is not just historical vicissitudes, “but a great ammunition for today’s and today’s political and social conflict.” And it is not so much to report what he has told us so many times, “if it is not to try to understand why what happened on that occasion excites us now, it forces us to take a position”. “I do not write so that history does not repeat itself, but to remember what the protagonists of those conflicts were able to do; now also, if they had the least possibility, they would be able to do. To fight, as far as possible, against the destruction of memory, which is a form of domination.” It is, therefore, about forming a historical account, not about revenge or cleaning up accounts. And, more than sorry, get confession and reparation for the harm done.

The novel El Botín begins with a quote by Walter Benjamin: “The historical memory is to give voice to those who have not signed up.” Dr. W. Dr. G. Sebald, for its part, criticized the historical memory as insufficient, unreliable, empty and repetitive. “The mayor of Madrid expressed his desire to remove Millan Astrain (as he was told in the vicinity) from the street.

has. Adversaries answer: He was not a Francoist, he was not involved in the War of 36. A lie. How can you not write that when you want to change the historical truth? I don't care what Sebald says. This rewriting of history cannot be accepted. If it's enough to write. OK, even if it's not enough. And rather than not being enough, it's irreparable, you write down what you write, there's no way to fix the victims and the heirs, they can put a plaque, give four salaries. But the real problem is that there is no will to clarify these crimes.”

In the newspaper La casa del rojo we have found a text that shows the antiquity of the intention to write in the War of 36: “I remember the novel I wrote to Carlos Pujol a few years ago: Novel on Pamplona from 1937-1938. Which I can still write. I had to look for a narrator. I thought of a wiper, a bookseller, a bookseller. Then I left it.” The text is dated 28 May 1996. One can also read somewhere, in 2005, that the protagonist of the story was such a MSO. “For so many years, the project has changed radically: at first it was a novel based on the daily burglaries of General Mola. I offered this novel to the editorial Espasa Calpe. In 2005, they said no, they had another novel about Mola. It came very well for me to finish the biography of Pius Baroja – although it brought me nothing happy: they did not like the heirs, because they just want a hagiography and the business continues to work. In 2011, following a visit to the fortress of San Cristobal, I resumed the project.”

Action to be taken

If the MSO had to do, namely if it has been the most important literary project of his life, he prefers to look forward. “There is another project related to the history of my family that cannot be delayed any longer: the Chimonco cycle will be called” (refers to the family house Chimonco de Obanos, the same that appears on the cover of The Roles of the Illusionist). Shorter novels, more concrete facts, another way of writing. “Trilogy has been like inflating the wheel of a drilled car, inflating and inflating, and expanding the text, not by the need for the text, but by the inertia of the inflated one. That can spoil the style and harm what you want to write.”

Asked about the reception that trilogy has had, the young man has frowned. “There was something about The Scarlet, nothing about The Spoils.” But even more surprising is what happened last year with the novel La perorata del insensato: “I put a lot in that book and the answer has been absolute silence. The biggest stick I've ever received in my life." A prestigious journalist from Madrid told him: “You’re very missing since you’ve published in that fighting editorial.” “A book published in an editorial such as Pamiela has a great chance of being ignored. There are no excuses, the books are in the shops, people are receiving them from the press; then someone has to give some explanation.” I've talked to you about the echo of the novel The Pirañas: “If I were to leave now I would have none. They said that I was from Batasuna and that I supported ETA's theses in 2005, for a high position of pp that has a lot of weight in the world of culture. I still have the nailed phrase. Someday someone will investigate what articles were written in Madrid at that time and what was said. It took me like a haunt, I ran out of literary agents, for example.”

There was a time when it wasn't like this. Prince of Viana Awards, Anagram, Seix Barral, Peninsula. “The abandonment of the anagram has been the worst decision of life. But I stopped doing it because I had been wrong with a guy called Seix Barral. And then I went to Espasa Calpe, and that was already a total mess. Pío Baroja’s biography, for example, was not presented anywhere.” The late Rafael Chirbes is released: “Chirbes did for me everything he could. I remember how some TVE journalists came to him when they gave him the Critic Prize. He started talking about me until he was arrested.”

What you're going to do next. A dietetic, heading to I don't know where, but the last one: “The other day, coming down from Mount Aizkolegi behind a herd of sheep, I saw fresh baskets of sheep. And there I saw a writer's dietetic, who chews reality, digests, and leaves puppies. Wow, writing isn't that. And lately the reality is repeated a lot, things have accelerated, the country has been jealously jealous. I've been tired of pointing to corruption, police abuses, violence. And it's not that I've lost faith in gender. I've been writing newspapers since 1974, they still serve me to think, but I want to give them another utility, not so misleading."

On-road and on-road unemployed

A new cycle arrives: “Some books I have hanging, short essays: On the poetry of Oteiza, for example, another on old age, on the rooting of another”. And at one time did you want to be part of the section on the contemporary history of the Basque Country? At first came a project of six novels, The Weapons of Time: “He stayed on the road, I don’t want to write about it. In Bayona under the porches was second, there was salsa

With someone's family they got upset and it was the beginning of the clashes I had in Pamplona. It seems that you have to write the story according to what the winners say. I wrote a third novel, The Ship of Baco, the drop that overflowed the forest.”

There was a time in Bolivia, in Valparaiso, in Bucharest, that went far: “But when we go to the place where we go, sooner or later we will return to the starting point. Of course, you never completely come back with empty hands: you have something to tell, your story, and that's the biggest treasure. Also, you must not forget that you are travelling for health reasons.” I continue to go a lot to Baiona – to fulfill the vice of buying books, to the bookstore Arragón – and to San Juan de Luz, where my political family lives. And he keeps writing, writing a lot. “What for? So as not to give in, so as not to despair. From a young age, I wanted to write. Desertion is the real death. We have to overcome the insensitivity, the temptation to send everything to the dog's room. And do what you think.” This last sentence has led us to the return journey. Not too far, not at least in the land of the Baztan, to forget that we were inside the MSO for a while.