Paco Ignacio Taibo II, son of Paco Ignacio Taibo I (half a family on Wikipedia), is at the door of the Rosario Castellanos bookstore, flagship of the Fund for Economic Culture of Mexico, which he has chaired since 2019. He has sat at a table round of coffee, drinks Coke and smoke without transition. It’s his office, she says. She wears a T-shirt and her hair is in the water, pulled back, a beard more than incipient. Nailed to a mafia capo: Tony Soprano, to be exact, waking up to his tasks at the door of the business. The idea does not please him. “Far from it, being at the door of a bookstore improves sensitivity,” he will argue. The writer, formerly the creator and director of the Black Week in Gijón, where he was born 73 years ago, looks with eyes full of eyelids. What color will they be? He will appear relaxed, provocative and irreverent, because he always is, in tune with the journalistic content of vacations, “that Spanish logic of ‘summer is coming’”, which seems so rare to him in a Mexico where the seasons are not distinguished.
Ask. Paco Ignacio Taibo II. That sounds very aristocratic or pontifical.
Response. It was an internal debate, when I finished my first novel I had a night meeting with my father. How are we going to sign? He was always a very generous man. He said, “What if we put on I and II?” It was two in the morning and we were in the living room of his house, he in his pajamas. He is very aristocratic, I told him. He answered me: “Yes, but also as pelotaris”. I don’t know where he got that from, that there was a Juanchi I and Juanchi II on the pediment, he told me. And from that day on, my father began to sign his column in the newspaper as Paco Ignacio Taibo I.
P. Half of the Taibo are on Wikipedia. Is that an honor?
R. It’s chance. But there are also all the González and the Pérez. It’s not that serious, right?
P. Are the revolutions made by the bourgeoisie?
R. Sometimes yes, La Fayette, Kropotkim, there is everything in the vineyard of the Lord, they are phenomena of constructions of conscience along long and intricate paths where your origin is mixed with what you have experienced and you take the side of the poor or the oligarchs.
P. Why did you take the poor man’s?
R. By family tradition.
P. Not by personal reflection.
R. Of course, but that was when I was 15 years old. From 11 to 15 I was on the left, but I still didn’t reflect.
P. 15 is the age to start reflecting.
R. Yes, but I already came with a progressive family tradition.
P. What are your contradictions?
R. Few, mind you. Somehow, throughout all these years I managed to become one and not two. Faced with the temptations of being a public official and being a writer, I did not sign up for that internal debate, I continue to be both.
Faced with the temptations of being a public official and being a writer, I did not sign up for that internal debate, I continue to be both”
P. It is considered a block.
R. Na, the word block is very strong, I consider myself a character consistent with his past. Let’s see, I stopped wearing a tie in 1967.
P. Why do you have it so present?
R. Because she was writing about it the day before yesterday. We were going to a New Year’s Eve dance and they didn’t let a colleague in because he didn’t have a tie and all of us, the rest of the group from the Left Front, took off our tie and threw it on the ground. Since then I have not used it once in my life. Well, you’re consistent, if you took it off for one reason, you don’t have to put it on for another.
P. Coherence is one of the things that is most lost these days, what do you think? Those who declare themselves Republicans and then marry in the Church or things like that.
R. Ha ha. With me there is no such problem, I have been an atheist since I was seven years old.
P. Since seven.
R. Yes ma’am. I was walking with my uncle through Gijón when a priest appears, and my uncle urges me: “Go tell him”. “Why don’t they distribute the treasures of the Vatican?” I asked him. “Oh, Ignacio,” he looked at my uncle, “you have to take this boy to mass.” I answered: “I don’t go to mass because they don’t allow smoking.” “But if you don’t smoke.” “But I’m going to smoke a lot,” I replied. And then he made the cross with his fingers and ran away from the conversation. It was the Francoist Spain of 1956.
P. Felipe VI does not get up when Bolívar’s sword passes and God’s sword is mounted.
R. Maybe I didn’t even know what it is, or the significance of that sword, I want to think the best, which is ignorance, the general ignorance that the Spanish power has towards Latin America, it doesn’t finish adjusting its relationship in terms of past and present. That sword has a symbolic character, I like it.
P. Why?
R. Because it’s Bolívar, damn it. The type that for the first time puts on the table, from Patagonia to the Rio Grande, the idea of a single continent. I am a Guevarian Bolivarian.
P. Well, that sword walking around in a glass case reminds Snow White.
R. The same caustic sense of humor that applies to Bolívar’s sword, why not apply it to Spanish religious-monarchical ceremonies? And to the Escorial, go for a walk to the Escorial to enjoy the macabre equivalent of Bolívar’s sword.
P. That’s what I was going for, if God is criticized, it is taken for granted that he exists. Is not too much attention paid to the monarchy?
R. When you have something as prehistoric as a monarchy in the political regime, you still have to pay a little attention to it.
P. When the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, repeats the word people, who do you think of?
R. In the village. When you have lived in the social movement for so many years, you have taught literacy in basic schools in neighborhoods so humble that everything smells of sulfur, when you have walked through society from below, with sugarcane workers, clothing workers, when you slept at the door of strikes, where not even There was a door… The town is very clear. And when the oligarchy seems so ridiculous to me, so sons of the Hello and in bad taste…
P. But between the common people and the oligarchy there is a lot of middle class.
R. Yeah, well, it’s not their fault.
P. Socioeconomically, you are in the middle class.
R. Yes, but the ideology is not sent by the money you earn per month.
Politics is not only a problem of ethics, but also of aesthetics”
P. But having other tastes or considering yourself differently, isn’t it better or worse, right?
R. You are who you are, you don’t have to go around buying grenadier uniform with feathers on top. You create likes. Politics is not only a problem of ethics, but also of aesthetics. Aesthetics is important. There is an aesthetic of the left, or there should be.
P. An aesthetic as a way of fighting?
R. At least a coherence with ethics. It surprises me that when you build progressive governments there are always about a third of those who come to them who aesthetically don’t add up, deep down they like the tinsel, the protocols, the structures of formal power.
P. I see him with a cgoose-cola in my hand and my schemes are broken…
R. So you see, I also achieve it with that.
P. The provocation as a goal.
R. In Italy, a colleague once told me: “Paco, the cgoose-cola It’s Vietnamese blood.” I replied, “Blow me an egg.”
P. When one goes to the poor towns of Mexico and sees that they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with Coke…
R. Ché would tell it better. In a Latin America that he traveled on foot, with terrible intestinal diseases, soft drinks and bottled water were a solution.
P. For governments that do not do what they have to do.
R. They do what the foremen tell them to do. He also said it when he was director of Coca-Cola in Havana: it must not be prohibited, it must be nationalized.
P. The Fondo de Cultura Económica is a huge Latin American publisher…
R. A left-wing transnational.
P. But is it enough for poor people to read?
R. Nothing is enough, although it is a material of brutal impulse, we have created 10,000 reading clubs these years in communities where there was not even a book. The Fund is for that. It is necessary to arrive in two planes, among the young people, provoking. And reproach old readers, who are reading again with this new government.
P. Why?
R. Because it creates curiosity, which is the mother of initiation and the return to reading.
P. Do you think that this government has caused a return to reading?
R. None of you believe, I bet my hands and head, I show you hundreds of book clubs, or the increase in book fairs in neighborhoods of readers who read again.
P. Well, if they have taken the books.
R. Of course, it is that wills cannot be articulated if you do not have mechanisms.
P. Don’t you get blocked when asked about your favorite book?
R. Yes. The truth is that my favorite book changes every month and something very dangerous is happening to me: I entered a stage of rereading books that deeply moved me and half of them are not as good as I thought and that makes me very nervous. Was I an idiot or what?
P. Why is it dangerous to discover that what you liked when you were 20, you don’t like when you’re 50?
R. Because your adolescent emotional judgment comes into question.
P. And is that dangerous or healthy?
R. Dangerous because what do you lean on? When you say to a teenager: “Have you read Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes yet? Try to read the stories and not the novels, and the real ones and not the apocryphal ones, which are very bad…”. Someone who works in the world of books is a natural recommender and if my judgment is in question, that worries me, it doesn’t anguish or paralyze me, but it does worry me.
P. Not recommending the right thing…
R. Not being faithful to the justice of a recommender, who has the solidity of his taste and the contagious capacity that his taste exerts on others.
P. Well, come on, take here some recommendations for adults and children.
R. For young people I would say that if they have not read Spartacus, by Howard Fast, they are in Babia. For older adults… Perhaps the Stratís Tsircas trilogy. He wrote three novels about World War II from the side that was never seen: the left-wing Greeks who emigrated after the Italo-German intervention and the complicity of the monarchy and left them without a country and went to Alexandria, Cairo and Jerusalem. It is a trilogy about the three cities.
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