From Franco to the monarchy: Manuel Vicent reveals the history of Spain through key figures

Manuel Vicent 's Retablo Ibérico is three books ( Aguirre the Magnificent, The Chance of the Blonde Woman , and Deer Parade , all published by Alfaguara). But it could now be a single book about the history of Spain written by the best prose writer of the period since the postwar period.

Vicent wrote these stories as time went by. They reflect his life experiences, his work as a journalist at El País, and his knowledge of people. His enormous gift for storytelling is largely informed by the personalities he met.

Throughout his writing career, Vicent has narrated what he has learned with tremendous skill , recounting, drawing on memory, combining irony and knowledge. The book spans a trilogy that, for the first time, achieves the air of a complete work, which this time, from the title itself, "Iberian Altarpiece," addresses the history of Spain since Franco's death. Born in 1935, a contemporary of Mario Vargas Llosa, he possesses, like the latter, not only an outstanding memory, but also a prose that is even more brilliant when he recounts what he knows from the years he has lived since his earliest childhood.

This new book of his is a look at Spain in times of hope, pain, and crisis… In the conversation that follows, he recounts what that altarpiece was like, seen by a privileged narrator of a time and a country.

–How do you see this country now?

–Right now, it's at rock bottom. A foul atmosphere has been created around politics, covering up all the individual happiness of citizens and flooding all the government's potentially positive projects…

–This whole new world that's coming, the world of social media, has conspired on the part of the Spanish right to stage a kind of coup d'état that aims to force the head of government to resign out of exhaustion… They're waiting for that day to happen, especially the far right. Some are betting on this, while others believe that the current head of government is a tough man who will hold out until 2027, when his term ends.

–And here is your trilogy, singing the past, which resembles this time, by the way…

–I'm not gifted at inventing characters. But I do know how to use real people who, at a given moment, embodied a part of this country's history, its sensibilities, its way of life, its sociology. I've surrounded all of this with a literary atmosphere that makes it believable and presents it as a reference to a time and place in which many people identify because they have lived through this country's history.

–It begins with the life of Jesús Aguirre, the Duke of Alba…

–Without intending to, I came across that real, but practically fictional, character who was Jesús Aguirre… Narrating his life, with his followers, with his friends, narrating how he developed personally by pulling on all the threads of his psychology, represents a synthesized history of the times in Spain from the 1940s to the late 1960s…

–The second part of the trilogy features Carmen Díaz de Rivera, the woman who helped Adolfo Suárez, the Falangist by origin who helped bring democracy after Franco…

–Another living, real character is Carmen Díaz de Rivera. Her personal melodrama [as the undeclared daughter of Franco's second-in-command after the war] would be enough for a novel alone. So is her political realization through her friendship with Suárez, forming a trio with King Juan Carlos, who was then a prince… Often, great historical events, in this case the Spanish Transition, can be explained through episodes like this one, which, on the surface, might be considered frivolous or perhaps ineffective, but which for me is at the origin of that pivotal episode of the post-Franco era. The fact that Suárez, a great politician who wasn't cultured but had a great nose for knowing where power really lay, knew how to back the one who truly held the reins.

–Friendship led them to create democracy…

–Suárez and that modern, blonde young woman from an aristocratic family with a personal drama, but a modern woman who smells power, sensed the new times Spain was about to move through… King Juan Carlos ends up in what would later become [a gulf, in Spanish terms], but back then he was a prince beloved by the people and then the first Bourbon beloved by his subjects. Franco gave him a country that he later ruined, but that couldn't have been known back then… Then Suárez lost his memory, and became, over time, a glazed mirror, a fog of memory, but a true hero…

–The third part of the trilogy once again features the royal family in Spanish life as literature…

–It was because the painter Antonio López, one of the greats of Spanish painting, was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Royal Family… I can only imagine how brave Goya must have been to portray the monsters that lurked within the royal family of his time… In any case, Antonio López wanted to and didn't want to paint the portrait, which took him twenty years. He did it for prestige, at a time when corruption was developing, not so much physical as moral, which was evident at street level. So, after those twenty years, Antonio López emerges from a middle-class Sunday-goer in a small town in Castile, who goes out after one o'clock mass on a Sunday, together, to have an aperitif at Casa Paco, where they eat typical Madrid dishes: garlic shrimp or flamenco-style eggs. In other words, the royal family becomes a family devoid of any interior, not exterior, embellishment…

–That's the portrait that comes out of Antonio López…

–And that portrait also indicates the entire development of the monarchy up to the present day… But all these are real facts about real people turned into fiction, surrounded by an atmosphere that envelops everything in a cold mirror…

–Vicent, have you ever considered that your way of telling the story, and not just this story, makes you a kind of 20th-century Velázquez?

–Well, man, that's a lot… Velázquez comes from Caravaggio and wants to be Titian… He senses that Titian is composing volumes through color. Color, for him, is a feeling. But he doesn't quite reach it; he stays halfway between Caravaggio and Titian, and he paints air… For me, the fact that the characters I've portrayed move within a fog, that they're not defined, that they can be seen from various angles, that's what creates the ferment of literature.

–You've always challenged journalism by writing literature. And you've met, for example, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato, Bioy Casares… What is it about that country that produces so much literature?

–I love Argentina… It's a country I really like, and Argentinians, one by one, are all wonderful… I had many fraternal friends who came here in 1976, during the military coup… Borges and Sábato were at the Madrid Book Fair in their time. Borges said to his friend: “Ernesto, can you imagine what the books we haven't signed will be worth in the future?” I went to Bioy's house once… A girl from the Alfaguara publishing house went with me; he was 82 years old. He was sitting; he’d broken his hip falling off a stool while searching for a book… He lived in a house where you didn’t need paintings to know that an incredibly wealthy man lived there, no luxury, but a millionaire… He told me that Borges came there every night, they wrote a book together, they talked, they laughed… “When he married Kodama,” Bioy told me, “I only let him come on Sundays… And we laughed a lot… Silvina, my wife, would say, ‘What are those two idiots laughing about?’…” I said to Bioy, “When did you have the feeling that women looked at me and no longer saw you?” He replied, ‘Last year.’ He died the following year, at 83… He was rich, handsome. And he’d slept with half of Buenos Aires.”

Iberian Altarpiece , by Manuel Vicent (Alfaguara).