Alejandro Palomas: “Stop thinking about sex has been a liberation” | Culture

Alejandro Palomas comes to Madrid on purpose for the interview. We have stayed at one in the afternoon in the attestation and noisy reception of one of those modern hotels and cuquisFront in front of the Atocha station and in the middle of a chaos of works, fences, debris, pneumatic hammers, sirens and provisional deviations for cars and pedestrians. It arrives, tall and skinny, unmistakable, with five minutes of delay because it has just gotten off the train and, although it is not in a hurry to finish it, as soon as we finish the conversation it says that it will take the first one that is back. He lives in the countryside, at an hour and a half of Barcelona, ​​and the city, the agglomerations and the noise are his very idea of ​​hell. Let it be explained.

In his WhatsApp state he puts “orphan.” Because?

Because I am. It is my marital status, my way of introducing myself to others. My mother died four years ago, but my first orphanhood was very previous, when I went through the movement of mine of the abuses (in 2022, Palomas denounced having been a victim of sexual abuse between 8 and 9 years for a religious of the La Salle de La Salle school Premià de Mar, Barcelona). I stopped being a child at age eight. I was orphaned with my childhood. I am alone.

Is it alone or is it alone?

I am alone. Being just means that you can look around, 360 degrees, and nobody occupies that space. You think alone. I always felt alone, from very little. I always saw myself far from everything and working separately. Even when I had partners, I never fused. There was confusion, but not fusion.

So, for you there is no “we”?

Like me and another person, no. My we are the common good, the community. I have several, but they don’t touch, because I don’t know how to handle them. There are my sisters, which is my family community. My reading community. And then the greatest, which is the one that lives in my head.

As in the comic ’13, Rue del Percebe ‘?

Multiplied by 300. My imagination is a skyscraper with all full apartments. And the neighbors go up, they go down, something happens to each one, and I am aware of everything. My mind spends more time there than here.

His mother died in 2021 and you revealed to have been a victim of abuse in 2022. Did she wait for her to die?

Consciously, no. I revealed them when I saw that others did, to make visible the matter. But, seen with time, yes. I no longer had the danger of harming him because, in addition, what I feared happened: that people said why my mother did nothing. I knew that questioning was going to exist and did not want her to live it.

But his mother did. You have said that your parents went to your school to complain.

My mother of course did, but from the perspective of now, it seems not. He did not take me out of school because, at that time, we talked about Franco was still alive, my school was religious, we were in the gray Spain of terror and did not question. We tend to judge things out of time and context. And that hurts.

In his book, ‘A life’ talks about how you and her sisters face your mother’s illness. How do you remember that time?

My sisters and I fought to take care of her, and that is very rare, because, there are two terrible moments in the life of a family and that takes out the worst of each one: when she plays to take care and when she plays inheriting. There comes the personality of each one and, or the stampede occurs and the brothers are not spoken anymore or that is when they are for a lifetime. Families and maps are rebuilt, although it was a fast process, it joined us like a pineapple.

Why do you think it was so?

For my mother’s personality. She divorced at age 65, after living decades in the shadow of my father without daring to separate, and stayed on the street with 180 euros of tip-think. So my sisters and I, who have no children, and that tells, we turn to her. Other children only realize that their mothers are women when they die, but I was lucky to discover a lady, Amalia, a woman who understood that until then she had not lived, she wanted to live and did it to the fullest. We, forties, were tired of life, and for her, everything was a surprise and a party.

That is, his mother rejuvenated him.

Completely. My mother was albina and almost blind and after so long to hear from my father that it was useless, ugly, clumsy, of all that machaque of ridiculing her in public, suddenly, she no longer had that look on top and had ours, that of your children. We discovered a wonderful person who was never aware of the joy he generated around him. We were her allies and we were rewarding her until she died.

That suggests the concept “family burden.”

Let’s see, I have lived that. We take care of my mother at 33.3%. We requested the help of the agency and arrived when I had already died. Taking care exhausts, especially when you know there is no remedy and the end is what it is. So, sometimes you surprise yourself driving and begging for everything to end, and at the same time, thinking, how I can think this, if my mother is what I want most in the world. That, speaking of a physical illness, I don’t want to imagine what mental illness is. I don’t want to go through that.

Does he say it because he has been there, there?

I’ve been there, there.

And now is beyond or more here?

(Long silence) I cheat a lot. All the time. I am two.

Well, I didn’t say it was alone?

Of course, but that’s why I can be alone, because I have another with which I am all the time. I have a part that does not want to be here, that would die right now, in front of everyone, that says what I do here, I am bored. Everything would change, this world, I do not understand how everything is so ugly.

But if this hotel is very cute.

Yes, but, look, this plant is false, plastic, and I hate the false. I don’t understand what need there is. What happens is that, as I am two, they get along very well, and one saves the other of madness every day, 24 hours, full time.

And today who is winning?

This goes at times and I live life through challenges. I wear challenges because if not, I have nothing to do here, sincerely: I already did.

So why do you write, that’s the challenge?

I write because I have to eat. There was a time when I said I wrote to love me. Fortunately, not anymore. I no longer need them to love me and, then, unfortunately, the outside matters little. What I am going to say sounds terrible. But I think I write so as not to end my life yet. There is no one to wait for me anymore.

Doesn’t his sisters await him?

Already, this is complicated, because they don’t want to. And I tell them that they have to think about it because that will happen at some point. I have it very clear.

What is pleasant for you?

Pleasant?

Pleasant.

(Long silence) What I like most about the world is silence. Being in my house, on the mountain, in a stone in the middle of the mountain, which is like the wax wall. Stretch, sleep, think. Without human noises, only birds, wild boars ..

And the others? The neighbor?

It generates curiosity, but I don’t know how to link myself, that is my problem, that I don’t know how to link myself and I will never know. I don’t have time. I know I can’t. I don’t know how to do it, I don’t feel me. I am not a associal, I have no shyness, I get to a place and I am the king of the party, the most nice and fun, but I do not feel linked, it is like I am a character who does that. As if I saw me from above. I control all those characters very well. That’s why I bore me.

He says that for you, the links ended. And sex?

Sex for me does not exist, because sex has to be pleasant and for me it never was. So why am I going to try? Before, I suffered, thinking that it was an abnormal, a total depletion, but then, at the end of my last partner, I told myself: I live this badly, but not only sex, also the pairing, I do not understand that “we “Of the couple. And since then I have discovered that I can live without sex, it is not so important. I don’t even think about it. And for me it is a release.

How many times have you called you selfish?

Not much, because I have always been very conciliatory. Always putting myself in the skin of the other. Even in sex. That the other was fine, that he did not realize that I was not there. I have lied a lot. That is why it is a release not having to lie. Like my mother, when she got rid of my father. There is a world in which you don’t have to lie, but for that I have to be alone. I am very quiet, very precarious, and people don’t want that. People want to be a look, but not seen.

Seen what was seen, it was worth revealing your abuses? Have you received comfort or repair?

The important thing is that, even, I still receive, by networks or even anonymous wasaps, messages of deep hatred. Of the type: you will miss that man fucks you. I have also received heat. But, above all, I have learned that the time of politics does not correspond to our reality. It has disappointed me a lot emotionally. I have been, I am, one of the five children who are still abused daily in this country. And that takes my dream. The suffering of those who have no voice.

Didn’t he feature, by denouncing his abuses, being seen as the abused writer of Spain?

Nobody asks me for that. Mine is already forgotten. After six months, it had already passed. Young journalists ask me what my book is about, without having read it, because they are bored. And I understand it, because today they have my interview and then another and we are involved in a wash tunnel, so it is about coordinating a bit to come out something interesting, because I also get bored, and here I am, promoting my book.

I have read that it has high capabilities. Does that explain some things?

All. I discovered it when my mother divorced, in some papers in the move. That explained everything. My inability. This head. It is horrible. When you say that you are gifted, it seems that you are flaging, I would like it not to be so. I can write a novel in the morning and another in the afternoon, and then they tell you: they will be shit, but it turns out that they will not be so much, I have been living very well for years. It is very rare, because everything is very slow, and inside, very fast. Being gifted and hypersensitive is a whore. Now, I also tell you that, if the gifted and the hypersensitive ones would send, the world would be different.