The inexhaustible writing of Félix Romeo

Mariano Gistaín, that visionary who succeeds day after day with the reading of the future, said that Félix Romeo Pescador (Zaragoza, 1968- Madrid, 2011) had his heart stopped because in this world the possibility of living from writing disappeared. Felix had been living from it for a long time, in the press, on radio and television, with his workshops, his collaborations and his books. October 7 of this year marks a decade of his death in Madrid, and the Plot label, owned by the Trueba brothers, publishes two books: the novel ‘Amarillo’, just over a hundred pages, that letter of friendship , pain and blame a friend from his childhood, Chusé Izuel –Horse of Troy, directed this year by Jonás Trueba, rescues his only book of short stories, ‘Everything is still quiet’–, and publishes ‘The four novels’, which includes: ‘Cartoons’, ‘Discothèque’, the aforementioned ‘Yellow’ and its posthumous narration, ‘Valentine’s Night’.

To that production are added, in Xordica, the stories ‘All the kisses of the world’ and ‘Why I write’, a selection of texts in various media, most of them from HERALDO, which brought together three great friends of his: the editor Chusé Raúl Usón and the writers Eva Puyó and Ismael Grasa.

Varied, vital, fascinating

The rereading, or reading for the first time, of ‘The four novels’ offers a lot of data and above all a complex general poetics that houses clear and recognizable traces in each text. The passion for reading, first of all, the freedom of composition and imagination, a certain amount of experimentation, the mirror game and the aesthetics of the palimpsest (the inventions are his, and they are personal, and at the same time he seems to rewrite on texts , letters, criticisms and fragments that are from others and that concern the subject and the character and the city of his works), the search for different expressivities, the novel-collage, the weight of love and eroticism, criticism and confrontation with power, the denial of clichés, the exaltation of pleasure and curiosity and a great love for Zaragoza. In all his books, Félix Romeo drew up his particular cartography of memories, affections, places, history, art and culture of his capital in the north. He was a neighborhood boy and that is very present in all his books, but especially in ‘Cartoons’, the novel of childhood and adolescence, written in that random and happy way with which Georges Perec wrote his ‘I remember’ .

Félix makes a portrait of the Transition, of family life with that constant dialogue that the young man seems to have with his parents, of the television we watched, of celebrities and people (neighbors and neighbors) that he knew, of whom they had something to tell about family trips in 600, about those two characters who seem to be fleeing to no one knows where, the Coyote and Roadrunner. All of Félix Romeo’s books are an essay on something, and this was also an exercise in the stylistic way of Marguerite Duras, which interested her greatly for its turbulence, for its syncopated, knife-cut prose, and for its repetitions. Duras’s ‘Writing’ was one of his favorite books.

‘Discothèque’ is another jump without a net. The delirious novel, horse jumping, nocturnal. That book of extreme beings, prisoners of marginality, which takes place in two days and which addresses many collateral issues that interested Felix: car trips, guns, the powerful shadow of his father again (his, Félix Romeo, he was a policeman and collaborated in the filming of ‘Guilty for a crime’ by José Antonio Duce), the inability to assume the present. The novel, with ‘dirty realism’ and ramifying arguments, tells the life of the ex-boxer Torosantos, today a sexual athlete in nightclubs and occasional actor in pornographic films, whose father fought in the Ifni war, and the transsexual Dalila Love .

How much I know about him and me

If that book appeared in 2001, in 2008 Félix published ‘Amarillo’, which is a moving book, the biography of his friend, the young writer and literary critic Chusé Izuel, who committed suicide in Barcelona after a love disappointment. The three great friends from childhood and the neighborhood lived there: Bizén, Félix (who came and went) and Chusé. Felix uses the second person and seems to speak to himself and to the dead man in a narrative, full of subtexts, criticisms, letters, interviews: perhaps it is one of the author’s most naked exercises and at the same time an exciting artifact about grief. And it is, without a doubt, another exercise in experimentation. As was ‘Noche de los enamorados’ (2012), which has much of a police and prison investigation story, with echoes of ‘Dora Bruder’ by Patrick Modiano, another reference, as Daniel Gascón recalls in his prologue. It is written in short sentences, arranged like a poem or drama, and tells the crime of Santiago Dulong and his impunity, and defends his wife, despised even by justice.

And there, again, the characteristics of the author shine: his constant rebellion, his nonconformity with the ‘proven facts’, that Zaragoza of ‘always in the heart’ and one of his obsessions as a writer: Félix, like Javier Cercas and like Miguel Ángel Hernández recently in ‘El dolor de los otros’, wanted to tell how books are written and how he wrote them. He did it to the open grave.

FOUR FRAGMENTS

1. In 600 we were twelve. My father was the driver and he was taking the twelve of us. And a good bunch of watermelons. We were going to the river. We were in the back and we were a perfect target for the cars behind. We looked like those dogs that move their heads. (Cartoon’).

2. Torosanos thinks about the story of the spider that his father told him. The spider would turn into a scorpion and bite you until you were bloodless and then the spider would turn into a kind of demon and offer you all the riches in the world. (From ‘Discothèque’).

3. We had extreme modesty when it came to talking about sex, about our sex I mean, the one we had with our girls. (From ‘Yellow’).

4. According to the sentence, Santiago Dulong did not intend to kill María Isabel. But things got out of hand. (From ‘Valentine’s Night’).

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