NAZARIO LUQUE

apartamento - Barcelona

NAZARIO LUQUE

At number 12 Plaza Real, to the right of the doorway, half-hidden, some little angels with sex-doll mouths remind the visitor that Ocaña lived in this house; Ocaña, the artist who scandalised the Ramblas with his costumes and stripteases while Spain was still under a dictatorship. We press the door phone for Nazario’s flat; he too has lived here for the past 40 years.Nazario was born in 1944 in a village in the province of Seville, but in 1972 he decided to move to Barcelona and become a star of the city’s counter-culture movement in the still-dark years that marked the end of the dictatorship and the subsequent political transition. So much so that he was considered, like Javier Mariscal, a father of the Spanish underground. Who hasn’t heard of the peerless Anarcoma, the internationally famous transvestite detective who knows the sleaziest fleshpots

of Barcelona like the back of her hand? She’s also one of Nazario’s offspring, perhaps the most popular of the many characters that populate his comics. But as well as being an illustrator, Nazario is also a watercolourist, a writer, a photographer—and exhibitionist, provocateur, hedonist. Whatever his chosen medium, his work revolves around sex, which appears in the form of huge dicks all over the place—in his life, past and present, and his world, which is the square he lives on and the people who pass through it.I remember the first time I visited Nazario. Alejandro, his partner for 35 years, was still alive. He opened the door and they welcomed me with the smell of bull-tail stew drifting out from the kitchen, qawwali music blasting out, and the moans of a porno film that one of his Pakistani boyfriends was watching, stretched out on the sofa. This time, at the end of the stairs that always seem endless, the door is open, but there’s no music, no moans.

INTERVIEW BY PERE PEDRALSPHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL RIERA

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Nazario?Come in, come in. I’m in the kitchen preparing myself a bit of thyme tea because the air conditioning has made my throat dry.

Are you by yourself?Yes, I had to kick Ali out to talk to you.

We’re out of breath, does the lift still not work?Not until the neigbours’ asso-ciation pays for it.

Well, the main thing is you’ve got one now. You used to com-plain because the Heritage Department wouldn’t let you put one in the stairway, but now it’s fitted. You won in the end, but I see you’ve lost one of the two windows in the hall.Yes, the lift goes up the space in the interior patio on the right, which is where I had an Ocaña angel hanging and where Alejandro had his pot plants. I’ve still got the space on the other side, where there used to be a little window that looked into the toilets of the guest house that was on the ground floor. When it was open you could see guys pissing, and when it was closed Ocaña had a stick that he used to push the window open. This entrance was for the whole hallway; there used to be eight studio flats. Later on, when it was divided into three, this entrance became just for me. But before, everybody used to come in this way and had access to these patios, and one day we came in to find Ocaña on top of a pot plant with his trousers down and his arse stuck out of the window, showing it to someone in the toilets downstairs.

Your experiences with Ocaña in this house are legendary.Well, I’d known Ocaña and had been coming to this house for some time, but I still didn’t live here. When we met, I lived in a commune on the Calle Comercio, with Mariscal and some friends, photographers, and comic illustrators. There were five or six of us, but there were al-ways about seven or eight more—it was like the immigrant flats today. Then when I moved to

the Plaza del Pino, Ocaña and I saw much more of each other because he often came to pick me up to go for a stroll along the Rambla and fight with the door lady who always shouted at us and called us queers. Ocaña got really mad. She worked in a bar nearby and knew every-body that went in or out, and whenever she saw someone shooting up there she’d start screaming about queers, and this, that, and the other. Once Ocaña started shouting too and ended up giving her a slap with his fan. But she just carried on. It was terrible.So this flat on the Plaza del Pino was kaput; we’d been there for two years. Mariscal was mixed up with the photog-rapher Marta Sentís and living with her—Pepichek too; I don’t know whether it had to do with the drug thing, or a girlfriend he had who was living nearby. But it turned out I was practical-ly alone in the flat, so they were

going to give it up. I’d also just met Alejandro and needed a place to be with him. Ocaña knew this, and when a flat came up here on the Plaza Real, he called me straight away.

And you’re still here. You were destined to end up living on this square.Yes, when I was still living in Seville and was travelling to Ibiza or Paris, I would pass through Barcelona and always visited the Plaza Real because of the atmosphere—the hippies, people smoking joints. This was be-fore Ocaña came to Barcelona, in the ‘60s.

And you’re right by the Ramblas, which served as Ocaña’s own stamping ground.Ocaña and Camilo’s first steps as painters were on the Ramblas, opposite the Café de la Ópera. That was where all the gay artists, painters, and literati met—both on the terrace and inside—except for Jaime Gil de Biedma, who didn’t come around these parts. It’s funny because you’d expect him to come, if only to pick up guys, but maybe the pimps took them around to his place. There was a whole culture already at work here that Ocaña knew how to

Above: Nazario, Ocaña, and Camilo filming Ocaña: Retrato Inter-mitente, Barcelona, 1978. Photo by

Marta Sentís. Below: Nazario and Alejandro on the balcony in

Plaza Real, Barcelona, 1987.

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exploit. The Rambla isn’t something he sudden-ly started up; rather, the Rambla responded to the way Ocaña was, because the street wanted a show. Ocaña started to make a scene, first by putting on angel’s wings to go paint and then with his prancing, his fans, and his shouting. It was a real turning point. I’d argue that Ocaña was a theatrical animal. He was more of a stage actor than a painter. He didn’t do it for a living because he didn’t think anything of it, just as he didn’t think about the staging and the shows he put on for his exhibitions. What mattered to him were the pictures, and all the rest was secondary and served to dress up his work. But if you look at it,

this fantastic packaging became just as impor-tant as the painting itself, and sometimes even eclipsed it. For Ocaña—and he also recognised this—theatre, his show and performance, were his life. At the end of the day it came down to attracting attention, it was pure exhibitionism.

Sometimes you became part of this show, but you chose to stay in the background.Because I had no intention of doing thea-tre. The stage wasn’t for me, I was very shy. Ocaña’s problem was that he didn’t have the right partner. Apart from Camilo, of course; it was as if Ocaña had an angora cat on his arm or an Afghan hound on a lead. Camilo

encouraged him, but Ocaña didn’t need any encouragement or drugs or drink, because he already had adrenalin and something inside him. By himself his performance was much weaker, but in a group he was something else—like at the Libertarian Meetings in 1977, when she came out accompanied by 10 or 15 queers fooling around and stripping, which I’d more or less put them up to.

Your role was to incite.Yes, because I was already naked; I’d be wear-ing just a fish net with nothing underneath, whereas they had dresses they had to take off. I’d say, ‘Girls, get on the floor and kiss!’ and

encourage them to go a bit further with their number. In the performances after that, it was collective chaos. Nobody needed to say any-thing more for us to know what we were all about when we went to the Canet Rock festival a week later, in July 1977; we already knew how we were going and what look to choose.Going back to the past, now that I’m re-reading Jean Genet, I remember the funeral procession of the Carolinas on the Ramblas—a group of queers in mourning for some public toilets that had been destroyed in riots. In those years, the crazy queers were already meeting, going for strolls, and showing off on the Ramblas. The Ramblas existed long before Ocaña.

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It’s a summer afternoon. It’s terribly hot. They’ve just had coffee after lunch. Basilio is taking a siesta. Nazario watches Falcon Crest while, out of the corner of his eye, he observes Alejandro flirt with a guy with hair as blonde as beer who’s staying in the pension in front (Pensión Lepanto). Meanwhile, in the window of the room above, three strange guys have interrupted their chores to watch the manoeuvers.

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A gorgeous blonde-as-beer guy flirts with a little moustachioed bald man (is he Arabic?), who, from the window in front and with incredible cheek, is displaying his male member, nude. The guy with the moustache is waiting in bed, smoking an ooo that he no doubt just brought over from Tetuan in a 600g egg hidden in his rectum, while he gently touches himself. The voyeurs and the exhibitionists

do not have time for siestas.

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Now that you mention Genet, lots of people think the two of you portray the same sleazy Barcelona, the Barrio Chino, but your world is around the Plaza Real.On the other side of the Rambla, from the Calle del Arco del Teatro to the Avenida del Paralelo, you could say that that was Genet’s Barcelona. And on this side, from the Plaza Real to the Paseo de Colón, it was more the modern gay Barcelona—with the Elefante Blanco, the most popular local gay bar, and the Bambú, the Nagasaki, and so on. On the other side they also had the Bodega Bohemia and the London, which were pretty similar, but they had some-thing specific. It was the red-light district, and

that defined the area a lot, because there were also the pimps and the sailors. On this side, not so much. Genet wrote more about the other part because the cabaret bar La Criolla was over there. And so did another French novel-ist, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who has a square named after him over there, too. The two districts were pretty well defined.

You experienced all those movida places and bars, but in your comics you portray the even more sordid, underworld spots.Yes, because Anarcoma doesn’t meet the old farts in the Cosmos, or go dancing in Les Enfants or Jazz Colón, where that scene started up with

all the queers dancing with a handkerchief on their wrist, snorting poppers, and always end-ing up in a fight with the marines who came from the boats and put on American music. And there was stuff going on in the toilets; when the bar closed I’d get the 10 or 15 queers who were up for it but didn’t have anywhere to go, take them back to Comercio, and put them in this room we had lit with black lights, with mattresses and cushions on the floor. And me, I’d get off with one of them and go to bed with him in my room. I’d leave the rest in the other room until ‘the boss’ came back, got angry, and threw them all out into the street. The next day he’d have a rant at me.

Tell me something about Anarcoma, because she’s an incredible character. How did you come up with her?I was turning over the slippery subject of the transsexual and the transvestite, but the idea didn’t come to me until I started to think about a character for a story that was ‘to be con-tinued’. I’d never had an ongoing character; the longest-lasting was Purita, from 1975, who was also famous. But when I tried mak-ing a second part I got bored and gave up. Anarcoma, on the other hand, was created in 1978 specifically for an ongoing strip. I wanted to tell a series of stories and I needed a thread to tie them together; the easiest thing was to

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create a detective story, but I didn’t want a male star, or a female one like Barbarella or Modesty Blaise. So I came up with a trans-sexual detective in search of something; in this case it was a machine to release desires. I invented a whole structure for a long story, but the important thing wasn’t the search for the machine, but all of the little stories—the meetings, separations, hunky boyfriends, ro-bots, dicks, and so on that keep popping up, enriching the general plot line.First it came out in Rampa magazine: two pages in black and white every week. The magazine lasted for three issues. I kept on looking, but this character didn’t fit into any

other magazine, until El Víbora came out—and was a hit. It wasn’t underground at all; you bought it at news stands and it sold loads of copies. My character was something of a shock, because he was a transsexual in a het-erosexual magazine that sold up to 30,000 copies. It was a boom. Anarcoma became a character known throughout Spain, and not just by homosexuals.I was also lucky enough to be published in English straightaway, in Britain and the United States, and in France, Germany, and Italy. It’s a character that worked pretty well at the time; the thing is, because the homosexual sex was a bit too explicit and pretty hard, it slowed

down a bit. To start with, in the United States, they insisted it be wrapped in plastic so you couldn’t see what was inside, and it was only sold in sex shops. But people who go to sex shops don’t go to buy comics. The proof is that now we’ve tried to republish the complete Anarcoma series, and apart from Spain they only wanted to publish it in France.

You brought out some new Anarcoma ad-ventures a couple of years ago, but without drawing them, because you decided to give up comics in 1993, after Turandot and Alí Babá y los 40 Maricones [Ali Baba and the 40 Queers].

I put a lot of care into Turandot and then had great difficulty publishing it. It was a bit de-pressing to see how something I’d worked on for four or five years wasn’t recognised as having the value I’d put into it. But you give up a form of expression for lots of reasons. Another reason, for example, is that my story was a little bit pop and scorned the culture of producing a single work; it was better suited to being published in serial form or as a comic, where the important thing isn’t the drawing itself but its reproduction. I suddenly changed my mind when a couple of galleries in Madrid offered me the chance to exhibit. And another reason is that I’m not a professional comic

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Nazario plays solitaire and Alejandro reads in the sun while Martirio sings on the TV. At Isa’s house in S’Agaró, October ‘86.

Alejandro: Should I play Montserrat Caballé’s ‘Ich Will Deinen Mund Küssen, Jokanaan’, or ‘Capote de Granja y Oro’ by the divine Juana Reina? Or something else? Nazario: No nene, play ‘La Niña de

la Puebla’, I’m inspired.

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illustrator; this is important. The profession-al is a guy who promises to have so many pages every so often—Mariscal, Ceesepe, and I didn’t fit with that kind of discipline.So I gave up comics and moved into ‘painting’, because I’d used more or less the same tech-nique. It’s not as if I started painting in oil or acrylic; I carried on drawing with watercolour and aniline. The only thing is, instead of creat-ing characters in my paintings—because I was a bit tired of characters that moved about and told their stories—I showed the objects that surrounded these characters. I’d already tried this with Helena, Una Sombra en la Plaza Real [Helena, a Shadow in the Plaza Real] in 1990,

which is the story of a woman who’s thinking of how to leave her lover, in which she herself is portrayed, but in turn she’s also portrayed by what she says and by her surroundings. You can see a table with some dried flow-ers, sleeping pills, a Maria Callas cassette, some cards for playing solitaire. This helps to portray the character. And in one of the first pictures I painted, La Voz Humana [The Human Voice], in 1993, there’s a bunch of flowers, but also an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a half-played game of solitaire, a bottle of grappa that a friend had just brought me from Greece, and a telephone. It had to be The Human Voice, it’s waiting for a call.

You portray characters, and at the same time you portray yourself, because they’re still lifes based on ‘tastes’, so to speak. All your work is like a self-portrait, autobiographical, from the strips in which you and Ocaña appear to the memoirs that you’re publishing.Yes, it’s a self-portrait without people. All my paintings are self-portraits, because what I draw and paint is what I have around me. I work like Rembrandt, who bought rugs and things from antique dealers to then paint them; well, I went to the flea market and bought the things you’re photographing, the little boxes, small chests, and other junk. I’ve used all this in the paintings—my vinyls, my books, my DVDs.

In 2008 you gave up painting and turned to writing and photography. You became a chronicler of the square.That’s the result of having a window that over-looks the square and of taking photos. Once again, there are different circumstances at play; for example, the economic crisis came along and they closed my galleries in Madrid and Barcelona. But before that happened I put on an exhibition with some paintings that weren’t still lifes, but paintings with very different subject matter and a much more re-fined style, which nobody appreciated. And that hit me pretty hard. Everybody asked me to make paintings of flowers.


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Now I make photomontages and videos. For example, today I’ve photographed Karim, a Moroccan alcoholic in the square. I hadn’t heard from him in a while and this morning I saw him again. There are also solitary types who appear one day and spend a few days in the square, get undressed, bathe in the fountain, and disappear. With them I’ve made a series of photomontages that I call Hombres sin Rumbo [Drifting Men], a sort of Flying Dutchman. Through the photos I end up meeting all these people. But I don’t just photograph the square; I also take photos of my boyfriends’ dicks.

Why haven’t you made a photo comic with the new adventures of Anarcoma, like you did in 1980 with Caperucita Encantada en el Bosque Rojo [Magic Riding Hood in the Red Forest]?There was a kind of photo comic that came from an interview I did. The title was Anarcoma Desvirga a Nazario (La Realidad Se Folla al Arte) [Anarcoma Deflowers Nazario (Reality Screws Art)]. But doing some-thing like that now would be impossible, be-cause you’d need people, production, collabo-ration, and so on, and I’ve become a kind of she wolf, shut in my flat with my photos and my lovers. Do you hear that voice?

The girl who’s singing in the square?Yes, she suddenly hit a high note, a deli-cate one: ‘Aaaaaaaaaah!’ Someone has shown her that she has the voice for it and she does it, but like crazy—when she’s fin-ished singing in a normal voice, she goes, ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’ She’s got a good ear and memory, but she’s very shy. One day I met her and asked her where she was going, and she said to me, ‘I not woman, I guy, I dick this big’.

One more thing before we finish: I’ve read that you wanted to publish your memoirs un-der the title of Un Pacto con el Placer [A Pact with Pleasure], but they’ve been coming out under other titles.That’s the overall title. The manuscript came


to over 1,000 pages. It was divided into parts, and two volumes have already been published: Sevilla y La Casita de las Pirañas [Seville and the Piranha House], where I explain my sexual and cultural education in the ‘60s, and La Vida Cotidiana del Dibujante Underground [The Everyday Life of the Underground Illustrator], which talks about the ‘70s, when I came to Barcelona, Ocaña, the house, and so on. Two other vol-umes are still to come out: one about my childhood up to the age of 20, when I started as a teach-er, my life in the village, and in Seville, which will be called Una Infancia de Posguerra [A Postwar Childhood], and La Crisis [The Crisis]. Four instalments and one or two other books in-between.

More books?Yes, Los Novios [The Boyfriends]. Instead of putting all my boyfriends into my memoirs, like a list of lov-ers, I’ve put a series of characters into the bar, Cosmos—a series of old farts who tell stories about their

lovers, which are my own. Like the one about my boyfriend Ibrahim, who spent a year and a half here in the house and when I wanked him off, lying here on the bed, he came so much and so strongly that it went all over the wall; it was dripping down, and then there he was, laughing his head off!


HELENAA Shadow in the Plaza Real

BY NAZARIO LUQUE

Tonight I’ll tell him. I’m tired of faking it, of holding it in, of keeping quiet… This night won’t be the same as the others. Before he leaves again I’ll find the courage and I’ll tell him: ‘Please, don’t come back again, let’s stop this for a while!..’ I mean, can’t you see that I’m not the same, that your caresses leave me cold, that I don’t anxiously await your arrival as I used to, that .... that I can’t wait for the sun to rise so that you’ll leave …?

Above: Sevilla y la Casita de las Pirañas by Nazario Luque, Anagrama (2018).Below: La Vida Cotidiana

del Dibujante Under-ground by Nazario Luque,

Anagrama (2016).

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But he won’t understand… How should I explain to him the thou-sands of details that have been boring me, desensitising me little by little over these three years? How to take stock of the string of trivialities that make some relationships stop being what they were? I have the feeling that I’m the phantom of Helen in Troy in the arms of Paris. I feel like a cloud in his arms, like a stream of water in his fingers. His caresses on my body are like a dentist’s instrument in an anaesthetised mouth. I can see myself observing the both of us as someone outside of this relation-ship, and I feel pity and rage for her indecision; and for him .....

… And it’s that cowardice. When I suddenly decide to tell him everything I’m thinking it’s that stupid fear that stops me from opening my mouth. I’ll tell him when he comes back from the bathroom: ‘I think it’d be better if we don’t see each other anymore.’ No, no, not like that! Better if I say…

But why this fear? Nothing will hap-pen. He’s not going to kill me, nor will he commit suicide, nor will the world end because of it. And, yet, what a weight off my chest! Finally I’d be at peace! And alone once more!

… He’ll probably tell me that, for him, nothing’s changed, that everything’s still as it was when we met, that he’s waiting for Saturday to arrive to aban-don his wife and come running to see me… ’She’s met another man that she likes more than me,’ he’ll think. Perhaps it’ll be the first thing he says to me ....

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I’d start a new life; another life! But, how to forget how happy he’s made me over these years? Forget how my week would be never-ending, wishing for Saturday to arrive to run and wait for him at the airport, and come back to the plaza, flying, to bed, not leaving, not eating. Fucking all the time, only resting to tell each other how much we’d missed one another at every passing minute of the entire week! And without realising it the whole day and the whole night had passed in a flash. And he had to leave at dawn and I hated the dawn ……

If ‘another’ had really ap-peared, maybe everything would be easier. ‘I’ve met another man that I love!’ And he’d understand, it’d be logical for his logic. But no. I know that I’ll stay here alone, looking at the palm trees, not waiting for anybody. In this ochre and grey plaza, of identical windows, of balconies and arcades and lampposts and balustrades and iden-tical pigeons…. Only the palm trees, the lunatics, the alcoholics, and the lost people that come here to find refuge are different.

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Little by little that routine, that boredom, became more unbearable than before because now I don’t expect another great love. I’m afraid that all great loves end up in the same way. They are always the ones that seem determined to convert pas-sion into routine, into that ‘force of habit’ that freezes everything.

Routine… The moment arrives in which you think that for them what you feel or what you think doesn’t matter. They ask what you’re think-ing about, not because they’re interested in knowing, but because your silence scares them.

‘What’s up with you? You’re so seri-ous. What are you think-ing about?’ ‘Nothing!’ Is the conversation that’s repeated over and over again lately. When he arrived he lifted me out of the routine and the boredom in which I was living. I thought I’d gone crazy with hap-piness! He was the great love that one hopes for, the great love, the madness that seems will never come to us, but….

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The same again! He leaves and I’ve not been able to say anything to him… I’d still have time! ‘Wait, we need to talk for a second. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while now.’ But… it would just prolong this absurd situation. I want him to go. I feel like a whore putting up with an obnoxious client… Now I’ll stay here on the balcony wait-ing for the sun to rise. At this hour the plaza is lonely, silent. You can only hear the buzz of the fountain and the smooth rustle of the palm tree leaves. They’ve just turned the lampposts off and the plaza has been immersed in an azure haze from which the palm trees emerge, that will be broken by the first rays of the sun. Now the hoarse coos of the pigeons begin, the distant caws of the seagulls, the crazed swifts, the bars… Another week… Next Saturday I’ll make up my mind and I’ll tell him not to come back again.

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NAZARIO LUQUE

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