We have lived in the Spanish capital for a long time, but now you are looking at Pamplona.
For fifteen years I’ve been working in a community mental health group in Madrid, and in last year’s acabail, I crashed. It was a job insecurity, among other things. We were working for the private company, even though it received public subsidies. I think it’s a good job to care for people with mental health problems. The users came to the day center, centers according to their development. I, for my part, went with the members of the working group to their homes and made a diagnosis of the situation of each of them in order to meet their needs. There are several elements in the game: person, family, isolation, trauma, suicide...

Is suicide there, too?
Yes, it is! And our goals were, for example, to reduce the suicide rate among these people and, in other words, to bring these people closer to public spaces, and to help or direct them towards that of the psychiatrist. Working in mental health is beautiful, but it also has collateral damage.

Not at all, as you said: “I crashed.” The
working conditions were not the best ever. I said, precariousness. We were four people in the working group, but we weren't even a fixed group. On one, the lows. In the meantime, the new colleagues did not have a fixed contract and, in the case of the Aunts, we worked on a one-time basis. The work had to go ahead. We had to attend to 34 people, we went above and beyond all ratios, and every year there were always new tasks: conversations with some and others, awareness campaigns in the institutes, dynamics of the International Mental Health Day. And, I said, instead of having a fixed working group – because it’s all important, even for the people we need to serve! – we were doing it the way we could. And I didn't believe it.

What didn't you believe in?
In what we were doing. If my colleague next to me changed every two to three months, how could the person with a paranoid diagnosis who had problems with confidence have confidence in us? And I was weakening until I crashed. The reason was the working conditions. I quit the job I loved. For several years, I have also worked at the microsocial level in Madrid, with migrants and other groups. I’ve been working comfortably in the field of mental health, it was as if I was following a circle, because I also lived a family story. I’m working on a book now.

What is that family story, you might say?
An uncle shot and killed a teacher when I was 16 years old. It was in 1996. They didn’t know each other. My uncle was sick, the family had no news of him, the family was missing at the lunches and the others. He gave her a brooch and killed another person. This incident was difficult for the family. This guy was taken care of at the institution I worked for in Madrid. On the other hand, he got the artwork. He also tried to make himself different. He didn't make it, but he broke his jaw. He was kept in the hospital, even in jail, and I visited him as a prisoner. The only people we met with were our own. I would take my driver's license, pick up my parents' car, and visit him.

And the next one?
Finally, one day, coming from being with the psychiatrist in Pamplona, he became different from himself. Leaving the village of Almando in his liver, he got out of the car and threw himself off the Marin Bridge. We had a lot of silence in the family. It was traumatic. Before now, I've tried to get in touch with family members and friends to pick up those around that guy. That's what I have in my literary project, but I don't want to talk too much about it now. I have tried to talk to some and others alone, and I have come up against a great silence. This subject has an Aunitz branch, some of which I am working on, of the services available to people suffering from mental illness in rural areas and others. I might be a bit embarrassed, because I don't live here, but is there a psychiatrist on the Baztan-Bidasoa side to care for people with mental health problems?

I can't answer your question right now because I don't know.
I want to make thoughts like that. I’ve been disfigured, I’ve come to see myself as neither a writer nor a social worker, and I’ve started an internal process, a reconnection, even mourning. And I've found that literature can be a mediator in making reconnections. For some reason, I have previously conducted literary workshops in a public library in Madrid with people with mental health problems. There are aunitz workshops, but people with mental health problems do not, without others, approach literature. When I realized this, I began to propose programs aimed at them, and people began to come. Those who were listeners in Hasmenta began to write: narrating traumas and others. We also published. Then I began to believe in this work, knowing that I also began to use writing as a liberating exercise.

Both in literary workshops and in reading clubs, a specific reader is considered.
In the workshops, the following groups are not included. And that's what I'm doing. They are mentally ill, or elderly, or marginalized... That is to say, I think it is necessary to take into account the different groups in public spaces, to give them some encouragement. I have made some contacts here [in the Basque Country] and my intention has been very well received. I live 500 kilometers away in Madrid and I have noticed that the dynamics there and here are different. Here I have found greater ease and closeness, I have found that they take into account what I am saying. In my experience, writing was also a way of escape: setbacks, distance, presences and absences... I am excited by the reception I have received here from some people, which has helped me in my process, to recover the voice and the illusion within me, to bring that Initiator of yesteryear to the present day.

Speaking of writing, you haven't published the old book: Writing is learning to count to the liver. That's where we met the Court House.
The book comes from memory. What do we remember and what don’t we remember? What is forgetfulness? What do we get? What do we get from living? I realized that I'm built with a Hasier aunt. It was a Hasier who lived here, Asier without a hitch –I always say that, broman-, the first Hasier before he started publishing, and the next one, who moved to Madrid. Going there was not in my sight, but the signs of life led me there, the one I have a husband had planned to study there. It was a great challenge to go to Madrid, even a break, because I had to start from scratch or from scratch, but it was also breathing, it was good to look at the thing from a distance... It made it easier for me to go to Madrid to do the aunitz process.

One leg there, the other is here for you now.
In Madrid, however, a past blurred me. It seemed to me that I had almost given up on a past, that I needed to leave that past behind. And, during the pandemic, braust!, certain events and memories came to me, and I said to myself that without them I would not be who I am now: “I’m who I was, I can’t give up!” I refer to the connection with the country of origin, as well as some other keys, in the context of the path that this “different” person has made – and is making –.
“Different,” you say, but what are we different about, Hasier? Why don't we say that I'm different, not you?
I shouldn't have. I could not speak on my own behalf. In the LGBT collective you have different sensibilities that you want. In my case, it was an attraction. I used to play football and football. I was among others in my childhood and youth, but I knew what attracted me, and yet I could not look directly at what attracted me. I was acolyte, and I was happy, but in my condition religion did not help. And, on the other hand, there were always the rams, the weasel high and the weasel low...

The eternal motto.
Always despising the man who is afflicted by some and others, enough to despise the man who is not. And take this into account, not today, not in the city, but in the small rural village [Arraioz], in the acabail of the 1980s and the anger of the 1990s. You’ve asked me what we’re different about, and I shouldn’t, but you feel weird, different, and other people realize that you’re out of one-on-one narratives, without presence or referents, until, in one and the other, we see people coming out of the closet. We felt different, in impatience.

And they made you feel different.
And that, too. It's different how it is in my case today, after all those processes I've said. But that’s what I lived in my childhood and adolescence and, again, I say that, in the rural area, there are also those that I heard from the tick-tick. They don't want to hurt you directly, but that's always the pain.

As you tell in the book, once, 15 years you, your mother came to you in tears, realizing that you liked boys.
It was as I told it. “You shall not marry, you shall not have children, what shall they say in the land?” he said. Fear of being different. And how to manage that? It's not easy when you're 15. My mother gave me money, and I came to Pamplona and, needless to say, the books I bought. Then I started writing Basque literature. Sarri[onaindia], [Anjel] Lertxundi, [Bernardo] Atxaga... Discs too. That reference to Dad. Back in Pamplona, I left the triptychs collected in the Kattalingorri space to my parents here and there. “What about my parents?” was my concern. Since then, we have worked hard on both sides as well. And, needless to say, that I had things clear, and that I knew clearly from the tick-tick what I wanted, what attracted me.

You belong to a great family of popular sportsmen and women and you even tried it on the axe.
I couldn't do anything different. From a very young age, my father wanted to instill in me the flame of popular sports. I also have pictures of Ttikita climbing wooden stones, taking a small axe and playing... As a teenager – my father didn’t tell me – but he probably knew I was gay. What I just said to you – my mother’s anecdote – was earlier. I, of course, had no assertiveness. When I was 17 years old, the Basque Country Youth Scooter Championship was held at the Doneztebe Stadium. In Elizondo I was dyed with blue hair, but due to my lack of assertiveness, I did not have this idea in mind. They came home and told me I was a clown, and [my father] was right, I looked like a clown. At that time, I listened to hardcore music, intense music, I also had an aesthetic, dressed in black, chains... Finally, I came out with hair discoloration in the tournament. A rara avis. But I had no other choice. I didn't have the kind of creature my brother has, the strength to say no to my father.

You didn't get to cut all the trunks with your bloody hands.
But the thing is, I was exhausting my work in training! In the Navarre Third Division Championship, I cut all the logs that had to be cut. But that day in Doneztebe, I was a descendant of Larretxea. The pressure was on Christ. I didn’t have any brackets, but the axe and the popular sport were not my dream. I was in literature, and in homosexuality, to see if I would meet a man who loved me, who would love me. And, on the other hand, I was there, in that square of Amaiur, in the axe, tearing down the trunk. It's nice to be able to talk this way now, but I haven't talked about this with my dad in years. In order to carry out the performative performances that we now perform together, we have had to carry out a psychological and cathartic elaboration of Christ, also passing through psychoanalysis.

I talked to your father before you. He said that day he saw clearly that popular sport was not your way. He says he left you alone.
I was very embarrassed, not exhausted from the work, and I'm sure my father was embarrassed, as I was. “La Larretxea” is a great name in popular sports – I have my uncle Donato! – while I, with my blood on my hands, could not finish the job. What a disaster! I've had that weight for years. Besides, I know we're made of disaster. My dad has always said that athletes also have bad days. That saved me a little bit from the disaster of that day.

What do you think of the current situation? I mean, I'm talking about diversity.
Now, fortunately, in the Basque Country diversity is very present, both in the media and in culture and in others. I feel obsolete to say this, but those of us who were born in the countryside in the 1980s have had no current reality. Even less so, in the Basque world. In the book [Writing is learning to count to the liver] I have written several stories and facts about this topic. Society wasn't ready, we weren't ready either, or it wasn't ready enough.

I have to tell you that the book made some impressions and also caused me pain.
I appreciate Aunitz. I presented it with Anjel Erro at the Euskal Etxea in Madrid and we had a very interesting conversation explaining the experiences and impressions of each one. We also talked about the space given to hybrid books, diets and/or autobiographies that are published in the field from canonical models. In some cases, they come out as part of some collection of essays, even if they are not fully rehearsed. And how to say... Sometimes I start to say things in a certain way, and I go into places where I don’t have to go. I don’t know if it’s because I live in Madrid, or if there are other reasons, the aunts have told me nice things about the book.