This is a book born from family caves, post-Soviet basements, border garages, mining holes, and a cybercafé in Abkhazia. An investigation into the shadows of the world that ultimately also became a personal question: how to retire without getting lost and, above all, how to return.
In this making-of Francisco Martínez reconstructs the writing process of Hideouts: How to disappear without disappearing completely (Menguantes).
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One August afternoon I rode my bike with my cousin Paco «el Fernández» around the outskirts of Fuente Librilla, in Murcia. We were headed toward the La Almoloya site when he suggested we approach a family estate. There, dug into a clay hillside, stood the House of the Slope, known by the neighbors as Uncle Adrián’s Casón.
My cousin explained to me that part of my family had lived there. One of my great-great-grandmothers had been born in that cave-house and helped tend the cattle. Another grew up in a cave in El Berro, in Sierra Espuña. I entered the Casón. There were five chambers, shelves carved into the wall, and an old stable at the back. The house had not been built upon the landscape, but withdrawn from it, like a solidified shadow.
I told my cousin I wanted to buy it.
—Piénsatelo bien —contestó—. Arreglarla te va a costar mucho dinero.
I haven’t bought it yet. Perhaps this book is a way to do so.
For years I have watched forms of disappearance across different countries and scales. I conducted sixty interviews in front of Berlin photo booths. I hitchhiked across Russia and traveled in third class through Kazakhstan. I also toured Paldiski, the former Soviet naval base, where Estonia inherited the empire’s radioactive waste. And I entered garages near the Russian border.
There I visited thirty-seven basements. I wanted to know what people kept under their houses and why some things should not be thrown away, but also not shown. I found guitars that nobody ever learned to play, love letters from military service, preserves, Siberian balalaikas, books about Che Guevara, construction materials, Orthodox icons, and objects reserved for films that may never be shot.
Some neighbors thought I was a thief. Others, that I was a policeman or a spy. Boris canceled our appointment an hour beforehand because he had told his mother that he was going to show his basement to a Spanish anthropologist.
—Don’t even think about it —her mother told him.
That “don’t even think about it” contains the entire methodological problem of the book. How do you investigate something whose very function is to stay hidden?
The research became an expedition through the planet’s backstage. But the book risked turning into a cabinet of curiosities—a succession of caves, holes, basements, and eccentric characters. For months I searched for the tunnel that connected them. Each chapter had to function as a small cavity, independent yet secretly linked to the others.
Thus three families of hideouts emerged. There are refuge hideouts, such as the cave, the pocket, the basement, the screen, the curtain, or the orchard. The workshop hideouts, like the garage, the occupied factory, or the abandoned library. And the world hideouts: Onkalo, bunkers, airports, and submarine cables.
Another difficulty lay in avoiding a naive celebration of disappearance. Not every secret protects. Not every shadow liberates. Disappearing can offer rest, but not being found can also become abandonment. The hideout, to remain a refuge, needs an exit. Otherwise, it becomes a trap.
Writing about hideouts produces yet another contradiction: each description opens a secret door, each photograph pulls back a curtain, every chapter arranges a display.
I also sought to introduce humor. Hideouts are full of ridiculous situations, oblique conversations, and objects out of place.
The last lesson was given to me by my son Ray. One day I asked him if he had any hideouts for my book.
—Yes —he answered—. Several.
—Name one.
—If I tell you, it wouldn’t be a hideout anymore.
Only at the end did I realize that trust does not oblige you to hand over the treasure map.
Books are also born from that gesture, from what endures for years hidden in notes, journeys, photographs, conversations and memories that seemed to bear no relation to one another. Until one day they come to light. And then everything speeds up.
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Author: Francisco Martínez. Title: Hideouts: How to disappear without disappearing completely. Publisher: Ediciones Menguantes. Sales: All Your Books.