Who remembers when you have tasted padron peppers for the first time without knowing that some of them sting but most of them don’t? You eat them as if they were just peppers until you put in your mouth that itchy rebel, and the effect is mainly one of surprise. Manuel Jordán Cava (Barcelona, 1978) is a calm man, with a friendly tone, who could even pass as predictable but then, he surprises you with his creativity and sense of humor. The coffees are coming, let’s get down to business.
-Let’s begin with a brief account of your journey here…
-I studied in Barcelona where I was born, then I got into law, but I’ll be honest, I got in with almost 40 friends between my school, friends of my siblings and by default. We ended up very few. The truth is that we came out of a pretty posh school and our parents supported us as kids and when we finished we had to go into a career. You either went into business or law…. The truth is, without any vocation.
-What did you dream of being when you grew up?
-I was very much into creativity. My family has been full of publicists. My grandfather founded Danis, which was a very cutting-edge advertising company from which all the biggest companies in the field, such as Contrapunto among others, came out. All the creative people know the name of my grandfather and my great-uncle, Santiago Jordán Jordán and Antonio Jordán Jordán, because together with their partners, in the fifties, they set up one of the most powerful companies in the field.
My father studied Communication Sciences, my uncles studied the same, so I was always surrounded by people linked to the world of advertising and creativity. But that was on my father’s side, because on my mother’s side they were all lawyers. My grandfather was a lawyer, my aunt is a lawyer, I have cousins who are lawyers, cousins who are lawyers… Then my father, I don’t know how, because I wanted to be creative, convinced me to go into law by telling me that “Law is a very good career because the world of law has produced great novelists, great publicists, directors and writers”. I looked into it and it was true. Law gives you a very broad idea of everything. If you look at the novel, whether it is historical, war, crime, the world of law is there. From Victor Hugo to the most modern novels, many of them have studied law. Journalism is basically law. I also got into it because I was a very good student and got good grades.
I will not hide from you that I spent the first two years where my only right was the right to party [risas]. I was on the party committee and we had parties in the faculty – we didn’t even go into the classroom [más risas]. I think the first two years of law school, I think, I stepped in the classroom a couple of times, until in National Public Law the professor caught me with a talk on the Israel-Palestine dispute, the subject caught me and I started to participate. There I realized that what they were explaining was very interesting from the Roman Law…

[interrumpo]-What is Roman Law?
-For example, the manumission or liberation of the slave was a formal act of liberation that consisted, for example, in his eating at the table of his masters, a tacit act of liberation. Or that he married a patrician was another. What I liked in the background is that despite being ancient, about 2,000 years old, it is still very current. What we are doing right now of having a coffee and paying is in itself a contract.
There I realized that the world of law, which might seem boring or dense, is in fact a kind of projection slide on any subject, because at the end of the day the law covers everything. Then there is the Intellectual Property Law for example, how the rights over a work are regulated, and who undertakes it. In the end, I believe that there is no part of the law that someone may not be interested in.
Then the career is very generic, you must specialize in what you like the most. I became interested in Criminal Law because when I was young I used to watch the typical trial scenes on TV. About the Penal Code, the Criminal Trial Law, the defendants, the rights of prisoners, different crimes and their penalties to name a few.
-You finish college and go to work as a lawyer?
-Yes, I did my degree in Mallorca while my family had moved to Ibiza and with my brother we went to the campus in Palma.
I finished after 4 years and I started to practice in the family office on the island in 2004, which we did especially Family Law which is one of the least interesting to me because I worry that it touches so much so important and delicate that I have only practiced it for conciliation. People have come to my office and I tell them to come with the couple and I tell them that if there is a basic agreement, fine, but if not, they should look for another lawyer to fight, I have never been a pit bull, especially when there are strong feelings, children or great patrimony. It is a very sensitive issue and you have to be made of a certain dough. Then the Criminal Law is the State against, and that seems to me more humanistic, to watch over the rights and guarantees of the arrested person….
-But who do you go with, the State or the criminal?
-I defend the criminal and it is complicated when I have to explain it to my 12 year old son who tells me “daddy, you always go with the bad guys”, it is obvious that I will have to wait until he is a little older to understand that the bad guys are not so bad and the State is not so good. [risas] It is obvious that I will have to wait until he is a little older for him to understand that the bad guys are not so bad and the State is not so good. And I tell you, that 98% of the, let’s say, clients I have had in the criminal field, despite having committed crimes sometimes serious as can be homicide, are neither so bad nor their circumstances are so far from anyone.
Criminal law is on everyone’s mind because at a given moment or in a given situation, we can all end up committing a crime, more or less serious. I am not justifying or laundering anything, I am speaking from the experience I have had. Most of the time they are people subjected to very limiting situations with decisions that are sometimes fortuitous. Only a couple of times in my career have I seen that yes, my client was a monster.
-I understand what you say, and a classic situation comes to mind that has its share of incomprehensible, I speak of what is known as proportionality. The typical case in which someone enters my house at night to steal and/or kill and I, to defend my family, kill the intruder. I don’t stop to see if he had a knife, a bazooka or a cell phone in his hand… And they take me to court, maybe to jail because I killed him and it was disproportionate….
-Okay, now I am your defense attorney and I tell you that you, subjected to a given situation and limit, cannot be asked to act as a superman or someone who dominates and controls the situation totally.
Look, I have a personal example because it is someone close to me. Grandparents of 80 years old in their house, at night, three young men enter the house to steal, they close a drawer to the woman breaking her fingers to coerce her to give the money and the man tells them that the money is in the room and when he goes with an intruder next to him, he takes out a shotgun and kills him.
And he was convicted as the responsible perpetrator. There is a very clear provision which are the exceptions as “insurmountable fear” which is fully applicable in cases like this, that is, a person subjected in that situation, of being in front of people with clear intent to cause harm or take life and above, within his home, acts moved by that impulse and there is that assumption.
There is legitimate self-defense where there must be proportionality, in this case, proportionality cannot be measured because you may not know if they are carrying weapons or not. So at least to a certain degree it is within what is legitimate self-defense. And even if he is responsible for the homicide, this excess of responsibility applies to him. How can you expect an eighty-something year old man to defend himself against three young assailants that he sees are breaking his wife’s fingers if not with a weapon?
-And in this case could it be applied?
-No, but the truth is that I have not known the trial 100%, only from testimonies and press, and I think that to form an opinion you have to know all the information. People today do not want to know the details, we are left with the superficial, nobody takes the case or the fact and looks at everything. People are left with only the news and that is very bad for criminal law.
For me, if you enter a house to rob, rape and/or kill, the victim should have the right to unrestricted self-defense?
Yes, but I remember a media case of the Tous family in Barcelona where the son-in-law of the owner, in a different case, left the house, took the car, chased and killed the driver ready to flee.
-Well, in that case we can agree that this is an excess.
-Of course, there is no proportion.
-How much and how has the new headquarters in Ibiza town improved Justice’s operations?
-I don’t really work inside, we are only collaborators of Justice, so I spend little time there. But the truth is that in the old building every time it rained they had files literally stored in the basement where the water corroded and rotted them, even outside on the floors in the corridors, causes and causes with what it means for data protection but with access to anyone, or in the cells themselves that there was one for everyone with the difference that now there are 5 or 7 agents guarding, which is protection for the arrested, besides having more cells and separated by sex. Things have improved a lot.
Think that in the past, dangerous prisoners were put together with people who were innocent, something that you don’t think about but is more common than you think. I mean, you get arrested by mistake and 48 hours later you are acquitted.
Another example is the coroner’s office with much better conditions, the air conditioning as well. It is true that one of the courts has had a problem that even lasted a year, but it has improved the daily life of the staff, before the officials were with very noisy fans with communication boxes glued to them… bad… they were in very bad conditions. And with more space, more order. And all this was a claim that the former dean judge, Juan Carlos Torres, had been demanding for many years and never became a reality until some criminals deliberately burned the court to delay cases they had pending so that they would be extenuated by “undue delay” and that was what accelerated the creation of the new court.
[riéndome] -Life’s carambolas are unbelievable. I find it mind-boggling that it is the criminals who achieve what the dean has not been able to for years….
-Wait, because there are more, many defendants benefited from this, but not those who started the fire.
But it was a mess for everyone because we, the lawyers, were asked for the information we had to reconstruct the cars, fortunately now everything is digital.
-But there are still things to improve, such as the number of personnel, for example, or not?
-In Ibiza we have a big endemic problem that is increasing, which is that insularity as such is not recognized as in other parts, the salaries that civil servants earn in comparison with the cost of living is insufficient, the housing issue is already a major problem, so there is a lot of rotation.
In addition, there are civil servants who work many hours of unpaid overtime, such as the Court of Violence against Women, who instead of leaving at 2 p.m. end up leaving at 5 p.m., and have been doing so for many years. A civil service so committed that basically is raising the judicial function, judges too, and prosecutors, then the problem is that it is not paid enough and the conditions are not ideal to retain staff. There are many who are only there for one year and who pass it because it is their turn because of their judicial career but then they opt for other destinations where they have better living conditions and career projection, think that here there are no provincial courts, nor high courts of justice, nor Supreme Court, so they do not last, and those who are there must cover their own and others’.
Then there are those who fall in love with the island or someone from here and stay, but on a professional level Ibiza is a springboard.
-You are also a partner of one of the most emblematic tapas restaurants on the island, El Zaguán, since when has it existed?
-Since Easter 2000, we are about to celebrate our 25th anniversary.
-And sometimes you work there too, lending a hand, don’t you?
-Basically, when they need me, they call me and I go, for whatever is needed. It’s also a way for my brothers to have their own living spaces to travel or just rest. My brother is going to Japan in November and I will cover for him, but I go less and less because there is a team of people very well put together so they are well organized and do everything – almost – well [ríe con guasa].
-What is your favorite dish?
– There are many delicious dishes such as oxtail. Perhaps my favorite is the scallops. But of course, the classic is some skewers with a zurito. That is universal.

-And about your facet as a painter, where and how was it born?
-Once my wife Nayra, who is an interior designer, had to paint two canvases to decorate a client’s house. She bought some brushes and acrylics and asked me if I wanted to help her. So we put paintings in front of each other so we couldn’t see them and we got down to work. But instead of abstraction, which was what she asked me to do, I started painting without direction. I had never painted with a brush in my life, but I had drawn a lot. In the end she goes to sleep at 10 -11 at night and I continue. 8 the next morning and I was still painting! [risas]. And she says “but what are you doing!” to which I reply “well look, I painted your mother topless, smoking and looking at the moon”[risas].
That painting is in my mother-in-law’s house, in her room, and it is curious because even in low light you can see my mother-in-law’s breasts [she tells me while I laugh, obviously I can’t help it] and then at that moment I realized that something had happened to me, that an obsession had awakened in me….
For your mother-in-law… [los dos a carcajadas]
Do you know how to call mother-in-law in Russian?
-No
-Storba [más risas] Well, my mother-in-law, whom I love very much, I call Storba.

Painting. A voracious need to paint awakens in me. From that day on, I often arrive at the office with my hands painted. In fact, that day, when I came back from work, I asked my wife if there were any more blank canvases and I continued painting all afternoon and evening! And that’s how I spent 5 years.
And I get inspired by what I see, from a puddle of water and its reflection to see the detail of the techniques of others, I bought books and collections to learn more with an inexhaustible curiosity. I even became interested in the chemical composition of colors… Then materials of all kinds… an obsession. And I must have painted about 200 paintings with a lot of calm in the result, I paint a lot the sea that I love and my work gives peace when I see it, it is even naive at one point. But I clarify that I have no technique or studies other than my own research.
Tomorrow, when I’m old, I see myself in my bathrobe with 4 packs of Marlboro and a bottle of whiskey painting in Salamanca, at the university. I imagine being that selfish artist who leaves everything for the drive of the need to create.
Then I switched to digital, which is cheaper and doesn’t make a mess because the garage where I painted was always a mess with paint all over the place.

-And there is no tug of war between the artist and the lawyer?
-Sometimes I come to court with paint on my hands. I have a drawer full of drawings in my office because sometimes even when I’m on the phone my head is 100% on the call but my hand is drawing independently of the rest.
Like everyone else, I have bills to pay and I cover them with my lawyer’s fees. I am lucky that I like my job very much, but I know without a doubt that my passion is painting. And I really like other art forms, from music to sculpture for example. My paintings also have some sculpture in them because I discovered to make reliefs with polystyrene with which I generate volume. I also make cuts with a cutter and there are also very powerful moments of observation of the work itself that are very interesting.
One day I was watching, with my face resting on my hand, which had the cutter open, and I see a space on the canvas and I get the spark of the idea and I make a gesture of…. “I saw what the painting was asking me to do and I gestured, moving my hand and making a small cut on my face. And I tell my wife that – now I understand what happened to Van Gogh! Everyone thought he did it on purpose and surely he had a good idea in the creative madness but with a box cutter in his hand at the same moment. [risas].

Do you have any works on display right now?
-Yes, thanks to Nica Seleva, the artist who, together with Amipa, has turned the public library of the Santa Gertrudis school into an exhibition hall, she suggested that I hang some of my paintings there. And there are a good number of works that represent me well, because they are the sea, the calm… And I have titled the exhibition “Es Barco” because that was the name of my grandfather’s house in Talamanca where I grew up and where I keep so many dear moments.
-Do you sell them?
-No, I give them away, to my family, to my friends… I am lucky that I can afford it.

-If your child asks you which of the three things you do that you recommend, what would you tell him/her?
-I will recommend my son to do what he is passionate about. I believe that life is a matter of time. If life passes you by in a flash, you’ve had a successful life; if it’s the other way around, it’s a failure. The best thing is that your day is short of hours because you are dedicated to your passion. I don’t care what you choose, as long as it is your passion.
My son really likes Biology, but we’ll see, he’s still very young….
