Juan Marsé: unforgettable memory of the boy from Guinardó

2023-07-31 07:32:05

Juan Marsé he spoke as if a novel were hidden inside him in which everything was real. Silence was part of his secretand friendship was inside a sheltered surface of a boy who had several lives to tell.

He went down in history, through some confessions, through some books, as if he were an angry adult, but he never stopped being that little boy who, when he died, was three years old on July 18, leaving not only literary memory, anger for a country that it was cruel and that it continued to be contradictory, but also that he had the heart and soul of someone who never quite thought of himself as an adult.

He was 87 years old and left behind, with his children, Berta y Sachawith his grandson, Guillewith his wife, Joaquinaessential books to understand the history of Spain, cruel times and more prosperous times, as well as some toys that served as amulet in a workplace that until recently remained intact.

Until his daughter Berta, also a writer, decided to rummage through the inside of the desk and found even more secrets, manuscripts that reflected his passion for counting, memories from different eras, and at least one photograph in which he is twenty. years old, he is in his parents’ house and looks ahead with the eyes that have always accompanied him. Eyes full of questions.

To answer those questions he wrote, from ‘Last afternoons with Teresa’, the work that stunned those who thought that he was just a jeweler who also worked as if he were a scientist in Paris, until that chilling post-war Time.news (I’ll be back one day) in which Barcelona, ​​what other place, hurts from the cold and the gunpowder that marked the future of a broken country when he was a teenager with an uncertain past.

That uncertain past, in which he was an orphan, picked up by the chance of life by those who would later be his parents, marked his literature, his history and even his tenderness. He was a human being full of secrets, some of which were part of his books, until the last moment. In those times that preceded his death, and which his daughter Berta has recently recounted, he was afraid of disturbing those who cared for him, he asked their forgiveness for the inconvenience, and he also encouraged his friends from afar in case the devil also lived in them. fear of the time, the damn virus.

Direct son of the chill of Spain, never boasted of his literary erudition, as if the secret of its syntax was kept in a desk drawer, but everything he touched as a writer is what also stood out to him in his autobiography. ‘Last afternoons with Teresa’, his most praised work, was born, he told me on January 1, 2020, from three novels he was writing. “You know”, he explained to me by letter, “that behind a novel there are usually other novels, and in my case there were three. In a horizon of readings that at that time, when I began to write the novel, was already quite distant, two books and a film persisted: ‘The Red and the Black’, by Stendhal, ‘Princess Casamassima’, by Henry James, and ‘ A Place in the Sun’, the film version of George Dreisler’s novel ‘An American Tragedy’. And the curious thing about it”, Marsé continued to tell me, “I hadn’t read that novel, the strength of it came to me through an article by the North American critic Lionel Trilling published in his book of essays ‘A liberal imagination’. what was said Behind a book there is always another book.

Marked by an illness that took him to the hospital almost every day, he wrote or called, almost daily, every week, to those whom he considered to be suffering from the uncertainty of the time, just as in other times. He called to laugh at what was happening or to find out about the future of the country in all its facets. A boy with a toy that was never broken, and that toy was tenderness.

Of all those memories I must share one that jumped out in the middle of a conversation that I fostered between him and the filmmaker Isabel Coixet in the restaurant Via Veneto from Barcelona around this time in 2007. It was evening, he was playing with the remains of the fruit, and still looking at the tablecloth that united us, he decided to recount this, putting music to the memory.

We were talking about identity. And he said: “That putting so much emphasis on one’s identity signs… Look at the experience I just lived, in case I still had any doubts regarding that blessed identity. It has to do with my origin, with my birth, in the closest land, which is that of my family. Until today I have been handling a version of my birth and my adoption, and now it turns out that it seems completely false. What I said and believed to be true was like a Dickens novel: that my biological mother died when I was born. Then, a few days later, in a clinic in Barcelona, ​​a woman lost her child, and also the doctor tells her that she will not be able to have any more. She leaves the hospital crying, takes a taxi, and it is driven by my biological father, who was a taxi driver. He hears the woman cry and hears the story. ‘Ah, you have lost her son,’ she tells him. ‘Well, it happened to me that my son was born and his mother died. And I don’t know what to do with the baby.’ And the taxi driver, my biological father, diverts the route and takes this woman to see her baby; That is me. This is the story my adoptive mother told me. She took me in her arms; my father told her that she should stay with me, that they would take care of the paperwork later. And now my sister Regina, who was born after me, says that this story does not correspond to reality.

“According to my sister,” Marsé continued, “the first child our mother lost did not lose it in Barcelona, ​​but in a town in Tarragona, Sant Jaume dels Domenys, and he is buried there. And he asks me: ‘When you were going to play in the cemetery, didn’t you know that that dead child was your brother?’ No, he didn’t know anything. ‘And our parents also didn’t live in Barcelona yet, they settled here later. So that thing about the taxi driver is a lie. It is not true that our mother’s first child was born in Barcelona, ​​nor that she left the clinic crying and took a taxi. It happened that our father, seeing that his mother was very depressed in the town for having lost her baby, came to Barcelona and met a man who had just lost his wife to a postpartum complication, leaving him a five-year-old boy and girl. ‘.

“The story that I believed to be true is false. I’m working on a novel that indirectly deals with this, and I have to investigate. Hardly anyone is left alive who can corroborate this story. Only my cousin Rosita, who is in her eighties. In other words, now I have nothing clear or how I got to this ass of the world that was Spain in the thirties.

“Now I have to recover from what they have told me. A story made up by my adoptive mother“.

When he finished counting, he looked up from the tablecloth, and we stayed as if he had left in the air the ghost of a book that would return with him to the room where his pages, his dreams, and his toys were also.