2023-06-24 22:29:14
Three years ago, while returning to her attic in the center of Madrid, Marina Sanmartín —Valencian, writer, bookseller— felt fear settle in her stomach.
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It was the fear of the consequences that the future provokes when it falters. Just 48 hours ago she and her partners had decided to close her bookstore, Cervantes and company, hours before the Government decreed total confinement due to the impact of COVID-19.
“Suddenly I found myself alone at home,” Sanmartín told elDiario.es, “thinking that the bookstore was going to close forever and with the feeling that there was no one by my side.” That March 14, 2020, uncertainty and doubts moved with her, but also an unexpected “point of refuge” that had always been there: books.
She had hugged that same lifeline before. It was when she first saw her father cry. Also when she opened her eyes and saw that her life was not going where she wanted it to go. Books reappeared as an escape route, as a window to observe the world and try to understand something more about ourselves. The “hunger for stories” when it seems that everything ends. “I can go three days without talking to my mom, but when I’m shitty and just want to cry, she’s the first one I call. And I have the feeling that the same thing happened to us when reading her: at the most critical moment, we all returned to her ”.
It is from this relationship with books that he writes From the eye of the hurricane (Ariel, 2022), an “intimate” essay that aims to trace a history of bookstores and, inevitably, of the author herself. Sanmartín opens up here about what led her to become a bookseller because her life “is always linked” to that of bookstores.
Thus, the memory of the little Marina is intermingled with the Babylon of the year 3,500 BC, with The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad or the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. While the traces of his disenchantment with journalism or those of his first job in the pocket books section of a large store in Callao are discovered among the story of the invention of the printing press, by Miguel de Cervantes, the awakening of Amazon and the changes that the pandemic came to impose on us.
The truth is that one of Marina Sanmartín’s dreams was never to be a bookseller. She ended up being one by pure chance. She had always known that what she really wanted to do was write. Her parents realized this very quickly when they saw the ease with which she filled out notebooks. Like the essay in which her social sciences teacher was murdered, her the one she barely remembered writing until they met again decades after her because Great-Aunt Angela had been keeping it. It was also Rafael and Marina, her parents, who, seeing the “childish eagerness” with which she devoured the adapted Bruguera classics that they bought for her at the kiosk (The island of the treasure, Oliver Twist, The Three Musketeers) they continued to encourage her to read and write. Books and more books, many read “without understanding too much”.
“One of my first memories,” he answers when asked about his childhood, “is from Three Kings Day, waking up and finding the dining room full of books on the Steamboat.” About thirty of them—half of Barco de Vapor blue; the rest, of orange— with which, when turning the page, “the miracle” would end up taking place. “Not only was I a happy girl, but I was stimulated. My parents, my family, put at my disposal all the possible tools”.
She says that it was her “a bit crazy” character that led her to study journalism. Those were her years of learning, of encounters, of love and discoveries. But they were also the years in which doubts began to arrive. On September 11, 2001, while she was working at Agencia EFE and everyone was talking about the planes that had crashed into the Twin Towers, she discovered that this was not her thing. She realized that she didn’t give a damn about news journalism. “I remember that day I was talking to my mother on the phone, crying. She was going in a taxi to the Israeli embassy to see if anyone there wanted to make a statement, but the only thing she could think about was that she didn’t want to be there. I just wanted to go back to Valencia with my mother”.
“I think”, he explains when asked about that day, “that there are moments in life when we realize if we are going where we want to go or not. And it’s hard to tell yourself ‘it’s not around here’ and be able to make a decision. That is something that I am very grateful to myself because not everything was idyllic”.
And how did Marina Sanmartín get to be a bookseller? Purely by chance. She saw an offer from a department store on a job portal, applied, participated in a group exercise, and ended up in the paperback section. Four days after crossing one of the doors of the store, she knew that she had found her place.
Cervantes with company
Three years ago, while the dust settled on their novelty tables, Cervantes and company —bookstore, 185 square meters, blind drawn— felt that it was beginning to transform.
It was a metamorphosis caused by the conviction that Cervantes could not close. Despite the pandemic, despite the confinement, the bookstore had to be saved. “We asked ourselves what we had to do now to survive because if there was one thing that was clear to us in the team, it was that we could not let it fall,” recalls Sanmartín.
“Who called first?” he writes in From the eye of the hurricane. “Was it Esteban to offer to set up an online platform that would allow readers to help his favorite bookstore by buying redeemable reading vouchers with the return of normality? Or was it Luis, who edited a video to remind book lovers that the pandemic would end one day and, then, bookstores would be waiting for them? What unsuspected spirit made us all agree to rebel against circumstances and surf them without falling?
Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Zoom and online sales were the unexpected allies. Social networks flourished as one more channel to talk about literature. And, overnight, booksellers assumed that they too could (and should) be content creators. “Until that moment,” Sanmartín explains to elDiario.es, “bookstores had only had their networks to bear witness to something that had happened, but they had never been used to broadcast it or create something original.” Independent bookstores learned that with a good messaging service and a decent website they could break the false belief that online sales were the preserve of the biggest fish.
Three years later, remembering how an entire neighborhood, an entire community of readers, did the impossible at the worst times to prevent bookstores from closing, Marina Sanmartín smiles. And when she is asked why she ended up being a bookseller, she writes: “Maybe I am a bookseller because I am unable to settle for just one life.”
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