Arenys d’Empordà is one of the centers that make up Garrigàs. During the second half of the 19th century, it must have been an enchanting place, with the river Fluvià close by and, prominently, the imposing castle of Arenys, from the 12th century. At that time, the rich pharmacist Josep Sarrà i Català (1821-1877), who made his fortune in Cuba, decided to buy it and, together with the castle, all the surrounding land. There he erected, in the same year that he died suddenly, the modernist Sarrà Tower, later known as Casa Francès. Here his daughter Emília would live and, subsequently, and until her death, her half-sister from her mother’s side, the renowned dancer Àurea de Sarrà (1889-1974).
They say of Àurea de Sarrà that she was a woman with style and personality toured with her plastic songs, as she described them, the main European stages during the decade of the 20s. His was an innovative style and with it he knew how to transform dance, taking inspiration from the classicism of Greece and Rome. The residents of Garrigàs knew very little about that splendid past. She lived in the Tower, away from the day-to-day life of the town. He wasn’t going to visit anyone, she was getting visitors at home. With whom he did deal is with Cèlia Mach Sala (1959), when she was between eight and ten years old. She met her thanks to her father, Jaume Mach Costa, who was “her trusted taxi driver” and who accompanied her, alone or with the maid, every week to Figueres or to look for the train in Madrid. «Doña Àurea was a very endearing lady, I laughed a lot with her, she was like a grandmother who had come over and she had a great time, so did I”, defines Cèlia Mach. At the time, she was a very curious child and Aurea de Sarrà took advantage of the proximity to open the doors of his close world to him without ever revealing who he was or everything he had done. Among other things, he told her “fantastic stories”, such as how it had been filmed the son of the night (1950) in the Tower. “I didn’t imagine she was such a famous woman, for me she was just a client of my father.”
Célia Mach, although she lived in Figueres, also had links with Garrigàs, as his great-grandparents were born there. His father, he remembers, was a taxi driver not only for doña Áurea, but also by other wealthy families in the city. “He was a gentleman, with a very correct attitude, he always wore a suit, the typical one gentleman», recalls Mach who met a doña Aurea a summer by express desire of her. She went there when her father was required, sitting in the passenger seat, while the lady rode in the back.
Cèlia Mach contemplates photographs of the Torre de Sarrà taken by her husband, Lluís Carballo, a decade ago. He laments the state of abandonment and cannot stop reminiscing about one doña Aurea already grown up, dyed, made up with powders and bejeweled, in the middle of those spaces full of light where she had played as a child. That garden with the fish pond, those rooms with sumptuous velvet curtains, which began with high ceilings and ended with two-tone marble floors, the great fireplaces and some “impressive” paintings, which he sensed were valuable but which were not can describe, decorating the walls of the tower and which served the lady to survive the last years. Célia Mach also remembers the library room and the beautiful tiled ceiling, which seems to have survived. “The books that were there came from the palace they had in Madrid and, in the summer, she stayed there because the room was cooler”, he explains. Of the house, however, what surprised her the most was the lady’s room and the bathroom with bathtub. “I was blown away entering that fairytale house, in the middle of nowhere. I had never seen a bathtub, in my house we lived in a very humble way, we had the toilet outside and at home, the urinal, and we washed with the clothes bucket».
Not only Cèlia Mach’s father had dealings with Mrs. Sarrà. Also his aunt Isabel Sala Solatges, a dressmaker by profession, worked sewing and fixing his clothes. Isabel, years later, would be a close friend of the son of doña Aurea, Albert French. “He had so many clothes that no new clothes were ever made,” says Mach. She attests to this because she was one of the few people who saw her immense dressing room. “I had never seen a whole room full of dresses,” he says. While they were there, the lady was trying on models. “It was like a game, she saw me as a little girl and it was funny to her,” he says. He will never forget, however, Maundy Thursday 1969 when the lady, knowing it was his tenth birthday, gave him a one-liter bottle of perfume that had been bought for her. “My mother used it, but what a generous gesture,” he smiles, remembering the face of commitment his father put on the situation.
The last years of Àurea de Sarrà’s life, his son Albert French settled in the Tower “and he separated her from everyone”. Jaume Mach’s services were no longer required and she never saw her again. Now, the Tower has been closed and occupied for about three years. It cannot be accessed, but its imposing figure can still be seen from the Arenys castle itself, a cultural asset of national interest, also abandoned and decaying.