"They left me on Carrer de les Camèlies, at the foot of a garden gate, and the security guard found me at dawn." Thus begins the story of Cecília Ce, the protagonist of El carrer de les Camèlies (Editor's Club). This anti-heroine of Mercè Rodoreda will spend her life trying to discover her identity, her origin, and that will lead her to a vital adventure full of misery and, above all, self-destruction.
Written in his exile in Geneva, the novel won the Sant Jordi award, which had been denied by La plaça del Diamant, and would receive other awards. It was, in fact, the public consolidation of the writer.
The neighborhood of Gràcia, as in La plaça del Diamant (1962), and the class contrasts, as in Broken Mirror (1974), also converge in El carrer de les Camèlies (1966), the title we have chosen for this series about the great novels of Barcelona.
It must be said that it could be any of the three mentioned, but the story of Cecília Ce, perhaps because it is less well known, seemed to us that it deserved to occupy the place of honor, at least to do justice to the unfortunate life of its protagonist, who he will spend his life “fent senyors” (prostituting himself), in a process of self-destruction with madness points.
The caretaker who finds the abandoned baby is the one who gives him a name, and more will be known about this episode later, which we will not reveal now. Cecília Ce bears the name of the patron saint of music, and for this reason she begins to look for her biological father in musical environments such as the Liceu. But the search will not be easy and things are not as they appear to be.
In the postface of the latest edition of Club Editor, the writer Stefanie Kremser says: “Cecília is a survivor. She walks and walks, she never stops or loses her composure. She gets up, falls back down, continues. In the end, she is a true heroine who has learned to live with her wounds, and who knows how to take advantage of this new strength. She is an admirable character within her circumstances. Capable of adapting to different social classes, by the way, precisely in order not to be the same as anyone else, Cecília is a hunter who becomes prey”.
Another aspect that Kremser highlights are the contrasts between pleasure and environment, as when, with one of his lovers in a Carmel shack, he protects himself from leaks with a silk umbrella. That draws a unique personality, with a life that may seem erratic, but that makes it clear that he does not want to go down the middle lane.
Another relevant aspect of Rodoreda's work in general, and of El carrer de les Camèlies in particular, is the botanical symbology. To give an example, the same day that Cecília Ce appears at the gate of the house of those who will be her adoptive parents, a half-dead cactus blooms and, since then, every year on that date, it will bloom again in an ephemeral way .
It is no coincidence that at the headquarters of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, in Calle del Carme in Barcelona, where the Fundació Mercè Rodoreda is located, you can also visit the garden that bears its name, where all the trees and plants it gathers grow in his works
Carrer de les Camèlies has a circular structure that makes it perfect, although Rodoreda confessed that he had had trouble finding the voice of his protagonist. But once defined, it echoes time and time.
Jorge Carrión refers to it this way: “His x-ray of the market for the mistresses of married Catalan men, both clinical and grotesque, leaves no puppet with a head. And her denunciation of gender violence is a cry that still moves and resonates." And he concludes: "Reading El carrer de les Camèlies today, more than half a century after it was published, is still a painful and dazzling experience."
Catalan version, here
