It is difficult to define the place where a writer works. Office or office is too prosaic, but study seems more typical of photographers or plastic artists. Nor is it a workshop, although words, phrases and novels are assembled there. Joan Marsé's is a living room. It even has three red velvet armchairs that could have come from Boccaccio and an oil painting by his great friend Jaime Gil de Biedma. The hydraulic floor and the ceiling with moldings are closed by a glass door and a balcony with blinds. It is on the first floor, at number 106 Bailén street, protected by a plane tree for shade, a tree that guards privacy in so many houses in Barcelona's Eixample.
The shelves have lost some books. Berta has taken them to another room and has placed here the notebooks and folders with the ideas, the drafts and the manuscripts of her father Joan, the most Catalan of the Catalan writers who have written in Spanish. Juan was her stage name and Joan her personal name, an ambivalence that autochthonous nationalism never accepted.
Joan took care of her papers with the care of an archivist. Dates and themes mark the contents of the folders, which is a help to Berta, since she has 226 numbered and still lacks.
In Últimas tardes con Teresa there are several shots of Carmel. Marsé drew the neighborhood, indicated where the Pijoaparte house was located on Calle de Gran Vista and the esplanade next to the fountain where the first meeting with Teresa took place.
The drawings are in pen. The text, too. Joan's handwriting is tight, leaning to the right, easy to read.
“There are girls from a good family,” he writes, “who sometimes, when sitting in front of you, cross their legs with the air of definitely denying something. Teresa Serrat belonged to this class of girls”.
On another sheet of paper, on a profile of Tibidabo, another note: “Teresa: her loose-haired hairstyle and her almost exotic features are surprising in Carmel: the rich, as well as being rich, are handsome. You have to fuck off!"
The Ronda del Guinardó manuscript is entitled Rosita y el cadaver, Joan signs it with an o and begins like this: “The inspector opened his eyes sitting in the sky-blue hall studded with purple stars”. In the definitive version, it gains depth: "The inspector stumbled upon himself on the threshold of sleep and said goodbye, go to hell."
The National Library wants Joan's papers and, if they reach an agreement, Berta would like them to be deposited in the provincial library that is being built next to the Francia station. They speak of Barcelona, of the postwar period, of political and religious cruelty, of the black market and rationing, of the city of the defeated at the front and in life. It wouldn't make sense for them to be anywhere else.
There are two spiral notebooks with cardboard covers from the Joseph Gibert stationery store in Paris, a diary that Joan kept at the age of 14, and a satirical version of Cara al sol that she wrote with Gil de Biedma. In loose pages, also written by hand, there is a story that he wrote during his military service in northern Morocco.
The latest version of Si te dicen que caí, typed, on pages that turn yellow at the corners, is held up with two rings, a pin, and a cardboard cover. The drowned man in the first scene remains the same. Seeing himself recognized, he "turned his head contemptuously in the murky background", because "the behavior of a corpse in the sea is unpredictable".
Behind the work chair hang three copied notes. One is from Ezra Pound. He affirms that "care is the writer's only moral conviction." Another, signed with the initials V.E., says: "Dream things have more of a true presence in the cinema than real ones." The last is a quote from Nabokov on newsprint: “Literature was not born the day a boy came running into the Neanderthal valley shouting ‘the wolf, the wolf,’ with a huge gray wolf hot on his heels; He was born the day the boy came shouting 'the wolf, the wolf' without any wolf chasing him”.
Joan knew how to turn against the wolf of Francoism, dignified the oppressed and took refuge in the cinema to be able to breathe. He never stopped rebelling against injustice and gullibility.
On the shelves to the right of the computer, an Apple that never knew how to make it work at all, the little notebooks are stacked today with his reflections on day-to-day life and his criticisms of the managers of the mistreated common good. Joan cut and pasted his faces, ridiculed his lack of culture, and lamented his influence.
The muses of Greta Garbo, Betty Boop and Catwoman are still in the room, as are several of the toys that she loved to collect so much.
Berta bustles with the papers while her mother Joaquina watches TV or takes the fresh air in the large patio inside the block, today with half as many plants and flowers as a few years ago. The summer has been long.
