“That is not a sentimental memory,” says the writer Biel Mesquida (Castelló, 1947) about his latest book, Passes per Palma (ViBop), with photographs by Jean Marie del Moral (Montoire-sur-le-Loir, 1952), with who has been collaborating for many years. “There are memories, feelings and Palma,” says the Mallorcan author, “but I would see it as the voice of a writer who for the first time tries to write personal events from his childhood and adolescence from the present, looking as always for a way to tell it.” unexpected, surprising and enriching that avoids any contamination of self-plagiarism, facilities and influences of my latest writing. As I have once said, trying to be a tightrope walker in a way that is an experience for me.”
The reader will find short texts that relate “without brilli-brilli and with a lot of restraint” some events of his life in the Majorcan capital, which he calls both Palma and Ciutat – one of its traditional names –, trying to avoid “the bombs of customs and the nostalgia", but "it is very dangerous to take some personal elements in a city as typified, as a communal place, as touristized and damaged as Palma."
For Del Moral it is an “inner journey, that trip that everyone makes when they walk through a city or outside when they see a landscape, when you have in front of you what you see and your interiority, a way of traveling that is never mentioned, that many "People live without realizing it." With some photographs that he assures, “may seem unreal but they are a reality of Palma in this game between reality, dream and poetics.” That is also why many images are not very recognizable and people do not appear, “because when you walk you pay a lot of attention to buildings or details and not to the people, it is an extreme concentration, only in front of an idea.” Mesquida highlights the “complicity between photographer and writer and harmony. In addition, there is like a collection of zooms, because the book is a choreography of details, with the desire to densify the language, to concentrate it, to try to keep the sentence very short, to not get carried away by my torrentiality or digressions.” With a language that does not want to be such a protagonist here, and that takes Azorín and Josep Pla as its model: “When I started reading, I read all of Azorín, because it was concise but had extraordinary musicality and lexicon, and it already hybridized history, characters, time, with a lot of poetic foundation, and I still read it. Of Pla, on the other hand, I have not read everything, I have stayed with books like El carrer estret, El quadern gris or El que hem menjat, because I am not a Planian, but I have read these books because I consider them masterful, and I was very aware of their tone in this book.” “I wanted it to appear that the text came out like when you are chatting, that you improvise, which is false, because my manuscript is full of corrections, and my writing is always slow and I like to let what I write rest and have an editor, who here it has been Montse Serra.”
The book is a tribute to the city and to his paternal grandmother, Joana Payeras, who discovered it, but we also find anecdotes such as some of the clandestine poetry recitals, or a walk with Pasqual Maragall and his entourage that ends when it starts to snow while recites Joan Alcover's poem La relíquia, or the realization that “it is one of the most stimulating places in the world”, and even “I have had sexual relations with Ciutat”.
In any case, despite the non-fiction material of the book, for the author it is literature, and as such “there is always the leitmotif of the voice that is heard, of a Biel Mesquida that is still a fiction, because in The moment I start writing, I am not writing history, I am not writing documents, I am not writing biography, I am not writing memoirs, I am writing a fiction in which the voice of the person telling it is a certain Biel Mesquida, who is a writer.”
Catalan version, here
