Enric Juliana landed in Madrid in 2004. He has been in the city for 20 years, so it is not at all strange that on Wednesday, at the Cercle d'Economia in Barcelona, during the presentation of Spain: the Pact and the Fury (Harp), the last book by the La Vanguardia delegate in Madrid, there were repeated allusions to the Spanish capital, Madrid D.F., as Juliana calls it.
In those two decades the journalist has learned some “lessons from Madrid” and on Wednesday he gave two to the public that filled the Cercle conference room. Lesson number one: “To resist is to win as Negrín said.” Lesson number two: “You have to understand the theatrical code of Madrid politics, which almost borders on tragedy, but without going beyond it because the blood cannot reach the river.”
“Madrid is like a pressure cooker, but Juliana does not let herself be carried away by the tension, she explains things without drama, draws conclusions and reaches a synthesis,” confirmed the deputy director of La Vanguardia, Lola García, who supported Juliana in the presentation.
The journalist Jordi Amat and the columnist of this newspaper Iván Redondo, from San Sebastian living in Madrid, also collaborated, who referred to the capital as “a very tough city, where you attack or they attack you.” “Madrid is a tough city in which I am not unhappy and for which I have a lot of respect,” responded Juliana, who in these 20 years has become the interpreter of what happens there so that Catalan readers can understand it.
And that has been from the pages of La Vanguardia, a newspaper that Juliana joined in 1991 and to which she is “very grateful.” Javier Godó, Count of Godó, and Carlos Godó, CEO of the Godó Group, attended the presentation of his new book – a review of the politics of the last 20 years that shows “how many of the current problems come from previous wounds” . Also present were the director of La Vanguardia, Jordi Juan, and the president of the Cercle d'Economia, Jaume Guardiola, among other personalities.
Understanding Madrid takes time, and understanding Germany was not easy for a girl from El Prat de Llobregat like Rosa Ribas. “No matter how immersed I have lived in another culture, there is always a distance, which can be very subtle, but it exists,” says the writer, who has lived 30 years in Berlin and Frankfurt.
Now she is back in Barcelona and, for a moment and at the request of Juan Cerezo, editorial director of Tusquets, she has put aside black literature to collect her feelings from childhood, youth, from that Germany that welcomed her and many other experiences such as that of writing or that of myopia in Peces abisales (Tusquets), which he presented on Tuesday at Laie in a fun conversation with the writer Carlos Zanón.
And if Ribas reflects on an endless number of topics, Míriam Aguilar focuses on one that she has experienced firsthand in What Now?: A reflection on non-motherhood due to circumstances (Kōan). “What hurts the most is when they ask you 'do you have children?' "It's a blow," he explained on Thursday in Bernat. Aguilar spent eight years trying to be a mother until she understood that she “can be happy beyond motherhood.”
