Sitting at a table in the Cabana del Mir, in Santa Maria de Besora, Xavier Theros (Barcelona, 1963) listened to many of the stories and legends of the area, in Bisaura, an area he has been frequenting for more than 20 years. "A good part of the novel comes from here", he says about the origin of Tothom ha da morir (La Campana), which continues to explain a not very well-known part of the 19th century Catalonia through the captain Llàtzer Llampades, who already starred in La fada negra (Destino, 2017), with which he won the Josep Pla award.
In the new book, Lampades begins as the other one ends, in prison, from where he leaves to become part of a company of prisoners who must stop a group of trebuchets in the area during the war of the Matiners, the second war carlina "For these city men here it was like sending them to the hidden side of the Moon - says the writer-. This is a world where the fears are not the same as in Barcelona, where the recurrent fear was being arrested by the police: the tyrannical General Narváez practiced the technique of preventive repression, and the fact is that violence was understood as a form legitimate form of violence and the most common means of the police to obtain information was torture". On the other hand, he continues, "here they will hear about witches, curses or meet the golluts", dwarfs who lived segregated and believed to be cursed, but they were simply a very closed community that also suffered from cretinism due to their own endogamy. For Theros, the novel, beyond the historical setting, "is an intrigue and reflection on fear".
We walk with the author through the area where the company will be quartered, woods "that have hardly changed because the property has remained in a few hands, it is the same landscape as in the 19th century". The border between the beginning of industrialization and Carlism. "In the twelve kilometers that separate Sant Quirze from Besora de Vidrà the world has changed completely, below it is industrial and above it is still almost feudal", he continues.
"The 19th century was a time full of violence, wars and revolts, but there are not many literary witnesses", and for a novelist this is "like a virgin field to explore". "It was a more spontaneous and wild society, with much less social control", explains Theros, who has documented extensively with the press of the time, which spoke of the attacks by trabucars, often gangs that took advantage of Carlism but went to his: "It was like the American West but with a beretina", he illustrates, and immediately goes on to explain the different types of beretina that were used to be worn, because it was not the homogeneous piece we know today.
Theros, who for years formed Accidents Polipoétics with Rafael Metlikovez - "now I wouldn't go back, on the one hand because I was very attached to my partner, and on the other because there were weeks when I barely stopped at home and left of an age I am no longer for it; I don't miss it"–, he conceived from the beginning the narrative cycle with Llàtzer Llampades in ten books that would go from 1843 to 1868, the year of La Gloriosa that ushered in the so-called democratic six-year period. The third is already underway, which will take place in Sants, then a town where the incipient industry of Barcelona ended up, with more presence of the widow Niubó, partner of Llampades. At the same time, however, he is working on a biography of Ramón Draper - promoter of Alcoholics Anonymous - and "a novel about the thirties in the Chinatown with a gang of transvestite bank robbers". He doesn't get into it lightly.
