Jokingly, he says he's a bit Diogenes. But there is an almost organic order in the distribution of Quique Bassat's books. Sort them by collections (or passions). In the room there is the one about the Holocaust, which touches him closely: a second great uncle survived a death camp, he always wore long sleeves to hide the tattoo. He did not explain anything until forty years later, and from the recordings he made Vouloir vivre: Deux frères à Auschwitz emerged. Between 1991 and 1993, Bassat studied in Wales and dedicated the final work to the Nazi conference that would define genocide. To document himself on denialism, he went to the Europa bookshop in La Cedade. He had dreadlocks. In the general catalog there was an article entitled The Jews of Barcelona. It was headed by a photo of his father, the publicist Luis Bassat.
Since then, and with references such as Els catalans als camp nazis, by Montserrat Roig, or La noche, by Elie Wiesel – which “condenses in a few pages the same force as Primo Levi in If this is a man”–, he has accumulated books about witnesses, the liberation, the collective psychological stabbing of the German people to make them complicit. The latter always on paper (which caused a disaster last year, because the boiler in his house burst and many were lost). They are with those of journalism and history, in a bookcase built by a carpenter named Josep Lamesa Pino must have been thirteen years old when Quique and Maria moved here. They used to live in Mozambique, where they brought a suitcase full of books every time; they have stayed at the Manhiça research center. He still travels a lot, long flights, weird schedules. And having been an anti-Kindle fundamentalist, he recognizes its practicality. He has gone from the moral obligation to finish all the books to reading three or four at the same time, and if there is one that does not convince him, he deletes it without whims.
The youngest of four siblings, at the French Liceu he was a reader of quantity, not necessarily of quality: a teacher gave them points for every four books they read a month. Because I was the ball of the class, I read eighty-one in one academic year. At the age of 16, two novels taught him that "literature is not only for fun, it also makes you feel". One was Cien años de soledad (he would re-read it some time later in the Amazon and he would feel like a teenager). The other, La ciudad y los perros. Already an adult, he received a call from his father's number, and a man with a South American accent said: "Hello, I'm Mario; you have a first edition of a very difficult book of mine to get, I wanted to tell you in person".
Bassat is a fetishist with sentimental books (it doesn't matter if they're badly edited, underlined or ugly), but he's after the others, which he leaves, gives away and can read digitally. Among the latter are those of true crime; he has become particularly fond of imposters such as Enric Marco or the woman from Barcelona who pretended to have been in the Twin Towers during the attacks. Frustrated photographer, he compensates by looking at photos, for example, of Salgado, of whom he has several volumes in his bedroom, next to the narrative ones. He is obsessed with mountaineers. With na Maria and her children Lea and Elias, they read Harry Potter together before bed.
A specialist in tropical medicine and epidemiology, he did his thesis on malaria, to which he devotes a large part of his work. In 2008 I opened an eBay account – the “black hole” of expenses – to buy an antimalarial box. This is the beginning of a collection that will be exhibited at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid next February. What amuses him the most is negotiating. Why is a book worth 200 euros and not 50? There is usually no waiting list for those with malaria, so when he doesn't get it at the price he wants, he insists on it after a few months. They are in a display case purchased at the Diagonal antiques fair.
"You find wonders in the brutal literature of three hundred years ago." He is interested in the images and the interpretation that was made of diseases at the time. "You'll be surprised", he says, "there are very well thought out things that we're still going over". Malaria began to be explained at the end of the 19th century, before it was referred to as fevers. Around the year 1700, the Italian doctor Francesco Torti made a drop-down with the tree of fevers, where each branch represents one. Quique Bassat's library is a bit like that, a tree of science and passions.
