--- I am a coffee addict. Until I have my first one of the day, I am not a person.
--- So, shall we have an espresso?
--- No, a cortado is better, I fancy it more at this hour. But serve it in a cup, please! I can't stand cortados in a glass that burn your fingers!
The writer Berta Jardí smiles, leaning on the bar, mid-morning, while a silence only disturbed by the sounds of the street fills the Bar and accompanies the conversation.
"I was born in a house on the right side of the Eixample, from a very local family. I am Barcelonian through and through," explains the author of titles that reflect with depth, affection, and an undoubted touch of irony the idiosyncrasy of the city, such as La portentosa vida del sastre Bariloche, Un concert memorable or L'home del barret. These days she is presenting her sixth novel, La bibliotecaria del front (Univers), "inspired by the months in which a young librarian, Aurora Díaz Plaja, traveled to the front of the Civil War in a bibliobús, a mobile library created to bring books to combatants and the wounded recovering in rear hospitals."
With a degree in Catalan Philology, Berta has worked as a cultural journalist for a large number of media outlets such as El Periódico, El Temps or El Món and, as a cultural manager and press officer, she has been involved in a multitude of projects such as the Joventuts Musicals de Barcelona, the Mozartiana or the Fundació La Caixa. "All were very interesting and very absorbing jobs that would have been impossible to combine with writing, to which I could not dedicate myself fully until I was offered the possibility of early retirement. It was at that moment that I stopped being a Sunday writer to dedicate all the free time I have to doing what I am truly passionate about: writing."
The perfect breeding ground
In Berta Jardí's childhood, some fundamental ingredients were not lacking, shaping the writer, journalist, and cultural activist she was to become. To begin with, the love of reading. "I had the privilege of living in a family environment where reading was part of my childhood. In addition to the books from my parents' library or children's books, my siblings and I were great devourers of comic books. Reading naturally led me to writing."
In the parishioner's childhood, some fundamental ingredients have not been missing, which have shaped the writer, journalist, and cultural activistBut there are other ingredients that made up that breeding ground in which the future writer was cooked. "When I was little, I would fall asleep hypnotized, my gaze fixed on some lines, like fingers, that crossed the ceiling of my room from side to side. My grandmother, who lived with us, explained to me that they were bullet marks that had been fired from the street. That story impressed me a lot and in my childish imagination I relived it as if a gangster brawl had occurred in front of the house. Later I learned the truth: those were the traces of a shooting that had taken place in the early morning of July 19, 1936, on the opposite corner, between a group of rebellious soldiers and a platoon of Assault Guards loyal to the Republic. It was the confrontation that Agustí Centelles captured in a photograph in which men are seen shooting from behind dead horses and which was on the cover of Newsweek, going around the world as a graphic witness to the war that had just broken out in Spain."
In addition to books and comics, Berta's childhood was nourished by fantasies articulated around a still palpable historical reality. A reality that hypnotized her every night.
A city to return to, but only as a tourist
The writer has lived in Penedès for twenty years, despite the inconveniences of someone who has to commute daily to Barcelona for work reasons: "With always deficient public transport, the fact of arriving home at ungodly hours when work gets complicated and having to give up some cultural activities that I would be interested in attending due to a matter of schedules." Despite all this, she assures that right now she would not go back to living in Barcelona. "I find that the city has become a global, banal, dirty and noisy showcase. It saddens me to see how more and more neighborhoods are losing their essence or others that have already completely lost it."
"The city has become a global, banal, dirty and noisy showcase"His work has much of historical and sentimental preservation of a Barcelona that is already extinct (or almost). "Knowing how to be was precisely about this: twenty-four hours of a lady from the Eixample that take place in streets, in a world, that she no longer recognizes. My first novel was about neighborhoods that transform and artisan trades that become extinct, The Portentous Life of Bariloche the Tailor, which narrates the daily life of a tailor, in love with his craft and who hates Tergal and who sees how his tailor shop is slowly dying out in a neighborhood in full transformation."
Of course, since she retired early, the parishioner admits to reconciling with her city, "but from a distance! I often come to Barcelona to play tourist. And I love that!"
--- Taking advantage of the fact that you're here today as a guiri, you can let yourself be tempted by lunch. Here we have everything and it's delicious.
Berta Jardí thinks about it for a few moments, evaluating the time, the place, and what she really fancies at this moment.
--- One thing I love is the café gourmand they offer in many establishments in France, which would be like tapas, but sweet. That is, a coffee with four or five mini portions of desserts. I don't know if you'll have something similar.
And she smiles while, from the other side of the bar, a way is sought to satisfy that well-thought-out craving.