Astrid Roig is a philologist, a bookworm who loves literature. Even as a child, she was struck by the fact that one of the great works of Catalan literature, La plaça del Diamant, referred to Montseny Street, the same street where she lived in her childhood, in a building her grandfather, Sever Roig, bought in 1923. Astrid little suspected that that reference in the novel could be more than a casual fact, until one day her father made a comment that changed everything: Astrid's childhood apartment had previously been the home of Jordi Gurguí and Margarida Puig, son and daughter-in-law of Mercè Rodoreda. It is that same apartment on Montseny Street that the writer had visited on several occasions while living in Geneva and writing, precisely, La plaça del Diamant.
Despite Astrid's passion (and profession) for literature, she was not aware of this connection until she was over 40, when her father verbalized it. "They had always talked about the Gurguís, but I never thought it was Mercè Rodoreda's son" (or Rudu, as Astrid says for short). Then, Astrid's curiosity and literary drive led her to the inevitable question: that apartment on Montseny Street in La plaça del Diamant that becomes the main scene when the protagonist moves in when she marries Quimet, was it the same apartment where she had lived? And not only had she lived there; now her brother lives there, and she lives in the front door, on the same landing, in a building that continues to belong to the family more than 100 years after her grandfather bought it. The fact that Natàlia —before becoming Colometa— and Quimet moved to Montseny Street just when they got married also had its parallel in reality: Rodoreda's son moved in when he married Margarida Puig, who had lived with her family since childhood.
The question and curiosity triggered an investigation that led Astrid to Rodoreda's correspondence and to meet her former daughter-in-law. All of it, to discover if the novelist had been inspired by the apartment where she herself had grown up. The first step was to resort to the network she had already built as a professor and devotee of literature: she discussed it with her friend and co-founder of the Candaya publishing house, Olga Martínez. "She suggested I talk to the writer Jordi Carrión, and he sent me to Llorenç Soldevila, professor of Catalan Literature at the University of Vic." The chain of contacts led Astrid to Soldevila, who encouraged her to delve into the novel to identify all the similarities she could find between that apartment on Montseny Street belonging to Natàlia and Quimet, and her family's.
With a detailed reading, the similarities became evident. Both in reality and in fiction, the apartment is a main floor, with an attic on the rooftop, where Quimet builds the dovecote that will end up engulfing Natàlia's life. Also present are the bay window, the balcony, the gallery, the hallway, and the step at the entrance, details that Astrid discovered and listed with a careful rereading of the novel. And a decisive one: Natàlia and Quimet's apartment on Montseny Street had a drugstore underneath, exactly as happened in the Roig family's building. "To Mr. Pepet's drugstore, we went to buy things since I was little."
The same shopkeeper, and the same business, more than a century old, that Rodoreda saw when she went to visit her son, on several documented occasions between 1955 ---when he settled there after marrying Margarida Puig---, and 1960, when the writer submitted the novel to the Premi Sant Jordi with the title of La Colometa (which did not win). The writer traveled to Barcelona from Geneva for her son's wedding, and also the following year —to collect the Joan Santamaria prize, celebrated clandestinely—, and for the baptism of her grandson. The visits were reflected in the writer's letters, which Astrid also scrutinized. "Professor Soldevila opened the doors of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans to me, and the archive of the Fundació Mercè Rodoreda," to be able to read the letters she exchanged while writing La plaça del Diamant with her son and with her partner, the journalist and writer Armand Obiols (pseudonym of Joan Prats). "With a bundle and in a small room, I read them, and found references to the pis del nois," when she referred to her son and daughter-in-law's apartment.
The Foundation not only gave her access to the writer's correspondence, but also put her in contact with her former daughter-in-law. Margarida Puig opened the doors of her house to Astrid, far from Gràcia; before dying, Puig lived in Sant Bartomeu del Grau, a small village in the rural area of Lluçanès. "She spoke of Rodoreda with great respect. She said it was very likely that she oriented her imagination towards the apartment on Montseny Street," Astrid recalls of that visit, now more than 15 years ago, during a very intense research process. "She explained to me that Rodoreda noticed everything. She looked at everything, feeding her fiction, her mind."
In fact, it is not an isolated incident that Rodoreda drew from her own experience to construct her stories. In Mirall trencat, she refers to Carrer de la Palla, where her grandfather had an antique shop, and in La plaça del Diamant Natàlia and Quimet get married in the Josepets de Gràcia church, where Rodoreda herself also got married. These parallels —sometimes acknowledged by the writer, and other times, not—, also include the dovecote in the novel, inspired by the one she had in her family home in Sant Gervasi. And why did she keep some references to herself, while revealing others? "Because she was very wary of her private life. It was a very vulnerable part, and she kept it to herself because it's a part of her life that she didn't want to show or make public," highlights the philologist.
Astrid's research also translates this fiction-reality relationship into the sketch of Colometa and Quimet's apartment, and she is clear: "There are enough similar characteristics between the two spaces, the real and the fictional, to relate them." There are numerous shared features and connections that her research brought to light, expanding the range of the novelist's sources of inspiration. With the research kept for years, the exhibition at the CCCB Rodoreda, un bosc, and an unscheduled visit during The New Barcelona Post's Literature Week, have brought it out of the drawer, from a main floor on Carrer del Montseny that finds its place in the imaginary of the most iconic work by the most universal Catalan writer.