"I am a night owl, no doubt. To all of us who long for the unknown, the night belongs to us." The writer Joaquim Micó has arrived late, the sky already covered in starry black, dawn just around the corner. The night that divides the day before it, resurfacing, destroys it. "Get me a ratafia cream with ice, please, my daughter discovered it for me not long ago and I like it more and more," he asks.
"I am someone who has spent half my life making mistakes and the other half learning to live with it." The writer has worked as a comic and television scriptwriter, journalist, press chief, oenologist, and historian. A restless soul who, outside of narrative endeavors, has been a clown, cheese seller, literary ghostwriter, high school teacher, or public relations manager for the mythical El Molino venue.
Many lives that fit into a single life, although his thing was writing. "There's nothing better than someone telling you they enjoyed something you wrote. Knowing that you've connected with their sensibility and that what you do serves to make a person happy, even if only for a few hours."
Seasoned at the Bruguera publishing house and with an extensive body of work focused on young adult literature with titles such as Qualsevol nit pot sortir el sol, 221-B Baker Street, El grafitti de Moctezuma, Ulleres de soul or Paraula de sioux, Joaquim Micó now assures that he only writes what he truly wants to write. "I feel that I am in a good creative moment, that I improve with each paragraph, but whenever I see one of my published books I would like to change some things. I am never satisfied enough and perhaps that is why I want to keep writing. I am convinced that if I made a perfect work I could no longer keep writing, so, in a way, I can be grateful to keep learning with each book." For now, he has just added the VI Bellvei Negre Award for Mai no hem tingut París (Libertània), about a very peculiar hitman, to his extensive list of achievements.
His is the story of a literary rebirth. If in 1995 Joaquim Micó abandoned his activity "as a keyboard-tapper" to dedicate himself to other more profitable tasks, in 2018 the writing bug resurfaced, unstoppable and voracious. "I know I can't go long without writing because I've been through that and I don't like who I was." Soon, as he himself says, the bug would acquire the dimensions of a gigantic snake. He could no longer stop writing. And he anticipates: "Now I am working on a novel set in 1975 that talks about love and hate, about memories and first experiences, youth and hopes, with a lot of music and Nazis in our country. But above all, it talks about friendship."
The carrot after the stick
In the life of the parishioner, good news has always arrived after misfortunes. "I started writing comic scripts, going through a kind of casting for Bruguera. The night before the test I was writing the script when my grandmother, who lived on the same staircase, interrupted me and told me that my grandfather was not feeling well. I went down to his apartment and discovered that my grandfather had died. Well, nothing, notify the whole family and keep writing the script because you're playing for a job you've dreamed of for a long time. And the theme of the comic was humor, so nothing better than making people laugh after finding a corpse. The next morning the director was enthusiastic about the script and I worked for them until the publishing house closed."
This metaphor of receiving the stick first and then the carrot is a constant: "We broke up with my best youthful partner, I signed up for language school to forget her and in class I met my future wife. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer and we were told we were going to be parents. I was fired from a shitty job at a take away and a week later I was hired as an executive in a large socio-health group. I almost died from a venous thromboembolism and won the VI Bellvei Award." He sips some ratafia cream and finishes: "The bad thing is that in life there are too many slaps and too few vegetables."
Three decades dying of success
Born in Les Corts, the writer lived deeply a Barcelona "where everything can be literary, the good and the bad. A city to be expressed in any genre where I visited my first cinemas, had my first drinks, loved my first women and a long list of first times, which fills an important part of my biography." His sentimental memory leads him through the streets of "that decadent and pre-Olympic city of the 80s with a marked personality, a mixture of extravagance, of a desire to become, of originality. Every corner exuded creativity and you could coincide in a dive with notable journalists, famous actors or some half-crazy artist."
Born in Les Corts, the writer lived deeply a Barcelona "where everything can be literary, the good and the bad"But that urban scenario was lost, for Joaquim Micó, with the following decade: "The Barcelona of my youth got sick and has been dying of success for thirty years. It never was the same again. I left." Settled in Garraf, he confesses his delight "in killing in fiction some of those responsible for what happened to this city, now turned into a tourist postcard where prices expel people from their neighborhoods, traditional shops close and no one says "bon dia" anymore when entering a bar…".
--- Well, watch out, in this Bar we always greet our regulars!
"But you won't deny that what's here is rather an exception," replies Joaquim Micó, quick-witted, smiling, as he savors his drink.