"A Jack Daniel's Honey, please," he asks, after having treated himself to a lavish à la carte dinner at the Bar. "I'll have it at the bar," he announces, while in the background the sound of a harmonica, accompanied by the plucking of his beloved Bruce Springsteen's guitar, announces the first bars of Nebraska. Writer Jordi Macarulla then smiles broadly at this unexpected reunion with the musical hero of his youth.
"I've always liked writing. As a child, mine were the best essays in class. There were always a lot of books in my house, and since I was a child, I was already writing stories," he explains, leaning his six-foot-three frame against the bar. "At fifteen, I did have an epiphany, because I had a teacher at the Institut Maragall who wasn't particularly good, but she had a great emphasis on literature, which she transmitted to me. That woman made me fall in love with Pérez Galdós's La fontana de oro, and my relationship with the world of letters changed. It became a passion."
---And what was that teacher's name?
---Can you believe I can't remember?--- he laughs.
After his high school years, Jordi Macarulla studied Hispanic Philology at the UB, a period he remembers with special affection, "because I met very important people in my life like the editor Marc Romera or Professor Lluís Maria Todó." At that time, he alternated writing short stories with poetry. "You have no idea how effective poetry is for making a girl fall in love," explains the writer, who confesses that in his youth he "didn't pick up girls in discos, but in libraries." That facility for composing verses and sonnets would end up turning him into the wedding poet for friends, acquaintances, and later, couples looking for a well-crafted couplet to seal their ---more or less eternal--- alliance with beautiful words.
He completed his studies in Human Resources, Criminology, and Psychopathology and, as a great fan of Raymond Carver, he never stopped writing short stories that, at times, caused him some problems: "I tend to put people from my environment into my stories and, of course, then they read them. For example, that was the case of the manager of a company where I worked and whom I literarily killed in a cruel and, truthfully, deserved way. You wouldn't believe the fuss he made!" The fact is that, in 2006, Jordi won the XII Short Story Prize of the Ateneo de la Laguna, which led to the publication, the following year, of his first book, Formas del Relámpago, a selection of ten stories "that I had to choose from the more than one hundred I had written" for the veteran Canary Islands publisher Baile del Sol.
From the miseries of the company to the voices for Bruce
At that time, in the midst of a crisis, Jordi Macarulla worked for a company located in an industrial park in Castellbisbal. The round trip to his house was long and there he had time to mature the idea of writing something that was not a short story. Something longer. A story about the predators, executioners, and victims of the working world. Thus, he immersed himself in writing his first novel, the murky Desagüe, "which took me seven years between finishing writing it and everything else" and which came out in 2017. "To date, it's what I'm most proud of on a literary level."
Shortly after the publication of this book, he began working on what was to be his second novel, but then an opportunity arose. "The publisher wanted to celebrate its 30th anniversary with the publication of some authors from its catalog and I was one of them, so they asked me for a new book with a year's margin." He immediately knew that, as a good long-distance writer who takes his time to shore up his works, he would never be able to deliver the novel he had planned, so he completely changed his register and, aided by the months of confinement, wrote Ahora estarías aquí conmigo, a work dedicated to the memory of his dog Bruce, who had passed away shortly before, and with whom he had cultivated a very special relationship.
After its publication, another project emerged. "My mother has always been a great reader, but she has lost a lot of her vision and finds it very difficult to read, so I turned Bruce's story into an audiobook for her. I had the voices of over a hundred friends, family members, acquaintances, and other writers like Llort, Rosa Ribas, Raquel Gámez, and Susana Hernández. My mother loved it, and we will soon upload it to Spotify."
---And the novel you had in mind?
---Well, I hope to finish it in two years. If it slows down, I'll do as I did with the previous one: I'll cloister myself on weekends in the Jaume Fuster library until I finish it.
Decadence might have been better
Born in Raval, with his childhood spent in Can Baró and his adolescence in "the total neighborhood" of Gràcia, whose streets, bars, and inns he trod and lived intensely, Jordi Macarulla now lives with his wife and son in Esplugues, where he directs the reading club of the Pare Miquel library. And he admits that, although he still likes Barcelona, "I don't love it as much as before. Also, as I get older, I feel more drawn to retiring to La Garrotxa or a similar place."
This disillusionment has a clear cause: "The overcrowding, the hordes of tourists that cram all the places. That repels me. I am already aware that before, Barcelona was objectively uglier, it was more neglected, it was a decadent city with a rogue essence that perhaps we tend to romanticize, but which has been lost in favor of an overcrowding that I believe is even worse," he laments, taking the last sip of syrupy bourbon.
---Hardly any tourists come to the Bar here. Shall I get you another one of these Jack Daniels?
The notes of Springsteen's Open all night fill the air and Jordi Macarulla perks up:
---Come on, yes, give me another one!