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n 1987, Juan Marsé defined himself in the third person in the last portrait of Señoras y señores: "He hasn't had much pleasure in knowing himself, he would have preferred to pass by himself… The guy is short, clumsy, not very talkative, taciturn and mocking. He doesn't consider himself an intellectual, and he dislikes being treated as if he were. He loves taverns and neighborhood stationery stores and the luminous flanks of kiosks displaying comic books and cheap adventure novels. Flags produce genuine terror in him. He eats salads and writes by hand." Thirty years earlier, in 1957, he already showed promise in a letter to Paulina Crusat, his literary "fairy godmother": "Don't think I believe myself to be a 'chosen one' —I believed that at 18—, because if I had to define myself a bit I would say that I am quite lazy, with very little drive for certain things that deserve affection and attention, and with little capacity for external affection towards others (I wish I were one of those children who kiss their mother often, but I am not, and don't ask me why) even though I regret it…"
More anniversaries. In 2016, half a century of Últimas tardes con Teresa will be celebrated. The writer remembers journalist Manuel Del Arco when he informed him that he had won the Biblioteca Breve prize and the press was waiting for him at the Marés Museum. Marés… Marsé. The author and his characters: Manolo, the Pijoaparte, trying to exchange the Carmel shack for a bourgeois tower in Sarrià or Cadaqués. The Murcian, that tanned and suburban epigone of Stendhal's Julien Sorel; or the blonde Teresa, "with a red scarf peeking out of her white trench coat pocket and with a trembling musical disposition in her legs." When Seix Barral reissued Últimas tardes con Teresa, Arturo Pérez-Reverte highlighted its perennial character: "It remains as fresh as when it was written. Not even the imbeciles who then grudgingly spared the author's life, the resentful or the parasites who live by explaining how they would write —if they wanted to— the books that others write, dare to dispute that Manolo Reyes, alias Pijoaparte, is one of the best-drawn characters in Spanish literature of the second half of the 20th century."
As Josep Maria Cuenca reveals in Mientras llega la felicidad, Marsé's biography begins like a novel. Son of Domingo Faneca and Rosa Roca, the boy who was to be named Juan Faneca Roca ended up being Juan Marsé Carbó. According to Berta Carbó, his adoptive mother, she had lost her son: a fortuitous encounter in a taxi with the biological father of that child, orphaned by another mother, made the adoption possible. The reality is that Domingo Faneca and Pep Marsé, his adoptive father, knew each other from the separatist party Estat Català, a dangerous friendship in post-war Barcelona. The "taxi story," Cuenca points out, was an imaginative tale by Berta: "It can be said today that Juan Marsé came into the world not with a loaf of bread under his arm, but with a novel: the one his mother 'wrote' for him."
"Why one writes has fifty thousand answers. Me, because I don't know how to do anything else. Or because I disagree with a world that is not well born: fiction offers alternatives to that reality that one doesn't like."Many years had to pass before the writer learned his origins in detail: "I never had much interest in delving into that, and if I didn't, it was not to bother my adoptive parents... When Cuenca started investigating my family, I let him. He discovered such surprising things in my family tree as some Ponce de León descendants of the conquistadors...". Gratitude to his adoptive father is evident in the dedication ofOne day I will return"To Pep Marsé, my father, who taught me to combine awareness with escalivada." Although with the passing of the years, not even memory is what it used to be, the writer acknowledges: "A kind of degradation of convictions occurs, and a certain moral ambiguity is imposed regarding characters and events that you considered definitive." For example, the figure of the absent father, which is reiterated and idealized in his first novels, reappears with a less dignified profile in Lizard tailsorCalligraphy of Dreams.
Raised in the Guinardó neighborhood, the writer frames his novels in memory, that "paradise from which no one can expel you." The Marsé Territory is neighborhood and skylight, movie theater, comic book paper, and eroticism in twilight. A Barcelona that only survives in literature. The Barcelona of 2015 seems to him "a design city with tourism as a source of income." We wonder if the Bartleby Syndrome diagnosed by Enrique Vila-Matas stalks the writer; we glance at the portrait of Gil de Biedma that presides over his works and days. "Jaime concluded that he had nothing more to say as a poet," Marsé comments. But that is not his case. He is now finishing a novel and has two more projects in mente: "Why one writes has fifty thousand answers. Me, because I don't know how to do anything else. Or because I disagree with a world that is not well born: fiction offers alternatives to that reality that one doesn't like." Rooted in the homeland of childhood and literature, he has no need for dangerous nationalist identities. When the topic comes up, he resorts to Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "You talk to me of nationality, of language, of religion. I shall try to fly by those nets..."
He escapes, oh how he escapes, as much as when we try to extract something from the new novel. Marsé twists his face and leans on Hemingway: telling a story yet to be finished brings bad luck. But he does let something slip: "The axis of the plot is an indictment of an individual who committed a crime thirty years ago and after a very aggressive therapy remembers how he committed it but doesn't know why..." Before we rush with labels, he warns us that it is not a noir novel, that genre he detests. "It's about the traps of memory and oblivion as therapy... The author of the indictment with the killer is commissioned a script project about that murder and has a series of talks with him... And I've already said too much!" he concludes.
Marsé has pronounced the word script, a battle horse of the failed film adaptations of his novels. We look around and are surrounded by black and white photographs. Literature, and cinema, living other lives... We return to the self-portrait of Ladies and Gentlemen: "To mask oneself, to disguise oneself, to camouflage oneself, to be another. The coyote of Las Ánimas. The hunchback of the Delicias cinema. The vampire of the Roxy cinema. The monster of the Verdi cinema. Nostalgia for not having been one of them." The film version of a novel, he emphasizes, "does not have to adhere absolutely to the literary work...". We ask for examples: "Nazarín and Tristana. Buñuel adapts Galdós, but the stories are Buñuel's. To explain the novel, you already have the novel and you read it. The mistake of the adaptations of my works is that the directors wanted to be too faithful to the texts." More happy versions? "Coppola and Conrad in Apocalypse Now, Welles and Shakespeare in Chimes at Midnight, Burgess and Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange...".
Marsé imprints character on his writing. Always incorruptible. The young man in a t-shirt in the jewelry workshop obsessed with the crime of Carmen Broto and the aventis that would inspire, years later, If They Tell You I Fell. Marsé, already a writer, with his first novel, Locked Up with a Single Toy, in hand. The tiny room on Martí Street: typewriter, desk lamp, and a photo of Edith Piaf pinned to the wall. The octogenarian Marsé who dreams like a child in Happy News on Paper Airplanes. On the shelves, the sensual Betty Boop, Stevenson, the muses of Hollywood that enchanted Shanghai and the motto: "Diligence in work is the only moral condition of the writer."