"I'm at the bar, thinking, reflecting with my gaze nowhere in particular. For years, in my favorite bar, I would sit in front of the beer taps, so I could stare at them and not attract the bartender's attention. It's a kind of public privacy that I always liked to maintain," explains Lillian Neuman, a woman from Rosario who tirelessly roams the streets of Barcelona in search of its secrets and literary corners, absorbed in her cup of coffee.
With her inseparable dog, Ron, at her feet, all good-natured face and legendary bad temper, Lillian likes to work and think in bars: "in public places where I read great books. My first or second reading of Proust was, in part, in one of these noisy places. I also read Fredric Brown that way, or made little drawings with a fine marker. Which I still do."
So when it comes to defining herself, describing who she is, she takes a brief breath, and replies: "I am a product of so many years of combining that privacy and the company of people." So many things have happened to her that way: "I met my husband by scolding him at the bar for invading my privacy."
Journalist, literary critic, writer (she was a Nadal finalist in 1999) and agitator, this Argentine residing in Barcelona loves "walking through cities looking for their literature," creating literary routes of which, shortly, "I will inaugurate one along Las Ramblas."
Mom and Proust
"I have two memories that I think defined my life, and they are from my childhood. In the first, I am doing my homework and I hear my mother telling my aunt that I do my homework without them having to tell me to. The other: there's a fight between neighborhood children and two mothers appear to resolve the matter. One of the mothers says, pointing at me, that I am the only one who is saved: a very good girl who never creates problems. The other mother -mine- replies that she shouldn't trust my angelic appearance. I can be a little devil."
As strange as it sounds, Lillian assures that both memories define her life. "I will always thank my mother for saying that. I detest mothers who speak wonders of their children, and I detest even more those who repeat their children's phrases as if quoting the wisdom of spontaneity."
Another defining moment for Lillian occurs in her twenties: "I read Marcel Proust for the first time; I didn't know this was going to be the constant of my life. And so it was. I am proud to walk through Illiers (Combray) and stop again and again in every corner, promenade, and atmosphere that I spent my life imagining and re-reading. And to do that, or whatever, without thinking about others' opinions."
In the end, that education of affection and truth, and that prose of escapism and reflection, have ended up being two pillars that shape the person she is today, someone who refers to slow and patient work as something to be proud of. "Every time I've done something without thinking too much about the results. Everything that refers to having faith in something and sticking with it. And without giving it too much importance either, because I can spoil everything."
A neighborhood in Barcelona
Lillian believes that "there is something serious, very serious, that we have become accustomed to, and that is, of course, the difficult or impossible access to housing in the city: exorbitant rents for small, dark apartments, the immoral relationship between salaries and housing, the inevitable exodus of neighbors and businesses." Those faces that she, as a resident of Ciutat Vella, knows so well.
"Living always in the same neighborhood, one day came, I wouldn't know exactly when or how, when it was enough to just go down the stairs of my house and take a walk to have someone to chat with. Some nights I would go out for just a while, but I would meet my friend Jordi Laplana, who would invite me "a fer un entrepanet" and, thanks to him, I would return home at four."
A neighborhood she continues to walk with Ron despite "the unstoppable and criminal scooter assaults from which, for now, I am saving myself by a hair."
--They go like crazy.
--Yes. I asked a mosso what can be done with these people who brush past us at high speed, mocking our lives, and his answer, between fury and sarcasm, was: "nothing, kill them."
As the conversation at the bar progresses, the silence of the empty city seeps in from the street. And Lillian abstracts herself again before observing: "We've been in a pandemic for a year and many of us wonder, when the supposed normality arrives, what kind of normality will it be?"