"I am someone who writes. I have become this, perhaps. Someone who writes all the time, so I write books pretending I could do something else." Marc Colell has sat at a table in the Bar, with the morning already behind him, and now savors a glass of red wine. He has ordered a particular one, "Mendocino, that tastes of field and leather and embers. That someone opens it and leaves it there, without protocols, without frills. That it says it is a wine, nothing more and, above all, that it does not pronounce words like 'barrel', 'pairing' or 'bouquet'." He sips a drink and adds, with a half-smile: "those words worsen any conversation. And any wine."
Marc Colell confesses that he already wrote "long before doing so, years, decades, perhaps, when he was a teenager, he read and knew, with an extravagant certainty, close to madness, that one day I would dedicate myself to that, to bending the world on paper." Thus he dedicates his days –especially his mornings– to putting his world in black and white, composing stories like those he publishes in Zenda or those he has collected in the volume El bozal, and novels like Reino vegetal (which received a special mention in the Kutxa Ciudad de Irún prize) and his most recent Las crines (Siruela), which has won the prestigious Café de Gijón prize.
The work presents the transoceanic journey of a man who, in the human and wild setting of the Argentine pampa, discovers vital coordinates that make him rethink his relationship with life and with the world. A book that speaks of solitude, of exploration, and of that immense fertile plain that Marc knows so well, for he inhabited it, loving it deeply. "I would get up very early, move away from the house and place a wooden plank between two cut logs. That was the best desk I have ever had. The dew soaked my feet. The sunrise was the property of the teros, of the horneros. They walked and punctuated my words. They, and the calf that approached to listen to the sound of my keyboard. I also looked at the screen. I did it next to me. He was a benevolent and ruminant critic," he recalls.
And something of him has remained there. For now, his library, "which I left in the warehouse of an old bakery and the books are still there," and the vice of tobacco, "that I didn't know if I would write again, because I couldn't conceive words without the smoke of cigarettes." It's impossible not to think, in this sense, that Las crines has much, much of auto-fiction.
Walking on the edge of the creative abyss
When asked what he is most proud of, Marc Colell shakes his head. "I am not proud of my work or my career. I don't like that word, it's pompous and boorish." He sips some wine. "I write what I want and how I want." Perhaps he can't do anything else, but therein lies the mastery. "For someone dedicated to this, recognition or oblivion are symptoms of the same disease," he adds.
— And what are you up to now?
The answer, for someone composing a work of fiction word by word, is never entirely easy. "I am writing a book that I shouldn't be writing. Barcelona might be in the background. The Barcelona I recognize, still. The one that remains adhered to my memory. But you never know." The will of the story can become as strong as, or stronger than, that of the author. "Books are nothing until they transform into an object. Or almost nothing. The possibility of a form. Its promise, perhaps. But they always hang by a thread, by a failed expression that could ruin everything. When someone writes, they trust each word as a salvation and fear each word as the threat of a shipwreck. Each expression, each paragraph, can elevate the text, give it meaning, or contaminate the whole and condemn it to disenchantment."
A complicated balance, on the edge of the creative abyss, which he defines in the following terms: "the writer feels in their hands the possibility of creation, of discovery, and the imminent risk of abandonment." Walking on that edge ends up being the question.
Without melancholy
"I left Barcelona twenty-three years ago, a little before the cupcakes, the cloned restaurants, the smoothies, the burritos, the sushi, the fish devouring the calluses from feet. A little before, nothing more." He finishes his glass of wine. "Just in time," he adds.
Currently based in L'Escala, the writer recalls some snippets of his Barcelona: "the beggars with names, or nicknames; a lady who lived on Aribau street, who pushed her cart, slept in doorways and wrote things in a notebook; the orthopedic store, the lamp store, the syringes of Plaça Letamendi, the market where people knew each other and sold cod, the one-legged pigeons, with a severed leg; the metallic cooing, the smell of the nurse, the cobblestones, the marble tables, the wounds on the trunks of the plane trees". But he remembers it all "without melancholy and without wanting to return. Barcelona is my city and I care very little about it".
— Something that could make you want to come back, at least more often, is our gastronomic offer. We have everything: menu, portions, combined dishes… All delicious!
Marc Colell smiles sideways again. "The full menu is the novel. A feast that lasts all day, while the stories serve to snack between meals, eat standing up, gather strength and keep walking," he replies enigmatically.