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I look around me. Poets, novelists, musicians, painters, journalists, professors. None, however, seem to have any other occupation at this moment than to wait with growing, almost childish, unease for Pere Rovira to appear at the door and surprise us with his face. The invisible thread that stitches us together in this emotion is friendship with a man who turns 70 and who, at any moment, will emerge from the summer backlight in the windows of a Delta restaurant.
Then, a few minutes before he arrives, I start reading the expectant gazes. I read that, for many, Pere is a master. In universities, many professors are found, but few masters. One of those who inoculate literature for years, without reservation. And who still now propagates through the classes, the writings, the thoughts of so many students and students of students. He only had to make us understand that we still had to learn to read and write. And as soon as we understood it, we learned that poetry, literature, has an architecture, a necessary structure to build any creation. A necessary artifice to tie feelings. So simple, so difficult for the impetuosity of early youth. And then he poured poetry into our faces to wake us up from the fright. Lessons to remember. That's why there is still a classroom where the silence of the end of his last class is kept.
Before seeing his face frozen at that point between astonishment and joy, I read in the eyes that will smile at him that he is a poet. And between eyelashes, I find more than one accent to understand what a poet is. Because his verses – which are no longer his – are part of our vital prose. Or vice versa, sometimes we can't distinguish it. And this is poetry. Verses that he doses us like a comet, with a book every seven years, after completing an orbit around his life and his readings. Poetry that is understood, as those who know less about letters but more about days say.
While the hugs to mark his body with esteem do not arrive, I verify that in some pupils there are still recent traces of his novels. Because the stories he tells have that, they leave a mark. Perhaps it is the fault of the mixture of tenderness with raw reality. Or of the stories of history that he knows how to cook. The son of a saddler: who would have thought that he would make us laugh and cry, that he would be able to infect us with the pride and rage of those who lose wars, the wisdom and village gossip. His novels, another form of poetry.
Then the time will come to sit down and he will look at all of us and get fed up before savoring the rice, while many of us would already want to be at the after-dinner conversation, which is the place to savor friendship. The moment to taste the intelligence of a discussion, the biting comment, where to find the overwhelming vehemence of the unleashed Rovira. Where the lived anecdote can become a chapter. It is easy to find him at the confluence of books, music, cinema. Where life and art touch. Even tears will come to mark with fire the moment when he will realize that there are many people who love him and are capable of traveling kilometers and literature to give him a book that collects what part and what whole of him each of us has kept. Pages full of words, drawings, images. Decades of poetry, jazz, urban nocturnes, well-set tables, some displeasure, more than one loss, so much gain.
But now I watch as his children wait for him to enter the scene they have prepared like someone composing a sonnet. It is one of the gifts he will not see. The other is the joyful complicity of the one who takes him by the arm to the trap, Celina, his wife.
And we will still take, at dusk, a photo on the border between the blue of the sky and the green of the rice fields. Many people to whom this man has filtered life in one way or another. The puzzle of a happy day. But now, as we sense him on the threshold, I already have a portrait of the pride of knowing one of the best writers the country has produced. The chronicle of a friendship.