"I believe that everything that happens to one in life ends up having a positive repercussion. It ends up leading to something good." Roger Bastida has just had dinner at a nearby restaurant – "traditional Chinese food from different regions, which I love" – and has stopped by the Bar for a bloody mary, a reminiscence of some mixology studies he took, although he never put them into practice professionally. "There's always some door or window that opens," he continues, smiling under his mustache, while the notes of Harlem Congo, by Chick Webb's big band, liven up the place.
Something similar happened with his first novel. "I started it when I was studying at university and I wrote it, little by little. After my studies, I started working as a tour guide at Casa Lleó Morera on Passeig de Gràcia. But, just then, it closed and so I was left without my first full-time job. It was a tough moment, but look, I told myself, I'm going to take advantage of this impasse to finish the novel, which, moreover, for some esoteric reason, I already had very clear that it was going to end up being published."
Thus, in 2017, La mirada de la sargantana, a fictionalized story of Ramon Casas and his muse, Júlia Peraire, saw the light. His first critical and literary approach to the bourgeois framework of Barcelona at the beginning of the last century. The literary world that has accompanied him throughout three more works. The latest, Passeig de Gràcia, història d'una família (Comanegra), which he has just published after winning the Santa Eulàlia award, which recognizes the best Barcelona novel in Catalan.
"It is, without a doubt, my most complex and adult book," he explains, regarding a story that delves into the certainties and lies, the tensions and silences, the injustices and inequalities of a city narrated through three family sagas as distinct as they are intrinsically Barcelonan: the noble Castelljussà, the bourgeois Massanas, and the working-class Farrés. "I am enjoying the beautiful repercussion the work is having and I am not in a hurry to start the next one. I don't feel the need to be producing novels every year." He wouldn't have the time either, with the work he has advising historical series and films. There would be too many windows open at once.
Dressing and furnishing History appropriately
When studying Art History, Roger Bastida was lucky enough to meet Javier Artiñano, "he was the greatest film costume designer, the one who accumulated the most Goyas. For me, within cinema, what interests me most is costume design and art direction, so meeting Javier and interviewing him for a university project opened up a whole world for me. He was very kind, a very cultured man, with whom I kept in touch for many years, until his death," recalls the person who ended up professionally advising cathodic or cinematographic fictions such as Temperance (Amazon), ENA, Queen Victoria Eugenia (TVE) or Sira, sequel to The Time Between Seams, which will soon premiere on Atresplayer.He combines this work with that of a professor at the Madrid-based AECAM and, of course, with writing novels, "which, although I always imagine them at a very visual level, have very literary structures, being very clear that I do narrative, and not scripts."
Thus, in addition to the aforementioned titles, from that mix between an overflowing imagination and severe historical rigor, have emerged La llarga revetlla, which tells of a group of bourgeois friends between two Sant Joan bonfires, that of 1935 and that of 1936 –"the young people of that cultured Catalan bourgeoisie who ultimately won the war"– and Sota l'ombra de la washingtònia, "a game of mirrors between two bourgeois generations, that of the 20s who paid the gunmen and that of their parents, the last generation of Cuba."
A creativity that the author knows will not be eternal. "When the well dries up and I have nothing more to say, I will stop writing." Now he limits himself to enjoying his life, "despite the fact that there are material needs that are not yet covered."
Reclaiming the metropolitan area
Currently located in Madrid, the parishioner points out, first of all, that "in fact, I am not from Barcelona itself, but from L'Hospitalet, a city with its own character that Barcelonans should get to know more deeply, and not have so much prejudice with its metropolitan area."The relationship he maintains with Barcelona, in any case, is one of love. Above all, he misses the pedestrian streets, "which here in Madrid are not very common," although he admits that at certain hours and on certain days of the week, many Barcelona neighborhoods have no life, while in Madrid the streets are more lively. Something, perhaps, quite more similar to those streets and squares of L'Hospitalet, colored at all hours by its open bars, its lively voices and its urban laughter that must be discovered (or rediscovered).
– This Bar might be the exception: if you want another cocktail, you're invited.
Roger Bastida smiles again under his mustache. Hot and anxious by the Fletcher Henderson band plays. The crowd livens up. The writer accepts. "Perhaps, for a change, I'll order another classic cocktail," he announces, before all the windows of this night that he has open before him.