The best chocolate that is made and unmade

Things clear and chocolate thick, they say in Madrid. Where it is true that chocolate of majestic, almost morbid density has always been served, I suppose in contrast to French chocolate, of whose flavor we have no complaint ---and if we do, we keep quiet---, but of whose texture we can only say that it is closer to cat pee than to any substance intended for dipping churros. Or ladyfingers, which is what Madrileños call what, for a Catalan, has always been and will be a melindro.

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Halfway between one thing and the other could be Barcelona's chocolate. Well, I don't know if Barcelona's entirely, but certainly the one served at La Pallaresa, on Petritxol street, 11. At Granja La Pallaresa. I remember once taking a Madrileño boyfriend there, and he was very surprised when I told him we were going to a "granja" (farm). He already imagined me in clogs and an apron, chasing chickens. Or in front of pigs, because in the end you always have to go back to Orwell, even more often than some of us would like.

A granja is a café, it's a chocolate shop, it's a snack bar or a breakfast spot, but it's also much more than all that. It's a place where clocks don't stop but they slow down. At La Pallaresa, magical things have always happened to me. For example, I once met Martí Boada there, a geographer and distinguished father of Catalan environmental awareness, based on his innovative experiences to conserve and make palpable and vibrant the Montseny Natural Park. Boada is a scientific advisor to UNESCO in the field of Conservation of Biosphere Reserves, is a member of the Spanish Committee of UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) and of the Global 500 Forum, also of the United Nations. Precisely this forum awarded him the Global 500 Award in 1995, which was presented to him by Nelson Mandela in person. That's something.

Not long after that, I remember it was my turn, then a debutante journalist, to do a profile of him, of Martí Boada, for a radio station that was going to interview him. Please don't be scandalized when I tell you how it worked: the radio in question interviewed personalities, logically the interview was done by one of their top journalists, and I, the novice, was tasked with an audio profile, a kind of sound portrait to introduce the interview. Most of the time I didn't know the interviewees at all. I had never seen them in my life, I hadn't exchanged a word and I only knew about them what I could find in the newspaper archives (not even the Internet, back then).

Said like that, it should have been a failure. But the fact is, it wasn't. I must have a hidden talent for getting to know people "in writing". To read between the lines the information from them and about them. This talent, which over time would serve me greatly, for example on Tinder, then helped me to make some "spot-on" portraits. I don't say it, the subjects said it, who in at least a couple of cases made a great effort to meet me, intrigued by what I had thought of saying about them... which apparently, no one else had thought of before.

Martí Boada was one of these intrigued people. We met at La Pallaresa, just like that. After seeing dozens of photos of him, who is also an immense, strong man, with a physique halfway between Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose and a great lumberjack, I had no doubt that I would identify him as soon as I saw him. What I didn't expect at all was his reaction when he saw me.

- Cagundena! Tu ets la pubilla del Buxaus!

It was like getting out of the shower naked, thinking no one is home, and finding an unexpected visitor, equally naked. It turns out that Martí Boada was born in my father's town, Sant Celoni. That was the thread I had pulled to portray him: breaking through the armor of his immense glamour as a great international sage, I had described him as what he is, a proud man of the town and of the land, a force of that almost wild Nature that is Montseny, intimately mocking urbanites all the time. Knowing since childhood what people in Sant Celoni think of those from Barcelona allowed me to nail that portrait, his portrait.

But, if my father is from Sant Celoni, it turns out that my mother was from Arbúcies, specifically from a mythical 18th-century farmhouse: el Buxaus. She was indeed the pubilla there, and I would have been too, or would be, if it weren't for the fact that the property has not belonged to my family for a long time. In fact, it has been all these years, and will continue to be for a few more months, a rural tourism hotspot of no small renown. But look how things are, or how people from Montseny are, that as soon as I set foot in La Pallaresa, Martí Boada almost fell out of his chair. In one glance, he had seen entire generations "dels Buxaus" parade across my face, as he insisted on calling my maternal family, even though that is not the surname that appears on our ID cards.

It was a very Proustian afternoon. Sitting at that table, Martí Boada told me many things about my grandparents that I didn't know, and even spoke to me about relatives whose entire existence I was unaware of. We were both, I must say, shocked and moved. The emotion lasted long enough for him to embark me at all costs on a tour of the old family estates and adjoining farmhouses. Where he invariably insisted on introducing me as "la pubilla del Buxaus". Never in my life have I felt closer to being of royal blood.

Since then, La Pallaresa's particular chocolate, thicker than French but more subtle than Madrid's, for me inseparable from that comforting dollop of cream that turns a chocolate a la taza (melted chocolate in Catalan…oh…isn't it beautiful?) into a Swiss, well, all that amounts to a kind of secret passage to emotions not just infantile but almost prenatal. I think I have never had so many roots for myself alone as that afternoon, in that farm at number 11 Petritxol Street.

I also used to meet there with an old journalist friend whom I haven't seen in many years. But this week, upon learning that some had insulted me very badly on a television program and on social media, he sent me sweet messages. And memories of our afternoons at La Pallaresa.

Paradises may not last long. But they exist.