"When you stop asking yourself why things are the way they are, you will stop learning." This message, given by a high school teacher to his student, Ferran Bartolomé Romero, has always stayed with him. It was probably preaching to the choir, because Ferran has childhood memories very close to books and entertainments that led him to learn. "My godfather, my father's brother, always brought me educational toys for Three Kings' Day, like the magic robot, a Meccano set, a box of compasses for drawing... things like that," he explains. He was interested in: sticker collections, human races, the wonders of the world, the Wild West, and similar things. He believes that "knowing things, many times, is useless, but not knowing them is even more useless. Culture, no matter the subject, can help free us from an excess of toxic materialism. I really enjoyed my childhood and I wouldn't trade it for any scooter or console," he says.
Ferran admits that he has always loved knowing the why of everything, and today, with the Internet, he feels that we have "a university inside our home, with professors I never would have imagined having in my life. And that's how you enrich yourself."
Conversing with this man makes life take on a special dimension, because his conversation leads you to notice every small detail, to ask yourself questions that, just by posing them, open doors in the mind that might not otherwise open. And he achieves this from any small detail around us: from everything, he observes infinite dimensions, and he knows how to inject humor into many of the connections he makes.
He always carries a tape measure with him, a retractable measuring tape that he pulls out whenever he wants to test a theory of proportions: the length of each side of a table, the slope of a staircase... He is passionate about drawing and numbers.
Shortly after undergoing hip surgery, one day while showering, he noticed the scar from the surgical incision. He asked his wife, Hortènsia, to help him trace the path of that incision, stitched in the operating room, onto a piece of paper. And why did Ferran feel the need to draw that dotted line? He wanted to derive the formula for the equations that define the curvature on the coordinate axis. And he took that drawing to the surgeon on the day of his first follow-up visit. "He asked me if he could keep it, and I gave it to him," he explains.
This is how this man makes mathematics beat from any element we have in sight. He brings into play numbers and proportions, sines, cosines, and tangents that give meaning to constructions, to distances, to the whys that curious people like him always seek.
A magnifying glass in his pocket
In his wallet, he also always carries a magnifying glass, in case he feels like picking up a tree leaf and examining it closely. "I like to look at the detail," he says. For many years, Ferran played football and whenever he had the opportunity to train in the mountains, he would go for a run. One morning, while running in the mountains, near the Camarasa reservoir, he noticed a man he had seen before, looking towards the terraces. That day he stopped to talk to him. After greeting him, he asked: And you, what are you looking at so intently? "The man replied: I'm looking at what you can't see because you always run. And do you see here?, pointing to a hole in the ground, he told me: inside here there's a spider and when it's windy and the sun comes out..." After a while showing him a lot of details, that man added: "the greatness of the world is in the small things and I entertain myself with what I have. And I thought he was right, and then I did the same with my son. When we went for a walk in the countryside, we could stop and I would tell him: look how this wasp and this spider fight, and how the spider wins. With my children and nephews, we have followed lines of ants and we have looked at the temperature of the river water."
There is no waste in a life of such meticulous observation. That the pyramids of Egypt, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure have lost ten or twelve meters due to wind erosion, for example, is the kind of information that captures the attention of this son and resident of Sant Adrià de Besòs. He was born there seventy-eight years ago and still keeps many of the old books that have been the basis of his education. "I also keep newspaper clippings with news like the arrival of natural gas from Algeria to Sant Adrià," he comments.
Once Upon a Time... Man, TBOs, and trading cards are other treasures from his school days. Even then -he says- he would set himself problems to ponder solutions. And that childhood curiosity still accompanies him today. How did Isaac Newton come up with infinitesimal calculus? A man who had no more light than that of a candle... These are the questions that leave anyone out of orbit. And for him, they are great stimuli for learning.
Ferran goes to the gym -he says- "to keep his joints well". In his head, daily exercise is assured. He usually gets up between six thirty and seven, and every day he does "a while of writing in French and English. "When you write, you are thinking and you are reading, and there is no time for boredom," he says. He also dedicates some time to mathematics and, a little, to physics. Chemistry, not so much." Now, specifically -he adds- "I am working on combinatorics".
Bartolomé: "There is juice in life to get everything you want out of it"
He has taught English and French at the Centre de Formació d'Adults Sant Adrià de Besòs. Currently, he continues to study English on his own, reading and writing and listening to conversations on topics he likes about science and culture that he finds on Google. "I started English because my wife was a secretary in a company where she needed it and I signed up too so she wouldn't be alone. After a while she quit, but everything I start I want to finish, and I continued. I don't do it to get any degree, but because I like to study and I like languages as a means for people to understand each other. What I don't want is to suffer to learn, but to do it in an attractive way. I don't set myself limitations or goals. As my father used to say, little by little the pile fills up."
Ferran's father is very present in his life and in his French classes, he always carries an old dictionary that had belonged to his progenitor. "He was a Republican soldier. At twenty he went to war and returned at twenty-seven, after having been in the Argelès Camp. He had told me a lot and everything he told me they had suffered moved me a lot."
In Paris, two of his father's sisters remained, whom Ferran remembers visiting in the early fifties. "I asked my aunts to write me letters in French, even though I didn't understand anything," he recalls.
Therefore, that old French dictionary, which had helped his father with the language of exile on the other side of the Pyrenees, acquires greater value in his son's hands. He remembers many details about his father. For example: "The salary, the wage he received each week, on Saturday when he came home, he would give it to my mother in a light brown envelope. At home, we kept 'hook accounting.' This means that on a hook on the wall, they would pin the tickets for everything that was bought. Life was very simple. My mother managed the money by making little piles: one for rent, another for food... Everything was scarce, but I never went hungry or cold, although I remember the icy sheets when I got into bed."
His father had once told him: "If you are lucky enough to live with a good administrator, a large part of your life will be peaceful, because you will live according to your means. And with these premises, I have always lived, as I had seen at home."
Ferran completed high school and then industrial expertise and drafting. In the company where he started working at fifteen, there was a school and he had - he says - "teachers who were eminences." With the first salary he brought home, 1,450 pesetas, his mother bought a washing machine. In that first job, Ferran had to calculate the cost of the industrial structures they manufactured. And he really enjoyed doing it. Later, with his studies finished, he worked as a draftsman. "If one knows drafting, one can understand drawing very well. I really like drawing in perspective, and I still keep compasses that are no longer used, because now everything is done with the AutoCAD program. But I keep many things that have helped me a lot to learn."
Monologues on stage
It must be about fifteen years ago that, at a reunion of alumni from the Sagrado Corazón school, of the Gabrielist Brothers of Sant Adrià, where he did his Baccalaureate, they went to the theater to see Pepe Rubianes and, at the end of the show, with the stalls already empty of audience, when everyone had already left, Ferran stayed for a while looking at the stage. And, suddenly, a classmate's voice told him: "this guy talks more than you." At that moment, Ferran imagined himself on stage and asked himself: "What could I do to chat for two hours straight?" And from that moment on, he began to ruminate on what would become a funny monologue that he presented as "Elucubrations of an Adrianense from the fifties." And he presented it before the public. The sensations he had at the end were fabulous. "As a designer of metallic structures and as a salesman, I had never had such an emotional response as at the end of my monologue," he expresses.
Then someone told him they were looking for someone for a play and he, remembering that well-being in front of the public, told him: "you don't need to look anymore, here I am. And the director, after seeing me act, told me that I should do theater. I put myself under the orders of that man, Mr. Sánchez, who was the one who gave me the theater bug. He told me that I contributed a lot, that I enriched the characters. And I, since then, have not stopped doing it."
Bartolomé: "Knowledge fills me, and I don't remember everything I learn"
Now he is rehearsing a play in which he plays a psychiatrist in a consultation with six female patients and in which his real-life wife plays the psychiatrist's wife. "It's a theater adaptation of the work of a writer and dancer from Sant Adrià, Montserrat Bonadona. And I have introduced dance and music because I have understood that it is part of the culture that unites people from many countries," he comments.
An Inoxcrom pen and paper, although he also writes with a fountain pen dipped in ink, always go in Ferran's bag, because he never knows when a good idea will come, some notes for a next monologue. On the day of the Cap Butaca Buida celebration, at the Ateneu Adrianenc theater, there is not a single empty seat to see Ferran perform.
This metropolitan city, with an old town that preserves the appearance of a village, is where the daily life of this neighbor unfolds, who also dances sardanas in the Plaça de la Vila and learns to play the guitar. It is a grab bag with resources to entertain life, enriching it at every moment. "There's juice in life to get everything you want," he says. Now that he is free from work schedules, he confesses that traveling is not what he likes to do most. At least, by physically moving. "I travel a lot with science. I like to know more than to see. Knowledge fills me, and I don't remember everything I learn; I also write down many things and keep them noted in six binders." He has everything classified and enumerated: the rule of three, simple and compound, the square root, combinatorics... "What has enriched me a lot is mnemonics to remember things. And that's what I think is missing to teach how to learn today: mnemonics."