"We went into the Monumental to have vermouth and eat baby octopus. There he found Cintet, and Cintet, who had very large eyes, like a cow's, and a slightly crooked mouth, said there was an apartment on Montseny Street, quite well priced, but dilapidated, because the owner didn't want headaches and the restoration would have to be paid in advance by whoever rented it. The apartment was below the rooftop. We liked it a lot, and even more when Cintet told us that the rooftop would be all ours. The rooftop would be ours because the ground-floor neighbors had an exit and those on the first floor, by a long, hanging staircase, went to a small garden that had a chicken coop and a laundry room. Quimet got excited and told Cintet that he shouldn't let it get away in any way, and Cintet said that the next day he would go with Mateu and that we should go too. All together."
The Diamond Plaza, Mercè Rodoreda (1962)
Natàlia and Quimet end up settling in the apartment on Montseny Street. Coincidentally—or not—it is the same street where Mercè Rodoreda stayed several times at her son's house, Jordi Gurguí, a few years before publishingThe Diamond Square. The estate where the writer was intermittently installed when she returned to Barcelona while residing in Geneva is still standing. At the door, I stop a boy who enters: he could be someone from the city, or aexpat, but surprisingly it is from the same family that built the estate and still resides in its apartments, the Roigs. He invites me up, and looks forthe grandmotheron the second floor; from there, with her, we go back down to the first: first she stings a nephew, then, the other; they look for Astrid, they say she can explain everything; but she is not there. As they leave through the portal, another girl enters, also from the family: "Do you want to see the rooftop?". A lattice that partially surrounds it evokes sensations of suffocation that trapped theColometaand, at times, to its author. All of them live on an estate commissioned by Sever Roig in 1923. Now, Astrid explains it. She lived as a child in the same apartment where Rodoreda was —theRodo, for her—, without knowing it until she was older. Astrid, a philologist, could not resist and launched an investigation that led her to the writer's daughter-in-law, Margarida Puig, and to the letters preserved in the Mercè Rodoreda archive. Everything leads her to believe that that apartment on Montseny Street in theColometais partly inspired by that of his family: "The staircase ofpinyonet, the stand, the floor… are common elements," she explains, sitting in the stand that overlooks Montseny street, on the floor next to the one her family had rented from the Puigs. Now her brother lives there, with a sign on the door and white dust through the crack: it's under renovation.