One day, the face and cultural agitator Fito Lapuente told Tuli Márquez: "you are very lucky because you have many things to tell." Those words have stuck with this Barcelona writer, vintage 1962, who always had the soul of a storyteller. "After the university entrance exam, my first option was to study cinema, but in Barcelona in 1980 there were no schools for it and I didn't want to go to Madrid, where there were," explains this resident of Sant Gervasi ---"and very Barcelonian"---, vermouth in hand, while in the background the notes of Baxter Dury's Aylesbury boy resound. "So I ended up studying Information Sciences."
Fifteen years after that decision, and as an avatar of destiny, he would be awarded a scholarship for a feature film script that took him to Bordeaux to share experiences and knowledge with the cream of the crop of screenwriters of the moment. But then the inexcusable and definitive step into the world of narrative was still far away.
For many years, Tuli worked in television promotion and marketing and in the music world. "It was a job I enjoyed, I was good at it, and I made a very good living from it. But everything was against the clock, the working days were endless, and I know that, in the long run, it would have ended up killing me." Thus, after passing through TV3, he landed in Mediapark where an ERE made him rethink many things. "I went to Mallorca for a season, to work for IB3, but I left soon. That was a nest of cronies and I can't work with people like that."
Reunion with the narrator self
By the time he returned to Barcelona, something had changed. He felt an irrepressible need to tell stories taking hold of him. But he had to live and, in 2010, in the midst of a crisis, the local was looking for work.
"I was around fifty years old and they suggested I study for a civil service exam to become a public servant, which seemed indecent to me on all levels." Thus, he began his journey working in civic centers. "It was then that I started working on a script and, later, on what would become my first novel, L'endemà." This would see the light in 2013, and six years later it would be followed by La mida dels nans. He had reconnected with that narrator self that he seemed to have given up at eighteen.
Besides making him "know the city and its neighborhoods as he would never have known it otherwise," that work journey through civic centers is the seed on which his recently published third work, Les voltes del món (Alrevés), a finalist for the Josep Pla and Pin Soler awards, is based, which speaks "about the Barcelona of the losers" and is, at the same time, a love letter to the Gràcia neighborhood.
Tuli Márquez's work journey through Barcelona's civic centers is the seed on which his recently published third work, Les voltes del món, is based.Today, already fully dedicated to literature, the author is proud to be able to define himself, "unequivocally, as a professional writer," and anticipates that he is working on two books: "a novel set in 1992 between Barcelona and the Plana de Vic, and a volume that, under the title 365 rpm, seeks to explain the history of Pop music in 365 events." Now, precisely, he is engrossed with the chapter on the sound Madchester.
Not to lose the Catalan and cosmopolitan soul
Concerned with maintaining the Catalan essence of a city that perhaps needs a few more great novels to write and describe it in the language of Pere Calders, the writer declares his almost unconditional love for Barcelona. "Because it welcomes. Because it's a fucking great city to be young. In fact, when my parents are no longer around, I think I'll leave, because I'm no longer young, but I like to see how people come from outside, and settle and end up becoming part of this cosmopolitan and at the same time Catalan city," explains the writer, who fondly remembers a nightlife lived to the fullest since his tender adolescence.
"In the last stages of Francoism and the first years of the Transition, going out at night was a way to exorcise the evils of that oppressive society. That was a fun and very affordable night," narrates the one who has seen and enjoyed an incalculable number of venues, bars, stages, and concerts.
---So you're more of a night owl.
"Quite the opposite, I'm a very early riser. In fact, sometimes I find the solution to a problem posed by some point of the plot of what I'm writing while I sleep and, freshly awake, at six, I can already work with that solution. I suppose it's part of the process of living immersed in the story you're telling," replies, with a half-smile, Tuli Márquez.
And he sips another drink of his vermouth, before dictating:
---I think I've been very lucky to be able to dedicate myself to writing.