Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Barcelona
Twenty years after the writer's death, a book celebrates the indissoluble bond between the great author and his city
On 18 October 2003, one of the most original literary voices on the European scene of the second half of the twentieth century died: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán .
It was a sudden death, which occurred in Bangkok, thousands of kilometers from Barcelona, the city that had always been at the center of Vázquez Montalbán's life and literary production.
Singer of a total and popular Barcelona, made up of workers and prostitutes, of history and underworld, of languages as noble as they are ferocious , no one has been able to describe the Catalan capital like the creator of the character of Pepe Carvalho , former CIA collaborator, gastronome, chef , book burner by disappointment, private investigator by profession.
But how much of that total and popular Barcelonaism remains in our 4.0 era? This is what the writer and journalist Giuliano Malatesta tries to investigate in the essay " In Barcellona with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán " (Perrone, 2023, pp. 128), a volume included in Passaggi di dogana , a series that explores the places starting from the authors who they inhabited.
Unfortunately, not much remains of the atmospheres and settings in which Pepe Carvalho moved.
Montalbán talked about his city trying to keep alive that historical and political memory that over the years some have naively mistaken for nostalgia for youth and a lost age. And now that after some time the city, besieged by mass tourism, is no longer that "populist paradise" but has become bourgeois under the banner of self-satisfied Catalan postmodernism.
As the journalist Gianni Mura writes in the introduction to the volume: «Malatesta's book, punctual and with a bitter aftertaste, takes you into a heart-belly of Barcelona that no longer exists, a piece of a ghost-city that remains alive on the pages but she was marginalized from reality . The Raval has been gutted, its somewhat romantic and murky, somewhat humanly everyday atmosphere is only remembered by the old. The Barrio Chino, as it was better known to foreigners, recalled other tangles of streets in other seaside cities: the alleys of Genoa, the Spanish Quarter of Naples. Local colour: thieves, whores, pimps, easy knives, small hotels by the hour. Even under Francoism the Raval had managed to resist. But it wasn't just this: it was poor houses for workers, students, it was solidarity and resistance, workers and students united, it was struggle and complicity. Now the new poor, the immigrants, live in the poor houses, the ones that remain. Modernization did what the dictatorship failed to do. Modernisation: it seems like a nice word, but instead it is a ruthless broom."
Despite the bitter awareness of the passage of time and things, Giuliano Malatesta tries to recompose, through the endless work of the Spanish writer, some fragments of the ghost city - the cultural climate of the time, the history of the Futbol club Barcelona, the anti-Franco clubs , the anxiety for freedom and transgression of the sixties, when Barcelona seemed much closer to Paris than to the rest of Spain - still alive on the pages but now marginalized from reality. We are thus, at least literarily, immersed in the charm of a city rich in history, art and traditions. A city that is the fruit of a dense, important, even painful past at certain times. A city that is not just fun, sun, carefreeness, but real life, joys and anxieties, past and present
