Drugs, love, fantasy: the energetic versatility of Jordi Cussà

The intimate motivation that drove Jordi Cussà (Berga, 1961—2021) during a good part of his literary life is perfectly summarized by his soul mate Jaume Huch in the letter-epilogue that closes Actuació de gala, the consistent and heterogeneous volume of unpublished short stories now published by Comanegra. Huch addresses Cussà posthumously and tells him that, from a certain moment in his trajectory, you had “already more than sufficiently demonstrated [...] that you were no junkie who wrote, but a writer who had been a junkie”. From how Huch says it, it is clear that this issue troubled Cussà.

When reading the stories anthologized in this volume—the oldest is from 1981, when the author was just twenty years old, and the last is from 2020, shortly before his untimely death—one notices the struggle or negotiation that Cussà maintained with himself and with the perception that the world had of him and his work. Cussà needed to write about what he knew and had experienced intensely (the underworld of drugs, heroin addiction) and, at the same time, did not want to be pigeonholed or limited to being just a writer associated with a gruesome and sensationalist theme—a theme, on the other hand, that he literarized with powerful results in the novel Cavalls salvatges (2000), with which he became known to the general public.

Cussà wanted to write about drugs, addictions, and the world of bohemianism that was a bit free and a bit degraded, which he himself had experienced firsthand, but at the same time he felt like a real writer –not a junkie who writes, but a writer who has been a junkie, in Huch's exact words– and, because of this, he experimented with all kinds of themes, tones, narrative dictions, and perspectives on the world. In this sense, one of the charms of the book, and one of the main qualities of Cussà's work, is the bold and unpredictable eclecticism from which he conceived of himself as a writer.

It is an eclecticism that, in a book like this, which gathers samples from all periods of Cussà's literary production, makes vivid portraits of 1980s Barcelona coexist with a tribute to Julio Cortázar, dramatic and sordid narratives that end with the most desperate gesture, divertissements (strange amusements), ironic reflections on the nature of drugs –from the hard drug of heroin to the hardest drug of creativity–, a kind of Christmas fable, stories of reunions between old lovers, and even an imaginative adventure set in an exotic, remote, and mythical China.

The same language energy

One of the dangers of creative eclecticism is that it may be just a showy mask for impersonality—the juggling and swerving done by a writer who has nothing to say and who is also not very clear about who they are, who they want to be, where they are, or where they are going—but it seems evident to me that this is not the case with Cussà. Above all, because everything he wrote has a family resemblance, the same energy of language. If we take the story that opens and gives the title to the present volume, Actuació de gala, the tragicomic tale of a love triangle formed by three young bohemian artists who perform street theater on the bustling Barcelona Rambla of the eighties, and place it next to the Chinese story that closes the volume, Un present per a l’eternitat, which connects with Cussà's last novel, El primer emperador i la reina Lluna (Comanegra, 2020), we will verify that, despite the thematic contrast and the scenic distance, both texts share the same plastic and vigorous style, the natural strength of a narrator who knows how to tell a story and who, moreover, enjoys telling it. The same goes for the most successful stories in the volume, for example Urbana subterrània –the desolate journey of a desperate man–, De matinada, una telefonada –a strange mix of William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe–, Juraments enfrontats –a moral tale full of spite about the theme of terrorism– or, also, Un duet nu and Persones i llibres, populated by characters marked by life and heavily burdened with biography.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Actuació de gala, besides that it completes the literary image of its author, is that it allows us to confirm that Jordi Cussà, like authentic writers, saw writing as an addiction, as a vice, as a compulsive passion that expands you and consumes you at the same time. And that all of this, when you read it, is felt, is noticed.