The epic of the son of a slave, Nestor Lujan novel prize

Barcelona"I've always been fascinated by the figure of the 'indians', but there's a lot of myth surrounding them," explains the novelist, screenwriter, and playwright Pere Anglas (Mataró, 1966), who has won the Nèstor Luján historical novel award with El sastre de Barcelona (Columna). Historiography has already taken it upon itself to dismantle the myth of impoverished men who traveled to Cuba and Puerto Rico and returned extremely wealthy thanks to their intelligence and effort. There was also the exploitation of slave labor, and one of the men who profited most from it was Antonio López.

López, the future Marquis of Comillas, is a key figure in the novel, which emerged from an attempt to answer a question with the help of fiction: "Reading the books of historian Martín Rodrigo I discovered that López had taken his family to Cuba fleeing yellow fever. There he freed the three-year-old son of a slave woman as a thank you because the woman had breastfed his eldest daughter," explains Anglas. "What became of that child? That's the spark of the novel," he adds. The playwright and writer turns the freed slave into a man, Lluís Massó, who aspires to be a fashion designer in Paris, but ends up being a tailor in Barcelona. He doesn't lose contact with the López family, especially with the eldest daughter.

"It's an activist novel"

The novel takes place between 1868, when the Glorious Revolution broke out, and 1888, when the Universal Exposition was inaugurated. It is a turbulent time and Massó ends up getting involved with the labor movement. The freed slave does not have an easy time because of the color of his skin. "In Cuba there was no freedom, but neither was there in Barcelona, where there was supposed to be. Neither for the freed slaves nor for women," says Anglas. "It is an activist novel," he states. This is made clear by the final note, where the writer details that in 2022, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), it is estimated that there were more than fifty million people in a state of modern slavery. "A figure that makes the present the moment with the most slavery in the entire history of humanity," assures the author.

For the novel, of more than 700 pages, 80 characters parade. In the end, Anglas includes a description of all of them. "Some are fictional and some are real, but I don't specify. I didn't want to because around the real ones there is a lot of myth and, therefore, I had to bring them down to earth, and find the balance with the fictional ones," assures Anglas. Among others, there is the poet Jacint Verdaguer —who was the chaplain of the López-Bru family—, the composer Erik Satie, and Eusebi Güell.