The secret love story of a bourgeois young lady comes to light at the Encants flea market.
The cartoonist Kim transforms into a graphic novel the diary that a girl wrote from 1938 to 1954
Barcelona"Today you turn thirty-six, Manolo, and as you can see, I remembered the date." Thus begins the diary that cartoonist Joaquim Aubert Puigarnau, Kim (Barcelona, 1941), bought in 2007 at a secondhand book stall in Barcelona's Encants flea market. "The handwriting caught my eye, very beautiful, and the fact that the author had given it to her love, a certain Manolo," he recalls. The cartoonist was captivated: instead of recording all sorts of vicissitudes, the diary focuses on a single love story that spans some twenty years. An impossible relationship, really: when they met, she was 19 and he was 35, married, and with two children. Moreover, Manolo soon moved to the Canary Islands, but she remained steadfast in her unconditional love, sustained only by a handful of letters, the occasional reunion, and, above all, false hopes. A story that reads like a novel but is tragically true, which Kim reveals to the comic book. Miss Litgi's Diary (Norma).
At the suggestion of the cartoonist and comics theorist Marika VillaKim has chosen to keep the complete text of the diary and alternate it with comic strip pages that illustrate the story, filling in what isn't explicitly stated but is implied. "The first scenes take place in the swimming pool of a tennis club where they meet," Kim explains. "I imagined it was the 1960s until, suddenly, she says she hopes the war will end, and I realize it was written in 1938." The diary's author, Mercè, was the daughter of a prestigious dentist and belonged to the Barcelona bourgeoisie who, during the Civil War, continued to celebrate, go to the cinema, the beach, and the tennis club. "We think that during a war people stay locked up at home all the time, but they also lead normal lives. Especially when you're rich, of course," says the cartoonist.
But the author wasn't your typical bourgeois girl from Barcelona. She celebrated the arrival of Franco's forces in Barcelona, yes, but she also studied at university, moved out of her parents' house to live on her own, and stood out for her modern attitude. "I found an interview where they talked about Mercè as one of only three girls studying medicine in Spain," Kim points out. "She smoked, wore trousers, and rode a Vespa. Back then, imagine!" However, beneath that emancipation lay an absolute emotional devotion to her Manolo. "She spends pages and pages crying over this man, but she insists she's happy, and she's not seeing any other man," the illustrator says. "It's a huge sacrifice, because she gives up her youth, from age 19 to her late thirties."
As time goes on, Mercè hints at how sustaining this impossible love affects her. She's stopped going dancing, throwing herself into her studies and work, and, except for her best friend and confidante, everyone thinks she's a confirmed spinster, incapable of love. But the feelings she pours out in her diary are passionate, unconditional, and overwhelmingly intense. For Kim, the key is Manolo's absence: "When he leaves, she idealizes him to an exaggerated degree, and goes completely mad when he returns to Barcelona, but it's not clear if they ever see each other again."
Beyond the newspaper
The diary ends in 1954, six months after this encounter, with the protagonist still in love, but increasingly aware of the price she pays for living devoted to a romantic chimera. Kim decided to turn the diary into a comic after seeing the reaction of his friends when, at dinner parties, he explained the discovery of the diary. "Everyone was speechless, and I realized that this girl's story really interested people," recalls the cartoonist, who completed the portrait of the character in the final pages of the comic thanks to the testimonies of several people who knew her, including a close friend who is still alive. "I didn't actually do any research, but the story of the diary spread so quickly among friends and acquaintances that many people who knew her came to tell me things," says Kim. "Over the years, she became quite a woman progressive and opposed to Franco, and she became very close friends with a gay man, whom I call Joan Coma in the book, with whom she went out a lot and often went to the Liceu opera house. I think that, in the end, she ended up being happy.” As fate would have it, Kim met this man many years ago. “He was a fantastic guy, very charming, and he hosted dinner parties to which I was invited a few times,” she recalls. “It’s even possible that Mercè and I happened to be at the same dinner party…”
Kim has not only disguised the name of her gay friend: to avoid legal problems with Mercè's family, she has also changed his surname in the comic, which was actually Lidji. However, she hopes that with the publication ofMiss Litgi's Diary New details about this story will emerge to complete the puzzle. And perhaps they will be added to the work in a future and eagerly awaited Catalan edition of the comic, which Norma would publish only if the Spanish version is successful. "I would really like that, especially because it's the language in which the diary is written," says Kim.
Retired since 2015 fromThursday and, therefore, of the comedy series that made him famous, Martinez does itKim maintains a high level of productivity despite being 84 years old: in 2023 he published the historical biography Fouché (Norma) and in 2018 the autobiographical Snow in the pockets (Norma), about her years in France as an expatriate from Francoist Spain. "It's a new path I've discovered thanks to Antonio Altarriba," she explains. "When he called me to do..." The art of flying I didn't even know what a graphic novel was. "But is this a comic book?" I'd ask. And now, look, it's selling like hotcakes: at the Zaragoza Comic Fair, I spent more than three hours signing copies, both morning and afternoon. And people of a certain age and ladies, who never used to come to buy comics."