Mercè Ibarz: "I've lost quite a few young people, but I don't feel like I've lost them."

BarcelonaSince, At the end of 2020, Mercè Ibarz (Saidí, 1954) published Triptych of the Earth in Anagrama —which brings together two of his best-known books, The withdrawn land (Quema Notebooks, 1994) and The wheat palm (Quema Notebooks, 1995), and the unpublished unfinished work–His work has progressed in two phases: from the revision and expansion of some of his emblematic titles, such as Urban Tales (Anagrama, 2022) and Portrait of Mercè Rodoreda (Empúries, 2022), and new developments such as the trials Rodoreda, a map (Barcino, 2022) and Don't think, just look: in front of the work of art (Anagrama, 2024) and the anthology Modern Pioneers (Arola, 2020), which brings together plays by a dozen Catalan authors, including Carme Karr, Rosa Maria Arquimbau, and Víctor Català. Now she publishes A girl in the city (Anagrama), where he recalls how he arrived in Barcelona in the early 1970s and everything he has found since then: love, friendship, work and his literary vocation.

A few years ago, when we were talking about The friend of the Red Farm (Tusquets, 2017), you told me you had some ideas in the works. You didn't give me any concrete details then, but if we look back at everything you've published since then, we see that it's been your most prolific decade.

— I told you because something was bothering me, obviously, although I couldn't tell you what. In recent years, several books I've been commissioned to write have come out, but since unfinished work, the third part of Triptych of the EarthThe only project I've written that's solely my own is A girl in the city.

When we open the book, we read: "L's death brings everything back to life. While I was taking care of him, he was taking care of me. From this tree sprout the following words and pages, from the day I arrived in the city. A girl in the city seventeen years old."

— My imagination has always been sparked by experience and memory. When I sit down to write, even on commission, I must feel it in every sense of the word, both in terms of sensitivity and emotion, and in relation to touch: I must be able to feel it, to touch it...

Your husband Luis was, and the city you knew in the 70s is Barcelona. Is it a book about someone who no longer exists?

— Yes and no. Time doesn't disappear. A girl in the city It's an elegy for my husband, but it's also a declaration of gratitude for all these years we shared. We were together for 50 years. That's a long time, isn't it? All these years together mean ups and downs, circumstances that work in our favor and others against us... Unfortunately, we tend to dwell more on the dark aspects than the bright ones. Here, I wanted to make the opposite move: to choose the light and embrace goodness.

In one passage of the book you write: "Kindness is sexy. It's my favorite mantra (...) It has never failed me."

— Indeed. Kindness is the intelligence of the heart, evident in human interactions and in recognizing what is truly worthwhile. Even so, kindness is a word and a feeling that has a rather bad reputation.

In literature too?

— There's this common saying that you can't write literature with good intentions. I disagree: literature has been full of good intentions for centuries; just think of two such important characters as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Both are good people, even though they are aware—especially Sancho—of life's cruelties and illusions.

Lluís's death prompted you to write A girl in the city.

— I started in mid-2024. If the Triptych of the Earth It is a book about the relationship between distances when you emigrate –instead of a return to the village, as has been said–, in A girl in the city I wanted to tell the story of my Barcelona: how I had arrived, the topography of apartments where I had lived, my university years, my relationship with journalism... Lluís's death brought everything back to life.

Luis appears immediately. You met shortly after you arrived in Barcelona. You recall your first encounters in the attic of the American Soda and mention Iris Murdoch: "Love is the extremely difficult realization that there is something other than oneself that is real."

— These are philosophically and vitally interesting words. We've talked a lot about love in relation to a romantic notion. The union of two different people is indeed a difficult realization, but then we have a long-term relationship, whether it leads to marriage or not, which is one of the most powerful political acts one can undertake in life. If you want a relationship to last, it must reach agreements and disagreements, it must listen to each other, and it must learn to mend broken pieces. In ceramics, the Japanese technique of scarification allows you to recreate something with gold or liquid silver thread. Failures shouldn't frighten us; they are the bearers of life's truth. When you've made a mistake, acknowledging it is the first step to not repeating it.

In A girl in the city Love appears in all its faces.

— Love has many forms... Passionate love, supportive love, friendly love, human connection in short.

One of the two friendships you revisit in depth is the one you had with Anna Murià. You remember how she remained in love with Agustí Bartra even after he was dead.

— What Ana felt for Agustín was mad loveShe would never have answered that she had experienced exile as a terrible ordeal. It was during exile that she found the man of her life. Anna cherished and nurtured that love for decades, to the point of somewhat neglecting her own work to write about her husband. She always felt that Bartra hadn't received enough recognition.

The other friend who appears in A girl in the city It is the journalist Pilar Caballero, with whom she shared a newsroom at Barcelona Daily.

— Pilar, as I write in the book, was more than a friend; she was a sister, and at the same time, she was more than a sister—she was a friend. She was a great cultural journalist, conducting excellent interviews with novelists because she was such a voracious reader. In the late 1980s, due to some changes in the profession, she left news journalism and dedicated herself to advising theater groups, including the Comediants. We always stayed in touch until she died in 2021 at the age of 73. It was a year before my husband died, who hadn't yet turned 71. I've lost quite a few young people, but I don't feel like I've lost them.

How is?

— I feel they're by my side. They remain my point of reference. I've talked so much with each of them that I can imagine what they'd say if I asked their opinion on any given topic. Death invites an eternal conversation with your loved ones.

In the case ofA girl in the cityThe death of a loved one has also spurred you to write about Barcelona. The first place you lived could be entered from two sides.

— Yes, via Ronda de Sant Pau and Carrer de la Cera. The entrance via Ronda de Sant Pau was the most reassuring, because it was very close to the Sant Antoni market.

You preferred the other one, the one near Chinatown. You also write that it was a neighborhood that "wasn't scary."

— Chino has been demonized a lot. It's a neighborhood where residents take their children to school and go about their lives, regardless of the drug trafficking and prostitution that, incidentally, also exist there. We often forget that Chino is home to major cultural institutions: in addition to museums like the MACBA and the CCCB, there's the Library of Catalonia and the Institute for Catalan Studies... and, for some years now, the Filmoteca as well. Chino has always been connected to the soul of Barcelona. In fact, it also reflects that soul in many of the city's current problems.

Are you referring to the housing crisis?

— Barcelona is a lovely city that's losing respect for itself. It's driving people away, especially young people. This is a phenomenon happening in many cities around the world right now. The image of Barcelona constructed by the media completely forgets its neighborhoods, when in fact it's a city built on them. We lived for many years under a dictatorship, and without the struggles of neighborhood associations, Barcelona would be different. That's why I said earlier that time doesn't disappear. What happens over the years doesn't vanish in an instant. There's a writer I admire, Lea Ypi, She recalls her grandmother telling her, "When the future is uncertain and you don't know what might happen or which way to turn, what we must do is look to the past and see what we can learn." I agree, and I'm not talking about historical memory here, but about the memory of cities and what we don't want to know.

What is it that we Barcelonans don't want to know?

— It's difficult to reflect on the effects of so many years of dictatorship on social and individual psychology. The lack of freedom in so many areas has affected relationships between people, and especially the relationship between institutions and people, which have historically been rigid and sometimes, I get the impression, even feudal.