Who was the prince of the Barcelona bohemian?

Just after finishing the reading of Venus i els bàrbars, we could imagine a book club with the members of Revolta Pagesa and councilor Ordeig as moderator, passionately debating this matter of the "barbarians". It is not difficult to believe that such a scene would have delighted the author, always diligent in shaking consciences and provoking lively disputes. Cap de Brot Publishing House has had the courage and the foresight to recover another author from the waters of oblivion. It is, no more and no less, Lluís Capdevila i Vilallonga (Barcelona, 1893-Andorra la Vella, 1980), a picturesque, unclassifiable literary figure. And it does so with an impeccable edition, rounded off by a prologue by Agnès Rotger that aptly accompanies the return of this sidelined voice.

Lluís Capdevila was called "the prince of Barcelona's bohemianism", at the throat "sensual dandy" or "modern Petronius", depending on who he was arguing with. However, we must understand bohemian as it was then, as a man of artistic profession, who has an empty wallet and a treasure of dreams and fantasies, a man who places a laugh over the miseries of the world, who also wears a wide-brimmed hat, smokes a pipe, has long hair, and proudly sports an inappreciable laziness. If we add a touch of radical propagandist, iconoclast, a man on the extreme left of republicanism, controversial, anarchic, mysterious, prison fodder, and with a monocle in his left eye, we have Lluís Capdevila. His father died, and faced with the family's serious economic problems, he decided to leave home and make his own way. This meant living between the street and the famous Bar del Centro – the bohemian base camp of the time, a stage of freedom without rules or morals, a place to dance tangos and snort cocaine – living on coffee with milk. In other words, he was hungrier than a schoolmaster. Capdevila is remembered as a journalist, narrator, and man of culture deeply connected to the theatrical and musical world, but he also worked as a house painter, a correspondent on the Aragon front – his articles are a goldmine – an exile, a lieutenant in the French Resistance, a professor, a publisher... He is a truly popular, prolific, and uneven author, but his oceanic memoirs are frankly interesting, as is part of his abundant theatre, Cançó d’amor i de guerra or La Legió d’Honor, for example; and some novels such as Memòries d’un llit de matrimoni and the unclassifiable Venus i els bàrbars.

Against the idealized rural world

Venus and the Barbarians (1929), in fact, is his most suggestive book, but it is not exactly a novel. If it were not fiction, it could be a bilious report about a village and the peasants who inhabit it, or a kind of grotesque description of human types who, in general, are execrable and repugnant. But I see in it, as Agnès Rotger also does in the prologue, clear political, ethical, and literary intentions, in response to the idealized image that was held of the rural world due to the writers of the time, abusing the cliché of the nativity scene, of peasants seen as pure and noble beings, uncontaminated by civilization. It is true that there is an acidic critique of power and the clergy, but Capdevila reveals himself as a stubborn anti-Rousseauian, faithful to the Socratic conviction that ignorance is the root of all evils. All of this could be a kind of moralizing invective, but since the author does it in such a barbaric and undisguised way, these aspects are diluted. And contrary to what it may seem, there is a subtle look at human desire, culture, and society.

Capdevila's prose is captivating, sharp, and cunning like a whetstone. His descriptions of the village, the interior of the houses, and this host of human types, mostly rustic with dark souls and little-developed intelligence, paint a disturbing, almost villainous human hive that does not leave one indifferent. For example: “La Teresa Noia has an idiotic smile and toothless gums, she is small, old, wrinkled like a raisin, and crooked like a hook. Single, virgin, a beggar, and lives off what the neighbors give her. She doesn't work, she says she doesn't know how, she never has. But she has a gift: she knows everything, everything that happens and what the men and women of the village think. She is feared. She is something of a crow, of a slug, of an unclean beast.” At the same time, there are occasional admirable scenes such as the description of Holy Week with its savage rituals, the boar hunt with the animals' cries at night, or the atrocious final scene that makes your hair stand on end. All of this is a raw and grotesque dramatic picture, a tragicomedy whose brutality reaffirms the Lamarckian thesis that function makes the organ, or in other words, that it is the environment that makes the man.

To think that a book of this kind, so politically incorrect, hurtful and free, could be written and published today, is impossible. So, just to check to what extent it clashes with an era as prone to offense and censorship as ours, it is already worth reading it.