Malena's room

In 2008, George Steiner published The Books I Haven't Written (Arcàdia), a collection of seven chapters on seven very personal themes that the English philosopher would have liked to write a book about but, in the end, never did, and in each chapter he explains why. One of them, titled The Languages of Eros, explains that he had had the “privilege of speaking and making love in four languages”, that each has its own charm in bed, but he didn't go into details, because the chapter put his intimate life at risk and that, if anything, he reached the conclusion that “shared orgasm is an act of simultaneous translation”.

Well. As of this week, the beloved Sebastià Alzamora already has the title of the first chapter of a poetry book he hasn't written, which will be titled Malena's Room Will Be Free and Available from April 24th to June 15th, 2026, Do You Know Anyone?, courtesy of a series of slips by our dear colleagues at "Els matins" of TV3, who have unintentionally demonstrated that Murphy's law continues to defy all other laws. And it's a good thing, because it could have been epic.

The possibilities of this fiction are stimulating: who is Malena? Why will the room be vacated the day after Sant Jordi? Where will she be until mid-June? Will she meet the “someone” who will occupy her room? And, of course, what do they charge for the room? And so to address the complicated housing situation from all points of view.

The history of live programs is also written with its errors and it is likely that Malena's room will outlive its protagonists. It doesn't matter. I know of a radio presenter of a morning show who wanted to say that the panelists were starting to leaf through the newspapers and said that the panelists were starting to "fuck". In Catalan, of course.