I was born a reader in my second year of EGB when, a year after arriving in Catalonia, we took a trip to visit the Jaume Balmes Library in Vic. I have explained it many times, but I will repeat it until I die because I don't want to forget that there are places where there are no libraries, as well as houses without books, and girls, like I was, who can never buy any. Not today nor any other day of the year. Allowing access to reading for the poor is the most revolutionary act, a true vector for strengthening civic awareness. It nourishes with words to think, opens doors to distant realities, connects with other consciousnesses, and makes accessible immense human diversity, with such different perspectives on things, with such radically opposing mentalities, with varied sensitivities and histories (individual and collective) to which we could not have access in real life. I owe my vocation as a reader (and later the obsession with writing) to these two “public facilities”: the school and the library. And in the visits I make now as a writer, I rediscover that many boys and girls live the same reality that I lived: houses without books or their own space to think, to acquire the necessary language to understand themselves and the world around them.
Every year for Sant Jordi, the memory of the first times I fully experienced this festival returns to me. It reaches my body in the form of a warm heat and a feeling of spring exaltation. Of course, I must have been... thirteen, fourteen years old? Yes, it is the time of permanent spring exaltation, even with sub-zero temperatures that are often present in the regional winter. (By the walls, intense red on a gray background of ancient stone.)
Saint George's Day was also the only day of the year I could come out of my reading closet. I had this habit of spending hours and hours with my nose buried in books, and that was the strangest thing that had been seen in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my school. I didn't know anyone who read. Who read for pleasure and for fun. Only the teachers understood what I did. Of course, you don't need company to read, but I always think it's a shame not to have had someone to share the experience with, friends who enjoyed reading and with whom we could exchange opinions, recommendations, habits, reading likes and dislikes. In my neighborhood, it was so unusual, this habit of being an avid reader, that I lived it in secret, like a kind of addiction, a strange vice that no one else had. And suddenly, on Saint George's Day, people like me would emerge from under the stones. So many people buying books, like snails after the rain! So I wasn't the only one with this minority and marginal identity? (now I see that in my childhood environment, reading was a differentiating trait that marked me much more than being Moorish).
That was the childish view, of course, believing that everyone who bought a copy was a passionate reader like me. Saint George's Day is a commercial holiday on which many books are bought (which we should celebrate, it would be worse a day to buy weapons, for example) which contains, like a matryoshka, the day that we readers, who are readers all year round, feel is ours, and the writers, who are writers for life, feel is theirs: the day of literature. Sometimes I don't feel part of the celebration, to be honest; often it seems to me that those of us who truly love literature are swallowed by the great monster of the market. Luckily, it is also the day when each reader will look for their author and, even if only for a very brief moment, we will recognize each other as part of a secret society formed by people who at the end of the day will get into bed and let the phrases of someone unknown and distant, someone who is perhaps already dead, penetrate into the deepest regions of their own subconscious.
