A hidden door behind one of the benches in the chapel of the baptistery of Girona Cathedral leads to a dimension suspended in time. It is the entrance to the bell tower of the largest medieval nave in the world. On the Gothic walls, the names of the bells can still be read, and the ropes hang from the ceiling to ring them. Climbing a beautiful and humble spiral staircase leads to one of the rooms that the Girona writer Prudenci Bertrana surely trod in the early 20th century. It is where the bell ringer lived until before the Civil War. Behind a large window overlooking the Plaça dels Apòstols hides a two-story dwelling with three cells, as if it were a stage. The same one where we can imagine the protagonist of Josafat living, the hunched bell ringer, with a pointed skull, eagle's nose and rough hair, who lives isolated, constrained between lust and the weight of sin to fall into the seduction of a prostitute.

In Prudencio Bertrana (Tordera, 1867 - Barcelona, ​​1941) is fossilized in a bronze bust on a stone pedestal in Girona. A couple of his paintings languish in the city's Art Museum, languishing in obscurity. Every year, he is honored with a literary prize whose winners rarely acknowledge him. In Tordera, a park bears his name, and he also oversees the library in Riudarenes. All this is well and good, but ultimately, Bertrana is not widely read, and very little discussed, despite being an indispensable classic and one of the most important figures in Catalan literature. Perhaps we too easily forget that he is the author of works such as Jehoshaphat (1906), Barbaric prose (1911), Me! Memoirs of a Philosopher Physician (1925) and the autobiographical trilogy Between the earth and the clouds, formed by The heir (1931), The Vagabond (1933) and The unrepentant (1948), among others.