"Japanese people used to come and kneel in front of our house"

Horta of Saint JohnIn 1982, Àngel Querol was quietly reading La Vanguardia when he saw an image that seemed familiar to him. "Pili, isn't this our house?" he asked his wife. For reasons only known to small towns, Pablo Picasso's stay in Horta de Sant Joan (Terra Alta) had always been treated with great discretion.

It was public and notorious that the Andalusian painter had been there between 1898 and 1899 and that he returned in 1909, when he settled there with his partner, the Parisian artist Fernande Olivier. It was also known that he had his studio in an attic in the village and that he worked "as if possessed," according to letters written by his partner and which have been recovered. But it wasn't until 1982 that the news was published with a photograph showing the facade of the house where Àngel Querol Pallarès and Maria Pilar Cortiella Pons lived.

"Of course it's our house," replied Pili. Years later, in 1998, also in La Vanguardia, the journalist Toni Orensanz published the definitive confirmation that it was in the attic of that building that the Andalusian painter was inspired to paint so many Cubist works.

The attic is located right in the center of the Church Square and belonged to Tobies Membrado, the village baker, who rented it to Picasso. "Painting like this, you won't earn a living, but in this house, you'll never lack a plate of food," he is said to have told him on one occasion. When Picasso settled there, the attic had an independent entrance from the street, but over the years it was integrated into the house below.

In the same square, there is another house that at that time was the inn where Picasso and Olivier stayed. Both houses were eventually bought by the family of Maria Pilar, Pili, without knowing their history. The one that had been a boarding house was much better preserved and is where her grandparents settled. "The other house was left half-forgotten," she recalls.

Later, it became a butcher's shop, where Pili's mother worked and those walls exchanged paintings for entrails: "In the attic, we used to hang the animals' skins," she remembers. Finally, the house and that attic that hid such a valuable secret became Pili and Àngel's home, and little by little, they began to fix it up.

"Since it was a butcher shop, we painted the walls constantly," explains Pili, who recalls that one day they decided to scratch and discovered the stone walls, the wooden beams of the ceiling, and even "festejadors," which are the stone sills that were made on the inside of the windows. The attic, which was nothing more than an attic, was tidied up a bit and also gradually conditioned.

A hidden treasure

From almost 80 years of indifference regarding Picasso's stay in the village, they swung to the other extreme once that information was published. "Pili's father used to tell us that Japanese people would come and kneel in front of the house," recalls Àngel. He also says that his father-in-law used to joke and search among the beams to see if Picasso had left any painting or sketch there.

The treasure they did find – and still keep – is the wooden window that Pablo Picasso opened every morning to let light into his studio so he could contemplate those fields that inspired him so much. When Pili and Àngel renovated the house, they decided to change it, but they kept it. "If they searched, they would still find Picasso's DNA." They also keep the stone that covered the fireplace where the painter warmed himself.

After that boom, tranquility gradually returned to Horta de Sant Joan. The cafe where Fernande Olivier often went soon became a hardware store, but it is now closed. A few streets down, the Picasso Centre was established, a two-story building that explains how the painter ended up in this corner of the world, and displays facsimile reproductions of the various works the artist created from Horta. For more information on Picasso's stay in Horta de Sant Joan, you should read L'estiu de l'amor, the novel by Toni Orensanz.