Màrius Serra: “The death of our son brought us even closer together as a couple.”

The writer Màrius Serra "deeply hated the esplais" and only went for a while because his parents sent him "to see if they would straighten him out." It's all a bit fuzzy for him, but he does remember an excursion to Cerdanyola where a girl kept coming up to him and tickling him. Five years later, one night while he was putting together the window display for his shoe store, he saw a "spectacular girl" walk by, and Serra didn't hesitate to approach her and suggest they go for a drink. He didn't remember, but she told him about it over a drink in a Hawaiian bar: it was the girl who had been tickling him. "We got into it with a phrase that Mercè has always remembered, and which was very unromantic: 'Do you want to mess things up?'" Mercè was keen, and now they've been "messing things up" for 40 years.

"We have a bit of an aversion to sugary things. That's why when we got married we did it in a theater. I don't believe in the church, much less in the state. If we had to put on a performance, at least we wanted a good show." And so, with an announcement on the billboard and everything, Màrius and Mercè premiered their first and last performance at the current Teatre Condal. Their honeymoon took them two months through Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. "The day after the wedding, I started the crossword puzzle. I had prepared sixty, and continuing them was the only reason we had to come back."

They became parents at 32, but that didn't stop them from living an unconventional life. "When Carla was born, we bought a camper van and lived there for three months; we went camping in Catalonia and then to Holland and beyond. When it was time to see the pediatrician or see the grandparents, we came back here," he explains. After Carla, Llullu was born, a child with multiple disabilities who died at the age of 9. "It was very hard. Everyone deals with the heartbreak of parenthood in their own way. In the face of adversity, we come together even more."

The writer quotes Sisa to celebrate the joy of being alive: "The present is the only documentable eternity." "You have to always maintain a spark of love, and you can only do that if you get up every morning and life seems to begin. If you think you already know everything, that you've already experienced everything, that's wrong."