The houses of Mercè Rodoreda

The exhibition Mercè Rodoreda, a forestThe exhibition, which will be on view at the CCCB from December 5, 2025, to May 25, 2026, has been curated by professor and essayist Neus Penalba. Conceived as an exploration of the writer's imagination, the exhibition transforms the museum space into a forest that represents and analyzes Rodoreda's universe. According to Penalba, visitors wander and discover "the literary and personal roots and the experience of uprooting caused by exile; the trunks of the experience of war; the branches that reach out to the great names of Western culture—writers, painters, and filmmakers; the canopies that shelter the bird, germinating and bearing fruit" in so many contemporary creators. In this report, we will reconstruct the biography and imagination of the author of The Diamond Square,also walking through a forest. Specifically, the forest of the houses where he lived and the houses that most iconically mark his narrative.

An intense life

"A happy person has no story," Mercè Rodoreda said to Montserrat Roig during a legendary interview. It's a phrase that elliptically summarizes the dramatic life and turbulent biography of the author of Broken mirror, Camellia Street and Death and SpringAmong so many other central works of modern Catalan literature, Rodoreda's influence and capacity to fascinate continue to grow and expand with the passing years. But it is also a phrase that can lead to oversimplifications and misunderstandings. Rodoreda's life was dramatic, yes. It was marked by a forced and unnatural marriage and a bloody civil war. Also by a world war that nearly destroyed everything and by a very long exile, and, finally, by a melancholic return to a Barcelona and a Catalonia disfigured by nearly forty years of dictatorship. Rodoreda's was also an intense life, full of precious moments and periods of genuine happiness.

Only those who have had a happy childhood can truly feel, as adults, that childhood is paradise lost. Rodoreda's was a happy childhood, safeguarded above all by two protective figures: her patriarchal and good-natured grandfather and her loving and devoted mother. There is a splendid photograph, taken in a studio, that exemplifies this: it shows a three-year-old Rodoreda, somewhere between bewildered and content, while her grandfather, from one side, holds the crank of the typewriter and gazes at her, mesmerized, with the air of a bourgeois prophet. Her mother, a cultured, vibrant, and somewhat vain woman, leans over her from the other side, a benevolent figure.

Mercè Rodoreda was born on October 17, 1908, in Casal Gurguí, a small tower owned by her grandfather, located on Sant Antoni Street (now Manuel Angelon Street) in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood. Nothing remains of the tower, which had a garden and was topped with a flag. A parking lot now occupies the site. However, the happy memories the writer accumulated there stayed with her always: imaginative games, flowers of all kinds, music (piano, songs), a family love of theater, the discovery of Catalan literature... Thanks in part to her father, an accountant but a frustrated man of letters, young Rodoreda was already familiar with Guimerà, Víctor Català, Ruyra... and, above all, Josep Carner.

In Of Fire and Silk: A Biographical Album of Mercè RodoredaIn the book prepared and written by Marta Nadal, a phrase is included that sums it all up: "I have never felt so at home as when I lived at my grandfather's house with my parents." To live life to the fullest, to be happy, is to feel at home, both in the place where you live and in the world. The young Rodoreda could not have known that a long period of nomadism, almost always marked by uncertainty and unease, and often quite inhospitable, would soon unfold before her.

That world of childhood happiness and pure vitality began to end the day young Mercè, at sixteen, was betrothed by her mother to her brother. Jordi Gurguí had made money in Argentina, and the future writer's mother saw him as the safest option to guarantee some economic stability for her daughter and her entire family, who lived in poverty. Rodoreda and her uncle married on her twentieth birthday and moved into the house at number 16 Zaragoza Street, not far from the family's tower house. It soon became clear that the marriage would not work. During the first few years, when she was neither writing nor working as a journalist, it is safe to assume that Rodoreda felt the suffocating discomfort of being dependent on her husband. The four walls of that house, now an apartment building, must have felt like a prison. The more she felt them closing in on her, the more she longed to escape, to write, to be free. The marriage to Jordi Gurguí officially ended in 1937, but before that it had produced the writer's only child.

Rodoreda flourished—professionally, creatively, and personally—during the promising years of Republican Catalonia. She contributed to newspapers and magazines, published her first novels, and began to make a name for herself within a Catalan cultural and literary world that, for the first time, saw the possibility of becoming modernly hegemonic and normal. She met powerful men who respected her (Andreu Nin, Francesc Trabal)... All of this faltered and cracked with Franco's coup in July 1936, and was definitively dealt a fatal blow with the entry of the fascist and Spanish nationalist occupation troops into Barcelona. Rodoreda, a staunch Catalan and republican, went into exile. Mas Perxés, in Agullana, was "a three-story manor house belonging to a cork magnate." Confiscated during the war, it would become the last headquarters of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Institution of Catalan Letters, as explained in the magnificent volume. Landscapesby Mercè Ibarz and Carme Esteve. There, Rodoreda took refuge for a few days before crossing the border. There were many other writers (among them, Antoni Rovira i Virgili, who wrote in memory of The last days of republican Catalonia), and Presidents Companys, Negrín and Aguirre also passed through.

The weeks spent at the Château de Roissy-en-Brie, already in France, constitute one of the most legendary episodes not only in Rodoreda's biography but also in the history of Catalan literature. Everything is there: the drama of history and politics, the tragic and uncertain adventure of exile, the unbridled passions of a group of sensitive and intelligent men and women living through an extreme situation... Financially supported by Picasso and André Gide, among others, some twenty Catalan writers, some accompanied by their friends, are recounted by Quim Torra in his biography. Armand Obiols, with a burning coldness. The intellectual who got lost"Roissy is an end and a beginning. Because in Roissy many stories of love and friendship end, and because others begin that will last a lifetime."

It was in Roissy that the passionate and scandalous love affair between Rodoreda and the literary critic Joan Prat, whose pen name was Armand Obiols, was born. Prat was married with a daughter, whom he had left behind in Catalonia. Furthermore, Obiols was married to the sister of Francesc Trabal, who was also in Roissy with his wife. Rodoreda and Obiols met almost secretly in the castle gardens and in the room of Anna Murià, the writer's new friend, strolling and celebrating together. The relationship caused an irreparable rift within the group. The hatred and resentment it provoked would, in most cases, last a lifetime.

Published in 1962, The Diamond Square It was overlooked at the time by the Sant Jordi prize jury, but it has been recognized with the best possible prize, the loyalty of successive generations of readers, and with the most lustrous prize, canonical posterity.

Set in Barcelona during the Republic, the Civil War, and the post-war period, the Gràcia neighborhood, where the narrator and protagonist, Natàlia/Colometa, and her husband, Quimet, live, is the ideal setting for Rodoreda to depict all the oppressions and adversities that a naive, resilient, and humble woman must overcome. The vibrant, working-class Barcelona of this novel, with its artisan trades, austere house, rooftop terrace, and dovecote, is also a literary representation of a reality that has been meticulously eroded over the last century.

The house in Limoges, at number 12 Rue des Daughters de Notre Dame, is the first where Rodoreda and Obiols briefly lived as husband and wife. They arrived in the summer of 1940, after—as Obiols explains—"a three-week journey between the French and German outposts": "We were heavily bombed and strafed; there were days when we walked for twelve hours with practically no food. We spent twelve days hiding in the occupied zone." In Limoges, in the unoccupied zone, Rodoreda met numerous refugees, many of them Jewish, and eked out a living as a seamstress while writing stories as best she could.

She does the work reluctantly, but masterfully. "I make nightgowns and slips for a department store," she writes to Anna Murià. "I have a machine and a mannequin, and my most fervent wish is to see it all go up in flames." She has liver problems and has to have an ovary removed. As is often the case, living together complicates her romantic relationship with Obiols, who is soon arrested and sent to a labor camp.

After his release, Obiols went to work for the Todt Organization, an opaque network of companies serving the Nazi regime and responsible for building hundreds of fortifications along the Atlantic Wall. It is a dark episode in Obiols's biography, but necessity, the will to survive, the violence of the Nazi boot crushing the human dignity of all who refused to submit, preclude premature judgments. Rodoreda and Obiols have moved and now eke out a living, practically confined to an eight-square-meter room at number 43 Rue Chauffour in Bordeaux. Stoic and vulnerable, Rodoreda sews and writes, primarily short stories that filter through the misery of French life under the Hitlerian occupation.

Three years later, Rodoreda and Obiols left Bordeaux and settled in liberated Paris. As Neus Penalba explains to lo esencial Hunger in the eyes, cement in the mouthThe years in Paris (1946-1954) were crucial for Rodoreda. She read everything and everything, in both English and French, went to the cinema and to art galleries and museums: she immersed herself in all the literary, artistic, and cinematic modernity that was then shaking and revitalizing a European culture still in a state of shock. Rodoreda and Obiols settled in a bon's room, a mansard roof, at number 21 Cherche-Midi street, precarious and not very hospitable, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.

While absorbing and processing everything around her, she writes stories and poems, paints canvases and watercolors (in the vein of Paul Klee's lyrical neo-primitivism and Jean Dubuffet's dirty art), and continues sewing. Like so many creators from around the world who lived in the wounded but vibrant postwar Paris, the French capital was always central to Rodoreda, who kept her apartment well into the 1970s. It is while living in Paris and confirming that Franco's dictatorship will not fall soon, surely, that the writer, who had never so imagined it, says Carme Arnau. Years of barbarismHe understands that it will take a long time before he can return to Catalonia.

After years of financial hardship, which Rodoreda tried to avoid by sewing and Obiols working for Todt and later as a reader for publishers and for a time reviving the Magazine of CataloniaHe finally landed a good job. In 1951, he was hired as a translator by UNESCO. It was partly because of Obiols' new position that they moved to Geneva in 1954. They lived at number 19 rue de Vidollet, "in a very nice studio, above a park," as he explained to Baltasar Porcel, from where he could see a bit of a lake and a bit of a mountain. Although he never truly felt at home in Geneva, unlike in Paris, it was here that his creativity blossomed and exploded.

She continues to paint, but above all, she writes, like an inspired fanatic. Everything she has learned, felt, thought, and experienced comes out here. In a cascade. Among other things, in Geneva she writes—or at least begins—four of her best novels: Garden by the sea, Broken mirror, The Diamond Square and Death and SpringHe will also write Camellia Street and he will rewrite the only one of the three early novels that he ended up saving, AlomaIn part, this almost miraculous productivity can be explained by the writer's solitude. Because of his work, Obiols spent increasingly longer periods in Vienna, until he eventually settled there. They remained together, but Rodoreda's sole and absolute commitment was now to herself and her work.

The writer's relationship with Barcelona had been difficult, marked by longing and sorrow, ever since she had been forced to flee. In 1949 she made a brief visit, but left again almost immediately. In 1968, however, she returned with the intention of staying. Times were changing. She bought an apartment at the intersection of Balmes and Padua streets, next to Monterols Park.

It was there that Pilar Aymerich took the well-known photo of her smoking in front of the typewriter, with a poster on her back that reads: Patriots stand erectIn the only blunder in his magnificent book, Penalba sees this poster as a supposedly ironic critique by Rodoreda of nationalism. This is not the case. Rodoreda was an unwavering Catalan nationalist, and one of the reasons she felt uncomfortable in Barcelona in the late 1960s was that she found it so linguistically and culturally distorted after decades of Franco's Castilian-influenced regime.

To spend her final years, Rodoreda chose to create her own personal Arcadia, the spacious and floral version of the chamber of one's own recommended by Virginia Woolf. She retreated to Romanyà de la Selva to dedicate herself to writing and cultivating a garden. Situated in a landscape of telluric echoes, full of "mountains of cork oaks," as she wrote in a letter, from there she had views over "half of Catalonia, from the Pyrenees to Sant Feliu de Guíxols."

In the house in Romanyà, which she found "beautiful," she lived in an old-fashioned and rustic setting, received select visitors, and wrote incessantly. Here she ended Broken mirror, wrote So much, so much war... and continued a novel that he had been working on since the early 1960s, Death and Spring, on which he worked inconsistently but obsessively and which, at the time of his death, he had still not been able to finish.

Broken mirrorOriginally published in 1974, this novel is perhaps the most ambitious in its conception of all those written by Rodoreda. It combines the serialized nature of 19th-century novels, the all-encompassing desire to capture the evolution of a family lineage and the mark of time on spaces and characters, and the fascinating, sinister, and kaleidoscopic modernity of certain 20th-century novels. Aside from the three generations of the Valldaura family, the tower and garden where they live play a central role in the work: the living room, the lavish kitchen, the playroom... Rodoreda drew inspiration, in part, from the family tower in her childhood home of Sant Gervasi, which she imbued with a stately touch, and used her garden in Romanyà as a model. All of this she grafted onto fantastical elements, dreamlike qualities, and phantasmagoria that distort—or rather, shatter—realism.

Thanks to the reissue by Club Editor in 2016, with a very complete epilogue, as insightful as it is persuasive, by Arnau Pons, Death and Spring It has redefined, made more complex and profound, the canonical fame of Mercè Rodoreda. Besides being the most influential novel in Catalan literature so far this century—an extraordinary fact considering it was published posthumously in 1986— Death and Spring It is the expression of Rodoreda at her most experimental, most serious, most symbolic, most transcendent, and at the same time most savage and brutal. She began writing it in exile, during the fertile and solitary years in Geneva, far from her country, marked by the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War and the long exile, and perhaps that is why it is, among other things, a great novel without a home, set in a kind of mysterious non-place, somewhere between a concentration camp and a place of refuge.

It is, among other things, a novel about the world as a hostile place, about the profound feeling of being the victim of an existential exile. Perhaps during the years in Romanyà she was unable to finish it, although she tried, because then, for the first time in a long time, Rodoreda felt she was home.