The Civil War of Catalan writers is a subject with many gaps and we are far from having a global vision of it. We have testimonies from those who were at the front –Joan Sales, Pere Calders, Avel·lí Artís-Gener, Josep Sol– and from some who joined the Franco side –Ignasi Agustí–, but when it comes to following the itinerary of Those who went into exile in 1937 or those who stayed in the auxiliary services or carrying out administrative work, a thick fog prevents them from seeing things well. Little has been written and with very little clarity, in general. That is why the archive of the Fundació Palau, which preserves all the documentation of the writer Josep Palau i Fabre and his parents, made up of hundreds of documents, offers an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct the tensions of that moment. This is what I have done in the three central chapters of the biography El jove Palau i Fabre. A family from the Eixample of Barcelona, ??the dream of Ibiza and the Civil War, which he will publish at the beginning of next year Galàxia Gutenberg.

Palau never hid that, in 1938, when his army was mobilized, he did not go to the Recruitment Office, and that he lived in ambush for a few months, which marked his subsequent career with a great feeling of guilt. In his volume of memoirs El monstre, written between 1984 and 1985, he says that he was hiding in the house of some French sisters, on Avenida de la República Argentina. That he took the work of Llull and Rimbaud and that he began to think about what he would do at the end of the conflict, with Franco’s victory, which he saw coming. I was researching who these French sisters could be. His father, Josep Palau Oller, had a decoration store on 273 Diputació Street, and many contacts with wealthy clients. The maternal grandfather, Fernand Fabre, was French: they could also have been friends or acquaintances of the mother.

I was reviewing the Municipal Register of 1930 and 1940, house by house, and discovered a world that would make for a novel: Russian barons, various German families, who were surely fleeing Hitler. Alícia Vacarizo, Palau’s last companion, who knows her archive in depth, told me that she did not believe that these French sisters really existed. That Palau took refuge in the house of her aunts, that at the time of writing El monstre did not want to compromise her memory and invented a fiction. We found some very suspicious photographs of the aunts’ house: a unique building on Avenida República Argentina 90, on the corner of Calle Bolívar, in front of the current headquarters of Escola Súnion. On the façade I managed to decipher an unequivocal graffiti: “Perish until the last before letting the enemy pass”, with a five-pointed star. Palau spent those crucial months of 1938 in this house.

In his memoirs, Palau says that his parents, who became Francoists, did not want him to show up, that his mother created a drama for him and that he himself – dependent on his parents and terrified, understandably – allowed himself to be dominated. I suppose that to console himself, and justify himself, he said that he had been more useful organizing clandestine activities in the postwar period than giving his life on the front. But this is clearly hindsight. The ambushers played it. On a visit to Marià Manent, in Viladrau, Palau, he met the critic Ramon Esquerra, who was taking refuge in this town. Esquerra suffered, finally joined up and was killed on the Segre front. Palau availed himself of the pardon in August 1938. He first asked for help from the head of culture at La Humanitat, one of the newspapers in which he collaborated until July 1936. The writer Josep M. Francès gave him a recommendation for Celestí Pinyol and Nicolau Battestini. , administrator and director of the General Hospital of Catalonia, respectively.

We do not know if the recommendation worked, but shortly after he joined the Health Section of the Ministry of Defense in Plaza Molina. After the Battle of the Ebre, in November 1938, he returned to the barracks. A soldier named Padrós, a dentist captain, gave him the choice between Olot and Alp. Palau told me that he chose Olot because of the Fageda d’ en Jordà from the poem by Joan Maragall. In the Olot Hospital he experienced the entry of Franco’s troops. He was taken prisoner and sent to the La Seu de Lleida concentration camp.

The correspondence with the mother, from prison, is impressive. Eulalia Fabre greets the winners enthusiastically: “The streets are no longer littered with spats, even the tram toll collectors have manners: what do you think!! Believe me I’m excited. I’m getting too fat again and I couldn’t take it the last few days, and if you had seen the entry! Like a miracle! We will never tire of saying: Long live Franco! That if they hadn’t come to release us so quickly we would have passed it black maybe!!”.

Palau, annoyed, takes a few days to respond to this letter. The mother guesses what is happening and from that moment on the correspondence is limited to the practical issue of guarantees to leave the concentration camp, which the parents obtain by using their influence. Josep Palau i Fabre had been left in no man’s land. Defeated, with the bad conscience of not having defended his ideas to the end, depressed and confronted his parents. It is the starting point of the Poems de l’Alquimista.

Josep Palau i Fabre had been left in no man’s land. Defeated, with the bad conscience of not having defended his ideas to the end, depressed and confronted his parents. It is the starting point of the Poems de l’Alquimista.