It was a gift from Gregorio López Raimundo: The communist manifesto in several languages, inside a case. It was for the members of the Center for Work and Documentation that they created with Manolo Sacristán and Pere Portabella, among others, around 1976. Later they would rent an apartment in Gràcia. But the case never left Laura Tremosa’s house, in Sarrià, where they first met and where the precious light from the garden bathes the books in the dining room. She can spend hours looking for one, she knows she has it, she doesn’t know where, and sometimes she doesn’t because it was never returned.
They are in every room. In the one next to it, are the Espasa and other encyclopedias that belonged to their parents. We had to make a shelf in the hall, they didn’t even fit in the bedrooms of their four children, upstairs. In his are those of feminism -he even had them under the bed-, many from the seventies, from Jorge Herralde, who had just founded Anagrama. Josep Maria Castellet ran Edicions 62 and did not give away as many.
Tremosa was the second Catalan to obtain a degree in industrial engineering, the only female student at the Edifici del Rellotge, and would also be one of the only ones in the profession. She was born in Espolla in 1937. Her mother was a teacher and her father, an engineer. She saw him for the first time when he returned from France after the civil war. Invented or not, she has the memory of a black car from which a man got out and they told him: “It’s your dad.” Instead of greeting him, she went after a cat. There was no television and she liked to read so much that she was scolded for hiding novels in textbooks. Her grandmother warned her that it would happen to her like Don Quixote and she would go crazy. “And that’s how it was, although maybe it’s the Tramuntana’s fault,” she laughs. The first were those of Celia, a rebellious girl, the work of Elena Fortún.
Since then he has always been in trouble, he says. In the sixties, Tremosa and a colleague created a culture commission at the Col·legi d’Enginyers. They invited anti-Franco professors and changed their names (they announced José Luis López Aranguren as José López, for example), they gave strange titles to the talks with concepts such as hermeneutics, so that they would be allowed to do so. With the Association of Human Communication and Ecology they organized a congress that ended badly; the police came.
He read a lot of essays, and novels at the same time: by Maria Aurèlia Capmany, by García Márquez and Vargas Llosa –almost his neighbors–, books by his neighbor without almost Xavier Rubert de Ventós, by his friend Montse Roig. She read everything by Mercè Rodoreda (“but what do you want me to tell you”), Nothing, by Carmen Laforet, Tiempo de silencio, by Luis Martín-Santos. People recommended books as now they talk about series. Madame Bovary enthused him as a young man, and Dostoyevsky and Gorky, and Margaret Mead. Llorenç Villalonga liked it a lot. And Simeon. Simone de Beauvoir awakened many things in him. The summers that she studied French in Paris, she would see her with Sartre at the Café de Flore.
“Reading is living other lives, it is the way to understand something of the world.” When she traveled to Latin America, he had the impression that he already knew her thanks to her books. Lately she has been reading South African authors, she has a fondness for crime novels, which she takes as a social portrait. She’s tired of the ones about families because she’s read too many. She is attracted to the story, she compares the version in old encyclopedias with what is on the internet. She usually finishes them all even if they are bad, except if she is a pretentious tomboy, which she leaves. Science fiction has never interested him. Artificial intelligence yes, I was already writing articles on the subject twenty-five years ago. She has edited technical magazines and loves to see the spectacular evolution of technology. He has fun asking GPT Chat trick questions.
At dinners and birthdays, if they gave him anything, it was books. There is always someone waiting. She says it’s like a disease. The kindle is doing very well for her because if it runs out at midnight, she can buy another one immediately. Digital support is comfortable for you. Instead, she prefers La Vanguardia on paper, while she drinks coffee. She subscribed at the same time that she registered the water and electricity, when she moved here, when she got married more than sixty years ago. She separated before there was a divorce in Spain. She now has six grandchildren – five already grown up – and “all the time that she dedicated to these crazy things” to read.
