Rarely have Barcelona or the people of Barcelona elevated a popular figure to the triple category of literary icon, figure in its wax museum and distinguished by the City Council. Perhaps because popular memory matters more than ever – it is so scarce!–, perhaps because of the unanimous affection that person aroused or perhaps because Barcelona is resisting Alzheimer’s, Juan Bayén, Juanito, the recently disappeared factotum of the Pinotxo bar, is the protagonist of a delicate book, 300 pages, very visual and worthy of a pop or fashion great, which is presented today: La Boqueria del Juanito. Pinocchio (publishing Genco).
The work is successful because of its opportunity – the honoree got to see it edited but he died on April 11, days before the presentation, postponed – and the care and quality of his images – the artist visual Josep Rodenas has shown off, a job of months of monitoring –, accompanied by texts by four authors and the drawings of Mariscal, Nebreda and Fransoy. The result honors the intention of the editor, Emmanuel Bouvard: “What is done from the heart is always authentic”. And unique…
Rodenas has captured the dimension of the character in his element: one of the souls of the great market of Barcelona, ​​the Boqueria, as much praised as “abandoned” by its inhabitants. In the photographs it is clear the affection, genuine, that awakened Juan Bayén, a pencaire made of an old paste who, for example, became a member of RCD Espanyol despite being a great culer only because a brother-in-law, parakeet , don’t suffer alone on Sundays.
“I have nothing left to live for, I was born on the eve of a civil war and I have just gone through a global pandemic. The historical events that have been happening have never distracted me from my goal in life: to be happy”, summarizes in the book, half reflections of the protagonist, half evocation of the human habitat of the market without which Juan Bayén cannot would have ever ended up in a similar book (or a statue, exhibited from today in the Metres room in the kitchen of the New Wax Museum). In passing, the work recalls some predecessors, such as Ramon Cabau, from whom Juanito took a taste for the bow tie, the restaurateur and pharmacist who took his own life with cyanide in the same market, in 1987), and episodes hilarious, like the throwing and eating of whale meat, in the 1950s.
The work contains the abbreviated testimony of Juanito’s legion of friends, the best in every house, and a QR that allows you to see and hear their words of affection, even those of the honoree himself, which denote, yes, the end of the road. There are no traces of the bad family background that has led to a Pinocchio without the Pinocchio sign, judicial things.
“I think that for me the Boqueria is starting to end, at my age I’ve done enough, I’m closing and we’ll see what comes…”, he points out, all in black and white, like that anthology photograph in which one of the his famous cuts. His favorite Pinocchio dish? “Meat stew with potatoes”.
Will Barcelona continue to produce popular characters who never dedicated themselves to being cute on Instagram and won the affection of their fellow citizens, morning after morning? The book reflects with passion a world that is ending, in which children, in their mother’s arms, learned everything in the street.
“My mother taught me to work”, sums up Juanito. God forbid.
