What has helped him the most in life are books and Breaking Bad. For Javier de las Muelas, reading is not just a complement, it is fundamental, a delicacy. He reads long runs, he wants to own the book and for the book to own him; he wraps himself in them. When he finishes reading one, he leaves it on a street bench. If he has been special, he keeps it. He loves art, but not crowded walls or cramped libraries. That is why he distributes them between his houses in Barcelona and Guils, and the Dry Martini, a cocktail bar that he acquired in 1996 from his teacher Pedro Carbonell. This Sant Jordi, he offered the terrace to fourteen authors to sign his books, he maintains that “history is played in a bar.” Days before, Quentin Tarantino was here for almost six hours. On a designer shelf, on bottles of rum, brandy and whiskey, with a red background, there are several titles, placed in a specific way, more decorative than in order.
Because aesthetics is very important to De las Muelas, he says that it is what you give to others. Not surprisingly, he entered architecture school after having studied medicine, where he met Antonia Kerrigan, now a literary agent (“my agent / friendâ€), and where he discovered the underground world. He sold Nazario and Mariscal comics, worked for the concert promoter Gay Mercader. The French May of ’68 did not interest him, but he was subjugated by the hippy movement in San Francisco. He went on interRail to see works by Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto. He is passionate about Chillida. There are his books among 29 dry martinis (that’s the limit), which Toni Riera de Pachá gave him, Un any més… 2004… un any menys, by Antoni Vives-Fierro, or Monzó: com triomfar a la vida, Edited by Julià Guillamon. He comments: “I love Quim very much.”
As a young man he made posters with Kafka’s obituary for his friends. Kafka influenced him during his existentialist period, in his teens, along with Flaubert, Castaneda and Rilke, to whose poetry the actress Rosa Novell introduced him. Later he would read Bukowski; Before, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Herman Hesse had influenced him. The first one he remembers is Corazón, by Edmundo de Amicis. When an author excites him, he buys all of his work. He happened to him with Mary Higgins Clarke or Don Winslow. Or Chandler, long ago. He loves Dorothy Parker. He now he has started with Arturo Pérez Reverte, from his Revolution, and he has the last one from Ray Loriga pending. Swedish authors sometimes get him down, but he was hooked on Camilla Läkberg’s The Mentalist.
Murders, drugs, sex, convoluted plots of suffering. She quickly consumes those novels that evade her, two or three a week. He does it sitting on an Eames chaise longue if he’s in Guils, where the books – some auction – are arranged alphabetically by author, alternated with sculptures, some prize, Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra, Campbell’s soup cans and a dedicated portrait of Madonna. There he buys them in Viladesau, in the main street of Puigcerdà ; in Barcelona he usually does it at the Casa del Libro. He likes the role, the smell is not to be emphasized.
He is anguished that he won’t be able to get into any story and gives him two hundred pages of margin. If he captivates you, that will be the book that he gives to his friends. Lately, A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, “wonderful from the first word.” He will have given away more than a hundred times Beber de cine, by José Luis Garci. He discovered the Paneros in El desencanto, by Chávarri, and El lugar del hijo, by Leopoldo MarÃa, impressed him. Also The War at the End of the World, by Vargas Llosa. He had a good friendship with Ãlvaro Mutis, he sent him ham to Mexico among his books.
He says that before there was a lot of wisdom and now there is a lot of modernity. He is passionate about Filmin, black and white cinema, Last Tango in Paris, which for him makes up a marvelous trilogy: Bertolucci’s film –which is stuck in his heart–, Gato Barbieri’s music and a novel ” brutal”. He gets goosebumps thinking about the ending. And the paradox: even though he is a benchmark in the cocktail world, De las Muelas is not much of a drinker, but he would trade few things for a book. As a joke, his wife Lourdes calls him “the king of the night.” Because the night interests her in another sense, she assures: “It is dark, perfect for cinema and literature.”
