It is the typical story of the found manuscript, but really: Montserrat Bacardí was working on the biography of Teresa Pàmies (Balaguer, 1919-Granada 2012) and needed to consult the General Archives of the Administration of Alcalá de Henares, that is to say, the file of censorship. Consulting the index – “it’s chaos, and all the Catalan names are misspelled”, he says – he found a title that didn’t sound right to him and asked for a copy, which took a year to send him, but it was worth it because it contained a completely unpublished manuscript, Una noia i un soldat, which also corresponds to the writer’s first finished novel, dated February 1972, and which the publishing house Adesiara has just published.
His son Sergi Pàmies explains that the first news they really had about it was through Bacardí, who passed them a copy: “We were not surprised as a find, but it was complete and finished, and that after all, what my mother wanted at that time was to publish, and I should have thought that if that one wasn’t published then she would have written another.” In the writer’s opinion, in retrospect, “the novel was like the greatest hits of what he would publish later, with that bit of taste for melodramatic customs, but which is very good, and with an unmistakable style”. “We gave permission to publish it, and so much, and more so when we knew that the proofreader would be Andreu Rossinyol, which is a complete guarantee”, he adds (Rossinyol was also the proofreader of Sergi Pàmies’ first books at Quaderns Crema).
Bacardí, who has also just published the biography La veritat literària de Teresa Pàmies (Eumo), III Ricard Torrents Bertrana essay prize, remembers that Teresa Pàmies had many problems with censorship, to the point where she even had a censor specialist, Francisco Fernández Jardón.
And it is that after a life in exile, with the last years in Paris, Pàmies had just returned to Barcelona in 1971 after having won the Josep Pla prize with Testament in Prague, co-written with his father, and that censorship would not have passed without the award. With Una noia i un soldier, on the other hand, and in view of two different censors, he was implacable with a “novel written with a defiant demagogic demagogue and pamphleteer by others. I often feel like I’m reading a socialist rally in 1937.” As Bacardí explains: “The measure of censorship was not taken”.
According to the scholar, it is the first novel by Pàmies finished here, since he had also started other projects in Paris, as evidenced by the fact that, despite the force of censorship, between 1975 and 1979 he published no less than fifteen books. It deals with “the experience of the war of a young communist that coincides line by line with that of the author, but it is not a doctrinal or party novel, but proceeds from two opposing voices, the monolithic fighter and the soldier in crisis in the face of the disasters of war, with a very successful interior monologue”, and which “has great merit” because he uses “a living language that is much more elaborate than it seems”.
In addition, he points out that “it is the only novel of the Civil War with the eyes of a woman”, even if it was from the combative rear. In a letter, he adds, Pàmies was surprised that they did not allow him to publish it: “I am surprised that they did not let it pass, because it is only a story of passionate love”. Bacardí also vindicates the writer because many of her 50 books cannot be found, and “often the image of an old woman who wrote about old age and death remains, and makes us forget that woman of great fighting spirit with many desire to write an ambitious work”.
