A lizard sneaks into La Pesquera’s house, on the island of Buda, and Gabi Martínez (Barcelona, ??1971) smiles at it. “It’s a good sign, it will eat the mosquitoes.” The house is simple, with no furniture other than two beds, a couple of closets, a small kitchen and a bulky television, which is almost as big as the table that occupies the room. Although it is from another era, it works perfectly. “But I find it curious that in the Delta you don’t see regional channels like TV3. Anyway, much of the time I was here was spent writing in my notebooks and observing,” he confesses. The result is Delta (Seix Barral / Ara Llibres), which has just arrived in bookstores.
Those four walls became his home for a year and he only had one neighbor nearby “who for personal reasons spent more time outside than inside,” although a few decades ago about seventy families came to share the island. It is not just any home. It is the last house before the sea, the first that it will engulf, “probably within two or three great storms, I estimate in fifteen or twenty years. I don’t think the island can take much more. The first climate refugees could be from the Ebro Delta,” laments the writer, who is once again the protagonist of an unusual experience after isolating himself in Siberia in Extremadura to become a shepherd.
“Wetlands are being lost at three times the rate of forests. In the last century, half of those that existed on the entire planet have been lost. These are worrying data because these are spaces where the most biodiversity in the world is concentrated. It is important to react and do so in a consensual manner. If not, in a few years, we will not see any of this,” the author insists.
Access to Buda is only possible if one stays at the Masia Rural. But Martínez met Guillermo Borés, owner of the private part of the island, who invited him to live in the house for a year. “My initial idea was to stay for three months, but this offer allowed me to experience all the seasons and have a broader vision” of this territory that sees how climate change is accelerating the loss of land to the advance of the sea. His stay also coincided with his 50th birthday, an age at which “there is a lot to reflect on.”
The experience and peace of mind of having the Finestres essay scholarship gave him the opportunity to reflect on the environment and its constant landscape changes, in addition to other personal issues, such as the delicate health situation that his father was going through, who died while he was staying there. “He was a wall painter and always took light into account when working. This made me think a lot about the Mediterranean and my childhood, and how I wanted to write about it all. The Delta had always fascinated us both precisely because of the light. “It was the perfect place.”
The circumstances and geography of the place also allowed him to think about death, something that “we don’t often do because we live frenetically. This is a delta, where a river is supposed to end and another life begins, that of the sea,” explains Martínez on the way to the La Pirenaica viewpoint, from which you can see flamingos in the distance. Animals that “some farmers don’t even want to see, because they step on their rice, but at the same time they understand that there has to be a dialogue with them and with environmental interests.”
This and other conversations are what the writer misses from the administration, which “has prime time busy with recurring topics without realizing that climate change is something important. It is not normal, for example, for us to have 30 degrees in October. We should ask ourselves if we will end up having one season instead of four.”
Martínez believes in the power of art and citizen mobilization “as a way to protect an ecosystem, as happened in the Llobregat Delta with La Ricarda. But this is further away, it is a far west that is ignored. I hope they realize it before it’s too late,” he concludes.
