Let’s start at the end. For tonight, when La Vanguardia celebrates Sant Jordi at the Alma Hotel. Upon entering, on a lectern, as a declaration of principles, is the immense Aurea Dicta in which the artist Miquel Barceló dialogues with thinkers such as Virgil, Cicero or Seneca. Every time Joaquín Ausejo passes by, he changes one of its 228 pages at random, “there is not a single aphorism that is not right.” He is left open by: “L’avar no fa res ben fet, sinó quan el mor.” In the dining room, among photographs by Jordi Bernadó, three shelves hold titles from Roca Editorial, an edition of Don Quixote, paintings by Perico Pastor – who illustrates the restaurant’s menu – and “some provocation”, such as a ‘Stalin’ visible from the terrace .
There are also poetry books and copies dedicated by friends, among which Three Enigmas for the Organization, by Eduardo Mendoza, did not last even ten minutes. “Except in a bookstore, in other places stealing books is an obligation,” says Ausejo. It is a first-class marketing operation, he assures, because many carry the hotel’s bookplate (a flower from the garden and the Borges quote: “The literature is nothing more than a directed dream.”) There is no shortage of those by Acantilado, which his partner Sandra Ollo edits and gives him fresh off the press.
Through her four-year-old daughter Violeta, she discovered Elena Fortún and The Art of Telling Stories to Children, “a virguería.” And when her 38-year-old son was little, he discovered Rodari in the Alfaguara Juvenil collection. But in his house, in the small Navarrese town of Corella, there were hardly any books: the Herder universal encyclopedia, Treasure Island, and those on machines and tools from his father, who had a mechanical workshop until he applied to be a teacher at the institute. Gonzalo de Berceo, in Alfaro.
Specializing in agriculture, livestock and canning, Ausejo studied there. He was fortunate to be taught literature by Fernando Ferreró: he played songs by the Beatles and discovered a new world for them with books that did not appear in the textbook (a manual by José Manuel Blecua). Thus he read Viaje a la Alcarria, by Cela, or Canetti, or Latin American literature and science fiction, such as R.U.R., by the Capek brothers. He had to order them. Every week he received a newsletter from the Monitor. Bruguera’s first collections appeared, he bought Conversar y convincing as a teenager; He loved the mansions of Ulloa.
He maintained contact with Ferreró, and a few years ago he asked him what Juan Ramón Jiménez was referring to with The Water Thief, which gives its name to a hotel where they gave him Olvidos de Granada. But long before that, Ausejo started naval engineering at the University of Madrid, then moved on to Economics. In college, which “had a brutal cultural activity,” he read all of Nietzsche, influenced by his roommate, and the neoclassicals and marginalists in the college library. He was surprised that Adam Smith based The Wealth of Nations on Theory of Moral Sentiments. He did not get past the third page of Capital, but he was interested in Marx’s analysis of historical development based on economic material: to do something, you must first be aware of what you are, “I apply this here every day.”
After his military service in Barcelona, ??teaching vocational training classes in Maresme, and a time in Badalona, ??Antonio Catalán, also from Corella and director of NH, told him: “Come work with me,” and he would create a story contest. In 2005 he would discover Adela Cortina and her Business Ethics. She has always been attracted to “what in my town they call honesty,” which is why she doesn’t like autofiction. He highly values ??what is said and how it is said, and in this sense, a good translation is essential: Dante’s Comedy resisted him until he read José María Micó’s version.
His is an expanded reading; When something catches his attention, he pulls the thread. Thus, a book by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben can take you to the seminars that Heidegger did in the late sixties. They are downstairs, in a library divided by gastronomy (“my friend Victor Gómez Pin says that we eat with memory”), architecture, some ‘management’. And on the table, a selection of those prepared to give to those who he thinks will like them, whether it is Sant Jordi or not.
