On the entrance door, Roser Capdevila has painted what you see when you open it: the landing of an attic with the elevator on the right. In the hall there is a photo of when his mother turned 90. Children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren posed as the Queen of England’s guard, with frock coats and hats made of cardboard. The same 2000 he began to draw his diaries. He has them on a custom-looking Ikea shelf, in a hallway with a portrait of his father that leads to one of the two terraces. In the background, depending on the day, you can see the sea. In the same hallway is his own work, more than four hundred titles and translations of Les tres bessones or La bruixa avorrida into Chinese, French, and Japanese.
He dedicated two diaries to the pandemic. In the current he has drawn his 85th birthday last month. She does it with one eye because he sees double, “as if there were little worms in the frames.” She was run over in 2005, and an Ángel and Esperanza (that’s their name) treated her. In 2017, a stroke affected the other eye and her doctor’s name is Socorro. She can no longer read like when she read seven or eight books a week, and with her audiobooks there is no way. She prefers to listen to programs in which authors are interviewed, for example, Més 324.
Xavier Graset comes for breakfast on Tuesdays. She drew on the 352 pages of her book The Pause of Dies and gave him the customized version. Capdevila has lived here with Joan for 55 years, since they got married. They set up a butxaca cabaret together that took them to Paris in 2012. Her respective studios (hers full of brushes and cards) overlook the other terrace. Here was the little wooden house where she worked, and which can now be seen in the garden of the Biblioteca de Catalunya. More books on the door of the hallway that leads to the bathroom, over which legs stick out. She made them because one of her seven grandchildren – all boys – asked where the feet of the girl who was peeking out from the other side of the wall were.
When I was little, there was little for children: Florita magazine, “which was corny,” and for them, Agañas belicas. She read A School for Dolls, illustrated by Mercè Llimona. Then Heidi arrived (the series didn’t exist yet and they didn’t have TV). She was so excited about living in the mountains and sledding that she became obsessed with going to Switzerland. She got a passport after compulsory social service, and she went to Geneva when she was seventeen. “They made me play a Spanish chacha, Heidi, nothing; “The heaters were coal and everything was gray,” but the trip was very important. She was daring, on the weekends she took the train and went to Bern, for example.
His daughters were born in 1969. He remembers that they went to Plaza del Pi to listen to Xesco Boix and he made drawings full of people; He sent him one, which he would use as an album cover. With his older sister, Capdevila had set up a printing business, riding a motorcycle everywhere with a pack on his back to carry orders. It would never have occurred to her to make books about her, until the Teide publishing house contacted her. She likes Pla, Rodoreda, she has read everything she can by Jaume Cabré; If she met him in person, she would tell him, Jo confesso loves it. For a time she was into detective novels, she had Inspector Maigret’s collection in yellow volumes (she was always more into Simenon than Agatha Christie).
In a library that belonged to his father, there are some of the many awards he has obtained; There is also the Bernat Metge, which he started and she continued, “I like to find it every time I pass by here, I think it is one of the most important works that have been done in Catalonia.” He has a first edition of Canigó, which Verdaguer dedicated to his great-grandfather, Josep Maria Valls i Vicens, “a carca who wrote some horrible plays, but, since he was a banker and very rich, they listened to him.” He says that the best time in life is from 40 to 60 years old, because you have acquired security. And that, when you are their age, you think that it is the final stretch: “Not because you have to die, but because every day something new creaks; “You wake up and today it’s the knee, tomorrow it’s the shoulder.” It doesn’t matter. He continues drawing, and doing everything, with the same enthusiasm as always.
