On December 11, 1942, eighteen days before his death, the poet Màrius Torres wrote to his tailor, Ramon Jové, from the Puigdolena sanatorium to tell him that despite some details to polish, the suit he had sent from Lleida was “not even painted” and he also took the opportunity to wish him happy holidays.
The letter from Màrius Torres to Jové will become part of the bulk of letters kept in the Fons Màrius Torres of the University of Lleida, accessible on the website of the Virtual Library, dedicated to the poet and doctor from Lleida, where some 800 digitized ones can be consulted , issued and received by Màrius Torres and members of his family. The original letters are deposited in the Library of Letters, along with the rest of the documentation of his legacy.
Conxita Navarro Tarrats and Carol Feixa Jové – niece and granddaughter respectively of the tailor contacted the Màrius Torres Chair of the University of Lleida (UdL) to donate the original manuscript to the Library of Letters so that it would become part of the Màrius Torres Fund of the UdL to ensure its preservation.
The director of the Màrius Torres chair, Joan Ramon Veny, assures that the anecdote that motivated the sending of the letter is not particularly relevant, but its content is interesting because the wording presents the proverbial features of the courtesy of MàriusTorres that, to justify some small defects in the suit, he affirms that it was his friends from the sanatorium who found them “by dint of looking for them”.
Veny points out that Torres talks about the future without any premonitory indication: “that another year we will be more of a gang to eat… rationing! at Christmas”.
He also tells his tailor that it is not necessary to send the suit to Lleida because he will be able to fix it himself on his next visit to the sanatorium.
“This original, Veny points out, acquires an important added value because it is the last preserved autograph letter of the poet, dated one day after the last handwritten letter known to date: the one he wrote to his friend Joaquim Gili on December 10 of that anus”.
The director of the chair adds that there is still a later letter, the one that the poet addressed to Joan Sales, dated December 14, 1942, of which, however, the original has not been preserved but rather a typewritten transcription that the professor must have made. Sales himself or someone from his circle, perhaps when he was preparing the edition of his Letters to Màrius Torres.
The last donation of correspondence to the chair took place in October 2019, when Helena Malagon Perenya, daughter of Màrius’s cousin, Helena Perenya Pàmies, gave the UdL several typewritten poems and seven letters that the poet will write between 1937 and 1941 to his mother, his father -Javier Malagon- and a friend of the marriage, for its preservation and dissemination.
