On the blank pages at the back of the books, Montserrat Pinyol writes by hand how they have impacted her. It ended Nothing is against the night, by Delphine de Vigan, at 9:30 p.m. on an Easter Sunday, a long time ago. She was in front of the fireplace, in the house that she and Pere Comas have in Torrent. She noted: “Suicides scare me,” and also that her mother had died 16 years ago and she missed her; that she likes having her as a mother. Her parents met through her books: her brother worked in his company, Josep. One day Josep forgot some study shoes and Fermina took them; Upon seeing her, she fell in love with her. Republican military man, he had been in the Agde concentration camp. He would create an important library. Every Sunday, since they were little, he took his three children to the Mercat de Sant Antoni to buy secondhand books.
Until they were university students, Montse and her sister had to be home at nine at night. But they could read what they wanted; for example, at the age of fifteen, The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. She was very studious and did not stop reading. Even now, when she does it, she lives other lives, she forgets about problems, she isolates herself. It’s her passion. She has a framed photo of her absorbed in reading, in the shade of a tree, in La Rochelle. Her sister opted for Philosophy and Letters and her brother for Economics, but she had a calling to be a lawyer. Of course: she was immersed in the generation of ’98, and that of ’27, “she was very unamunian”; She returns a lot to Chekhov, Ibsen, Gogol, Tolstoy. She has had a passion for Dostoyevsky all her life.
She has always lived surrounded by books. Among those who have Comas in the office
They share life and space, but not always readings. Pinyol couldn’t live without Proust, for example, and Comas isn’t too interested. Each one has their personal ex-libris; Hers is the work of the painter and friend Rafael Cidoncha. They have made literary trips to Trieste (Ulysses, Joyce), or to Chile, to Neruda’s three houses, or to Pessoa’s Lisbon. And Pinyol immediately lists Marías, Miller, García Márquez, Borges, Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Machado, Delibes, Ferrante, Coetzee, Kundera, Camus, Cortazar, T.S. Eliot. He has also been marked by Auster, Hustvedt, Salinger, Sabato, Josefina Aldecoa, Rodoreda, Víctor Català, Martín Gaite, Ernaux, Vila-Matas, Nemirovsky. He has read everything by Ángeles Mastretta, Marcela Serrano, Montserrat Roig, Sándor Márai. As he mentions them, more and more come out, Flaubert, Zweig, Ian McEwan: “I just wouldn’t be who I am without all this.”
Buy the books at La Central, Laie or Ona, on the way to the office. Read two or three at a time, in silence or with classical music. Underline them in pencil or pen, write down comments. Next to the bed, she has a shelf for books by Joan Margarit and Rafael Argullol, the two great friends she has had with Ricardo Bofill. They met Margarit once a month to eat in front of the sea. She misses him. Argullol has even given him a notebook so he can write about the people he knows and this city that he loves so much. In fact, Pinyol began writing diaries at the age of eleven, like Anaïs Nin. He continued until he was sixty, “and then I said enough, it’s over.” He has asked her son Pol to burn them when she dies. In any case, written down by hand, her biography is at the end of the books she has read, on pages that are no longer blank.
