A musician in the subway exclaimed when he saw him go by: “The last person in Barcelona who reads while walking!” Edu Castro doesn’t know if he’s the last one, but he spends all the time he can reading, and that includes walking. It’s not hard, he says, because as you look down, you know where you’re stepping. At the Palau Blaugrana they have already gotten used to it. But that the roller hockey coach of Barça is passionate about literature is an extravagance in the sector. He likes to teach and transmit to his players things that he has read. No exhibitionism. Quoting seems pedantic to him; although in some press conference he has left everyone speechless referring to Hume or Goethe.
His dream would be to have a library like Umberto Eco’s. At the moment he has a three-year-old because he separated five years ago, and left the books as a tribute to his children, “it’s the best place where they can be.” She dedicates the room in an apartment in Sant Just to her new library, where she moved after the pandemic, with some additions by her partner Maria de ella, among which is the complete work of Josep Pla in Destino. And whose volumes he reads in order, he goes for 11. “The editor decides for you, and you ‘go fent'”. He admits that his method borders on the geeky. For example: as the fourteen volumes of A la recerca del temps perdut with a translation by Pinto were published in Viena Edicions, they gave them away, and he read them. He returns to Joyce’s Ulysses every February 2 (author’s anniversary) and every June 16, Bloomsday.
In the public library near the Palau, he picked up novels alphabetically, which allowed him to discover literature at random. He just got to Barnes. He set out to read the Nobel prizes for literature by seniority: Sully Prudhomme obtained it in 1901, Theodor Mommsen in 1902. From there he jumped to Annie Ernaux –2022–, of whom he has everything published in Angle. Now, when she goes with the team to Camp del Ferro, he buys the Cátedra Hispanic Letters at the Canales bookstore-stationery store. He usually buys the rest at La Central. Never e-books. Every month he rereads A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, which runs to 954 pages. 32 a day. In fact, he knows what day it is by the pages he gets.
Read four or five books at a time, about 25 pages of each a day; if he is at home, lying on the sofa with a coffee. It all started with Crime and Punishment at the age of sixteen in his parents’ caravan, in the Laguna Negra natural park. He was born in Vigo, they lived in Bellvitge. He wanted to know everything to be cool and flirt a lot. At university he tried to seduce a girl with Tres exemplary novels and a prologue by Unamuno. And she did not understand anything. She says: “You find that you are letting things slip, so you develop a retention system. You mark the page, you transfer the quotes to word, you print them, you try to classify all the world’s wisdomâ€.
In literature, he seeks for the dead to speak to him, or the living whom he does not know. They never fail you. He likes worlds that end, The Leopard, The Man Without Qualities. During the pandemic, he read all of Dovlatov’s titles in Labreu. He has The Book of Disquiet in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, and he quotes Pessoa: “I am the size of what I see.” Two shelves above some books by Flâneur, it’s all Bolaño. And next to it, all of Vila-Matas. The vertical journey is one of the few novels in which roller hockey appears. He wants to thank the author for taking him to Walser, to Melville, to the city of Trieste (his new literary love of his and another myth of decadence). And he also wants to thank him for the end of Lejos de Veracruz, because it couldn’t be more perfect: “They’re going to find out. I’m going to fool everyone.”
De Vila-Matas is fascinated by characters who aspire to be penless and disappear, leave without a trace but be missed. Of literature in general, he admires the description of the simple things and the fluency. Synthetic realism and plain language, the contrast between the prosaic and the lyrical. He believes that coaches have to be gassy and make things gassy too. Jorge Guillén said about Machado: “It is marvelous that everything, step by step in the day, is so true with simplicity.” Or going back to Pla: “Life is a complicated and difficult thing, impossible to describe, which consists of an anar fentâ€.
