Quimi Portet likes unknown worlds and explorers’ diaries. For example, those of Captain Cook, or Dr. Livingstone, or Lewis and Clarke. Maybe that’s why his library has a scattered order. Because looking for a book becomes an adventure, she finds others and says it’s like a mystery. They are divided into three shelves, in a cozy living room, where there is a recording booth that looks like an elevator (he assures that it is temporary), his work table in front of a window that overlooks the old town of Vic, and twenty-seven guitars that they want heat; those prior to their 29 years were borrowed. She turned 65 in October. She has lived here for twenty years, and the first shelf – behind the television – was the work of an architect friend. Shortly after, the carpenter Garriga made the main one, on which there is a framed drawing by Pilarín Bayés and a collection of caganers. And when she was small, she needed another one under the stairs that leads to the attic, where there are CDs and more books, these by Miu, “la meva senyora”; she smiles when calling her that.
On the center table, between the sofas and next to some metal-rimmed glasses, I see History of Music of the 20th Century (Electronics), by Pau Riba, and Contact Journalism, by Miquel Bonet; Portet and the cook Maria Nicolau accompanied the author in the presentation of Foster
Reading abstracts him from the everyday. He comments that, with the amount of information and stimuli we are overwhelmed with, there is something romantic and old-fashioned about her. If Nintendo and PlayStation had existed at the time of Last in Line, surely he wouldn’t have spent so many hours in the van reading on tour. Thus he discovered a country. He read Josep Pla, Pere Calders, Manuel de Pedrolo, Terenci Moix, Gabriel Ferrater, Montserrat Roig, who signed a book for him; also Francesc Pujols, whom he does not always understand and with whom he laughs a lot, he quotes: “Poor noi, such a sad thing as life i haver-se-la de guanyar”. Before he had discovered surrealist poetry, Breton, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti. And when he was going to school, a friend from the university recommended Vercoquin et le plankton, the first novel by Boris Vian.
On the main shelf I see books in French (Rabelais, Proust), in English (Sharpe), in Italian (Umberto Eco, Giovanni Verga), many dictionaries. He likes languages. He has tried to study German several times. The last one, just before the pandemic. He has an ex-libris made by a Neapolitan gentleman, and notebooks where I imagine there are songs. He has maps from when he was riding a motorcycle and two Beatles tapes; As a child he believed that they had released a record called Part 2 because it was the one that ran at home. Yes, the Complete Works of Santiago Rusiñol are located, under the stairs. He is the one who has given the most to his friends. The copy he has was published in 1956, and seems to have been dedicated by about twenty students to a professor with an illegible name. He likes to lend books and, since he lives surrounded by good people, they always return them.
He says that reading gives value to memory and longing, and when you are young you miss the future. That he is interested in adventure books perhaps responds to an entrenched part of childhood, he adds. He also likes astronauts, but those who traveled to the moon, not those who traveled the distance from Barcelona to Mallorca upwards. His genre would be time travel and Planet of the Apes, with Charlton Heston; science fiction wins with the image. He suddenly remembers a book from 1896 entitled In Abissinia. Alla Terra dei Gaia. The author, Gustavo Bianchi, was sending letters from his expedition through Africa to the Geographical Society of Milan. Until the letters stopped coming. According to the illustrations in the book, a tribe ate it. When showing it to me, Portet exclaims: “Colossal freak out”.
