At one point in Els murs invisibles, past page fifty, the character he plays as Ramon Mas accompanies his friend Raül and the boy’s mother to the Social Security psychologist. He is a doctor who has no interest in the vailet and who goes through everything. Raül takes advantage of the psychologist leaving the office for a moment, takes his file and reads that he has an intelligence coefficient above average. The news has a phenomenal impact: they had always wanted him to believe that he was a donkey! The teachers knew it and sent him to psychopedagogues, he spent the day filling tests, they told him he would never pass. “These sons of bitches have ruined my life” – he says with a heavy heart.

Ramon Mas (Sant Julià de Vilatorta, 1982) has explained a moment in Vic, which made me think – in another generation – of Miquel Creus’s Ópera acid, which Mas and his partner Ricard Planas recovered as editors of Bad weeds. It is also the subject of Els dics, Irene Solà’s first novel. What life awaits you if you stay in a small town? What will become of your courage and your talent? What will remain of that impulse that made the skateboard fly and turned up the volume of the hard punk groups you used to listen to on CD? At the same time, you can’t always be a vailet, slide on the surface of things, try variations with your skateboard, hear the same records over and over again.

Little by little, the companions who, at the age of fifteen, were around the old sugar factory, choose their path. In 2004, one of the friends, Raül, tried to commit suicide by diverting the smoke from the exhaust pipe inside the Ford Fiesta. The narrator accompanies the friend and tries to reconnect him with life. He takes him to Barcelona and Begur, talks a lot there, invites him to see films. But he nails it when he says that the magic of pop culture is to turn any emotion, even the vilest despair, into an aesthetic matter. The experience doesn’t always go well and sometimes the movies stir up the unfathomable bottom of the pain and the desire to complete. There is no will to interpret, to understand, to look for causes and reasons: only the realization of a personal journey towards nowhere of which Ramon Mas, the narrator, is a kind of stone guest.

There is a portrait of a fallen angel: Raül was the gang leader, unpredictable, creative, imaginative and individualistic. And a requiem for youth and for the drive of a rascal who was not ready to succumb to the grayness of the conservative city without expectations. The narrator went to Barcelona to live and study Philosophy, while the friend went to work at the Casa Tarradellas sausage factory.

These days there is a lot of talk about friendship as a literary theme. The invisible walls, like La cremallera by Martí Sales, who also published Males Herbes, are two great short pieces on this subject. But he writes without melodramatic exuberance or dithyrambic declamations, with a sobriety that honors him. When, for example, he remembers the incident at a Doctor Calypso concert with a gang of bikers who Raül thinks are neo-Nazis and who turn out to be peaceful people, or when they talk about a beggar from Vic, Paco, who they had a crush on, he made them laugh, they loved him, but one day they left him tied to a tree. There is no tender drift or condescension to the memory. Every now and then a sharp sentence jumps out, when he says that skateboarders and poor people are alike because they all spend their lives on the streets. Or when you describe in a short paragraph the feeling of waking up in the morning to find a pile of junk that you took out of the bin last night because you thought it would look so good at home.

This feeling of passing from one reality to another as if waking from a dream occurs at different points in the book and speaks to its romantic nature: between pop fiction and reality, between youth and the maturity of the forties, between life and death.