On the back cover of A les dues seran les tres, Sergi Pàmies (Paris, 1960) there is a phrase by Enrique Vila-Matas. He says that in recent years, the more brutally biographical Pàmies is, the more fictional his literature is. It is one of those round phrases, with a point of provocative paradox, that flatter the author because they make the weight fall on literature, on creation. The biography is a pretext to reach the fiction that is the desirable horizon. It’s an approach that I like, although I don’t see clearly that this is the case. The latest books by Sergi Pàmies are part of a genre – as noble as pure fiction or fiction more or less mixed with autobiography – which is confession.
Just as Saint Augustine explains his childhood up to the age of fourteen, how he became a follower of Manichaeism and how he met Ambrose of Milan to end up reflecting on memory, creation and time, Pàmies talks about his early years in the suburbs of Paris, of the friends of Gennevilliers and Barcelona, ??the knowledge of figures who have had a decisive weight in his career – Johann Cruyff and Manolo Vázquez Montalbán –, of his illnesses and his hypochondria. And from here it goes to philosophical questions about memory, the fragility of life or the art of telling stories. More than the provenance of this or that other event, of whether we can conclude what is lived, more or less reworked or completely invented, there is the tone, which seeks to establish with the reader a complicit communication: that which I will explain to you belongs to my privacy, I have not explained it to anyone, it contains a key of myself that opens the lock of higher and more abstract doors.
So, for example, one of the best stories in the book, Perquê no toco la guitarra, which reminds a little of what he published years ago about the raincoats of his father and his communist friends, who wore them with such style. Based on the story of the mother who, because she never had money, couldn’t buy the clarinet for the little boy that he wanted and who ended up buying him a so-called cadet guitar – smaller than a normal guitar -, Pàmies explains all the relationship he has had with guitars. Starting with the wound of the beginning – a little boy’s guitar that reveals his dependence – until the glorious moment when, singing the songs he learned at home – the Nova Cançó and the anti-Franco songbook – he triumphs at the progressive school. And later, when you buy one of those fabulous Ovation, electrified acoustics. To finish explaining the moment when, seeing the great guitarists, he thinks that he will never be able to play like them and the decadence and brittleness of the instruments begins. To finish at the starting point: the clarinet. All this is embroidered with delicacy and erudition. Pàmies has created a world of his own references – musicians, writers, journalists – where he has quenched his self-taught thirst. The story explains many things about himself and his traumas and about the way of understanding creation, based on musical models.
Fiction, invention, fantasy are part of autobiography. These are projections of oneself, ghosts of the subconscious, emanations of the self that, somewhat overwhelmingly, fill Pàmies’ books. The portrait of the parents, who we have seen suffer in the years of Francoism and exile, exult in the transition, until they grow old and die; and of the children, who we have followed as they grew in the midst of all kinds of apprehensions, to the point that it is as if, in a certain way, we know them, it is always linked to the narrator who is the absolute center of the experience. Pàmies knows a lot, the stories work wonderfully and always have bright moments, sometimes from a minimal anecdote, like that time (Fairs and congresses) that a lecturer, a German writer from Oxford, his face lights up when, rummaging through his rucksack, he finds the tangerine he’s carrying for the return trip. Pàmies offers the reader a mandarin of sensitivity and intelligence.
