Mr. Lotari, whom the reader of Julià de Jòdar (Badalona, ??1942) knows because he plays a leading role in El metall impur, the third novel in the trilogy L’atzar i les ombres, returns with the idea of ??extending the search for that novel in the entirety of the literary production, the political ideas and the family, sentimental and sexual life of Gabriel Caballero, the author’s alter ego. Lotari is the name of a character in Cervantes. His friend Anselmo instructs him to watch over his lover, to see if she is faithful to him. Lotari gets involved and Anselmo lives deceived and happy. It is a vaudeville story that ties in with the atmosphere of La casa tapiada, where loyalty and freedom play a major role. Beyond that, it is necessary to look for an epistemological meaning. Lotari goes into Caballero’s work in search of the sterile truth (the reality behind the fiction) and finds the fertile truth of the voice and opinions of others in a work of new creation.
From the self-task of finding out what is real and what is not real from the stories that Caballero tells in his books, Lotari ends up living in concubinage with these stories, he is himself part of the story and creator of a new Gabriel Caballero amplified, richer, more intense which, in the final part of the novel, reaches one of those moments of humanity that appear in all of Jòdar’s books – the man who in the hospital looks after the son he has had an accident in one of Zapata’s texts in Encants, the appearance of Lilà at the end of The Traffic of the Fairies, the portrait of Natàlia Vidal sick in the residence –: a peak. It is not surprising that in the last pages the narrator evokes the death of Maria Callas: the novel ends with an operatic crescendo.
A friend points out to me that La casa tapiada is dedicated to psychoanalysts. Jòdar’s great merit is to have turned psychoanalytic research into an impressive work of art. That at the same time it is a multifaceted, contrasted, human chronicle, full of first-hand stories of political life, social movements, theatre, literature, historiography. Having been a first-line witness offers a lot of interesting details and the possibility of digging through the neglected or forbidden branches of the tree of Catalonia’s history. The same friend, with whom we read the novel in parallel, as if we were characters in a book containing The Walled House with Us Inside, shows me the importance of Ry?nosuke Akutagawa’s Rash?mon filmed by Kurosawa in the composition of the book. Jòdar himself refers to it, alongside Faulkner, Espriu, Gabriel Ferrater, Larra, Terenci Moix and Borges. The same story told through several voices, even the voice of a specter. Other times, for the purpose of Impure metal, I have talked about Heinrich Böll’s Portrait of a group with a lady, which uses the resource of the survey. In any case, there is no single truth, nor is Gabriel Caballero always the same person. Colleagues from the paint factory, friends from the independent theater, fellow political adventurers, lovers and even a quillo from Poble Sec, see him as a seductive man and as a bell ringer, as an arrogant guy and as insecure, like a man who makes women miserable and like a prince blue.
Readers who are fresh from reading Jòdar’s books – especially The Man Who Loved Natàlia Vidal and Impure Metal – many of these stories – and we could even say many of these problems – are familiar with them. Because – at least in the case of L’home que va estima Natàlia Vidal – there is a desire to return to an absorbing, obsessive subject, a great love, with strengthened literary expertise, knowing more about it after two long decades of writing novels and also the distance that the eighty or almost eighty years give, compared to the sixty he was when he first wrote the story, which has now deepened and gained in emotion, nuances and contrasts . It must be said that the ordinary reader can read La casa tapiada without needing to be in the case of the books that precede it.
If up to half of the book the reinterpretation has a lot of weight, the entire other half is new. He describes the Barcelona of the seventies: the birth of the autonomous movements, the drift of the PSUC and the splinters of Bandera Roja towards pactism, the world of the Ruedo Ibérico publishing house, in Paris, and the birth of independence. But all this, which could be very interesting in a chronicle, is treated with human density in the novel. There is nothing that hurts more than an author who has been a good author who in old age repeats himself, softens or deflates. Jòdar, on the other hand, has written his most powerful novel, a book that unsettles and upsets you while you read it and that, once finished, gives you a dizzying sense of fullness.
