Let’s start at the end. For this evening, when La Vanguardia celebrates Sant Jordi at the Alma hotel. When we enter, on top of a lectern, as a declaration of principles, there is the immense Aurea Dicta, in which Miquel Barceló dialogues with thinkers such as Virgil, Cicero or Seneca. Every time Joaquín Ausejo passes by, he changes one of the 228 pages at random, “there is no aphorism that is not good”. It remains open because: “The miser does nothing well, except when he dies”. In the dining room, among photographs by Jordi Bernadó, three shelves house titles from Roca Editorial, an edition of Don Quixote, paintings by Perico Pastor – who illustrates the restaurant’s menu – and “some provocation”, such as a Stalin visible from the terrace .
There are also books of poetry and copies dedicated by friends, including Tres enigmas para la Organización, by Eduardo Mendoza, which did not even last ten minutes. “Except in a bookstore, in other places stealing books is an obligation,” says Ausejo. It’s a first-class marketing operation, he says, because many have the hotel’s ex-libris (a flower from the garden and Borges’ phrase: “Literature is nothing more than a directed dream”). There is no shortage of those by Acantilado, which is edited by his partner Sandra Ollo and receives just off the press.
Thanks to his 4-year-old daughter Violeta, he discovered Elena Fortún and El arte de contar cuentos a los niños, “a wonder”. And when his 38-year-old son was young, he discovered Gianni Rodari in Alfaguara Juvenil. But in his home, in the Navarrese town of Corella, there were barely any books: the universal encyclopedia Herder, L’illa del tresor, and the machines and tools of his father, who had a mechanical workshop until he objected to to be a teacher at the Gonzal or Berceo labor institute, in Alfaro.
Specializing in agriculture, livestock and canning, Ausejo studied there, with the good fortune that he was taught literature by Fernando Ferreró, who played Beatles songs on the guitar and discovered a new world for them with books that did not come out in the text (a manual by José Manuel Blecua). So I read Viaje a la Alcarria, by Cela, or Canetti, or Spanish-American literature and science fiction, such as R.U.R., by the Capek brothers. I had to order them. Every week I received a fascicle from the Monitor. Bruguera’s first collections came out, he bought Conversar y convencer as a teenager; He loved Los pazos de Ulloa.
He maintained contact with Ferreró. A few years ago, I asked him what Juan Ramón Jiménez was referring to with El ladrón de agua que dona noma a hotel where he was given Olvidos de Granada. But long before that, Ausejo began Naval Engineering at the University of Madrid and then switched to Economics. At school, which “had brutal cultural activity”, I read all of Nietzsche, as well as the neoclassics and marginalists in the faculty library. He didn’t get past the third page of Capital, but he was interested in Marx’s analysis of historical events based on economic material: to do anything, you must first be aware of what you are, “I apply it here every day “.
After the mili in Barcelona, ??teaching FP classes at Maresme, and for a time in Badalona, ??Antonio Catalán, also from Corella and director of NH, said to him: “Come work with me”; I would create a story contest there. In 2005 he would discover Adela Cortina and its company ethics. He has always been attracted to “what my people call honesty”, which is why he doesn’t like self-fiction. He values ??what is said and how it is said, and in this sense, a good translation is essential: Dante’s Comedy resisted him until he read José María Micó’s version.
His is an expanded reading; when something catches his eye, he pulls the trigger: a book by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes him to the seminars that Heidegger gave in the late sixties. They are downstairs, in a library divided by gastronomy (“my friend Víctor Gómez Pin says we eat with memory”), architecture, some management. And on the table, a selection of those prepared to give as gifts to those who think they will like them, be it Sant Jordi or not.
