well The day has come. I used to read the obituaries – a sport like any other – until today, March 9, when mine appeared”. This is how the column dedicated to Manuel Brañas González, published in yesterday’s edition of La Vanguardia, begins, the house in which this Barcelona native, born in the Sants district 83 years ago, worked for more than four decades as a printer. Because for Brañas, this newspaper was like his second family.
“He was very happy at the company”, explains his son Agustí, who still has the image of his father dressed in a blue shirt and red embroidered letters on which the name of this letterhead was read. And he details that the person writing the obituary is not actually the protagonist of the funeral, but Agustí. But why is he pretending to be his father? To embody through his words what he felt and also because he liked to read the obituaries in the newspaper. “He always said: ‘I will read those who quit smoking today’, and I promised him that when the time was right I would do his thing”, he explains.
Manuel Brañas stopped smoking on Friday, although he did not practice this habit, except on occasional occasions. His time came after a long battle against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which gradually erased his memories. However, “in the few moments he had lucidity, we would ask him: ‘Father, what have you been working on?’, and he would answer us: ‘Yes, yes, I had to go tonight, because the paper and I left late’”, recounts his son.
Their experiences are part of what it means to produce a new edition of the newspaper every day. In addition to the breaking of a roll of paper, other circumstances, he explained that when there was breaking news “they had to stop machines and redo everything”.
The last years in which he served at La Vanguardia he did it by programming the computers to distribute the copies of the newspaper on the different routes. “He had to make a great effort, because he was a very manual and mechanical person”, remembers his family. However, he passed the test with eagerness so that the printed edition always reached its destination on time while most of the city slept.
After 42 years, Brañas retired from La Vanguardia at the age of 63. Despite this, he continued to be linked to this newspaper as a reader. “One of the funnest occupations I had once retired was reading the newspaper.” Especially the obituaries.
As Agustí remembers in the piece published yesterday, his friends and acquaintances affectionately called him the Vanguar, because he “always spoke very and very well” of the Godó Group. For his family, he was the fox of Sants, because of his dark character, and the marquis, because of his elegance and because it was the same nickname with which he referred to the sports journalist Andrés Astruells. Brañas was a big fan of Barça.
The esquela leaves no doubts about his hobby: “I’ve enjoyed great football nights with a brutal bacon sandwich and beer – may your majesty forgive my cholesterol – but now it doesn’t stop making me angry xDDD”. Being a cook also allowed him to open the heart of a woman with extraordinary eyes, Teresa Sillué Vilà, with whom he shared his life from the age of 20.
“When he met him at the Sants party, he asked him which football team he was from. And if he hadn’t been from Barça, he would have fixed it”, says his son. Far from that, he formed a great household with him. Agustí would like his father’s memory to finally convey a positive message: “May all those who are in a similar situation and have a disease of this type enjoy their family.”
