Eduardo Mendoza has been signing books at Sant Jordi for more than half a century (he published his first novel, La verdad sobre el caso Savolta, in 1975), but never until today had he had to do so accompanied by a bodyguard. An ironic comment about the celebration of May 23 (one must say Book Day, he came to say, because the figure of the saint “has nothing to do with books or writers, Sant Jordi was an animal abuser and probably couldn’t read”) ignited the flame of indignation in pro-independence sectors, with the Joventut Nacionalista de Catalunya (Junts’ youth wing) announcing a campaign for the Generalitat to withdraw his Creu de Sant Jordi, and from the anonymity of social networks there was even a call to burn the author’s books, taking advantage of the Sant Joan bonfires.
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“It was just a joke. I think everyone has understood it now,” Mendoza himself concluded the matter in practically the only statements he made today throughout the day. He made them to journalist Isabel Pastor, from La Sexta. It was right at the beginning of a marathon day that started at 11 in the morning at the Documenta stand on Passeig de Gràcia and is scheduled to end nine hours later at Demos, the bookstore in his Sant Gervasi neighborhood. If anyone feared a protest, within minutes it became clear that the chances of it happening were remote. Only comments overheard that the writer wasn’t even meant to hear (“not even water for him after what he said the other day”).
The city’s possibly most beloved writer, at 82, suddenly needs security
Mendoza, who appeared in the afternoon with a dragon from whose mouth a rose emerged pinned to his lapel, gathered the longest queues and the most loving fans, and did not stop signing copies of La intriga del funeral inconveniente (“this pointless intrigue,” he writes in the dedication to a nonagenarian who drags a chair to rest while waiting her turn) and old copies of Sin noticias de Gurb or La ciudad de los prodigios that their owners bring him with genuine veneration.
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But in the image of the kind and smiling writer who does not speak to the press (“he wants to focus on the readers,” justifies his editor, Elena Ramírez, director of Seix Barral), shielded behind a security man at the entrance of the stalls and on his tours around the city, there is something deeply sad and disconcerting. The city’s possibly most beloved writer, 82 years old, needs a bodyguard.
