Literature, yes, but also diets, clothing, toothaches, money, dream interpretation, past and future encounters… For several years, from the sixties until her death, Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908-Girona, 1983) exchanged letters with some of the friends she had met while working at the Comissariat de Propaganda of the Generalitat during the war, now collected in Cartes a les amigues retrobades. De la Catalunya republicana a Romanyà (Sidillà), edited by Anna Maria Saludes Amat and Araceli Bruch Pla.
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The war and exile had separated the writer, Susina Amat (Barcelona, 1912-1983), Julieta Franquesa (Barcelona, 1910-Geneva, 1987) and Carme Manrubia (Almería, 1916-Girona, 1998), until two decades later they began to meet again and with the resumption of the relationship, the letters returned. The edition is a display of friendship, since Saludes, who passed away last October, just before finishing the book, was Amat’s daughter and also shared time and letters with the writer, while Bruch met her in the late seventies, when she first brought to the stage a theatrical production based on her stories, La sala de les nines – among others Maria-Mercè Marçal, Maria del Mar Bonet, Marina Rossell, Nina Pawlowsky and Joan Oller participated – and later L’Hostal de les tres Camèlies, the only play by Rodoreda that was performed during her lifetime, which this coming November will arrive at the TNC directed by Carme Portaceli.
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From Geneva, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona and Romanyà de la Selva, Rodoreda wrote 170 letters, until now kept by the Fundació Mercè Rodoreda and intended for scholars, which have finally ceased to be unpublished. On May 10, 1972, for example, the author of La plaça del Diamant writes from Geneva to Susina Amat: “Dear Easter Mona: […] I, believing you, do not take pills to curb hunger and now weigh sixty kilograms instead of fifty-four, which is my normal weight. Tomorrow I will start stuffing myself.”
Amat, from Barcelona, replies: “Dear and beloved friend of Easter Mona: It seems to me that you are giving me a bit of blackmail. First with my desire to have you close and now with the threat of pills. Don’t you remember that taking the Pill was the beginning of a great revolution? Seriously, Mercè, a bit of sanity! […] You have no right to ruin the health of the best writer in the Catalan language. Nor that of my dearest friend. Pills are good for nothing but harm. […] If the fashion is in skeletons, the fashion is wrong, not you. Other women have to adjust to your weight. Since we cannot reach your level!”
A few days later, the writer tells her she has “found a ‘magic and harmless pill’: food without salt, or almost no salt. Right now I have boiled cabbage and carrot ready to devour and I recoil as if I had a soup plate full of live frogs in front of me. Let’s see what happens.”
“I have found a magic and harmless pill: food without salt. […] I have boiled cabbage and carrot ready to cover”
To Julieta Franquesa, on March 23, 1975, she writes: “I can’t walk for too long because my knee gets heavy and all the muscles in my thigh. That’s why I’m on a diet of vegetables and canned asparagus – which require little effort – and mineral water in large doses… and not a drop of alcohol. I really want to drink a whisky, even if it’s watered down…”
Often in the letters they update each other about the other friends as well, and Rodoreda often updates them on literary or publishing news – some translations into Spanish, Czech or Japanese – some article about her, or what she is writing whether stories or her great novels or theater, so little known. Other times, however, Rodoreda’s letters have practical reasons, especially those sent to Franquesa, since she also lives in Switzerland – before resuming contact, they met by chance on the bus – and the writer asks her for help with remote errands, such as collecting her accumulating mail.
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Part of the correspondence with Manrubia is also of this type, when she already has a residence in Romanyà, first in her house and then in the one she builds, but the content of some of those Manrubia sends her, in November 1973, is of a tone between spiritual and sentimental. “Now I feel myself sprouting and I have such an exaggerated sprout that if I don’t know how to stop myself I might end up drowned by an excess of branches and leaves. I need you Mercè, I need you to laugh at me and with your balance stop an imagination that takes me I don’t know where,” she says in one of them. And in another: “There are things that should never be said. Inside us arises a vague, though strong, impression that one does not want to pick up with thought so as not to give it concrete form. One rejects it incipiently for fear of discovering its meaning.” Later, Manrubia’s letters will return to everyday matters, but she destroyed Rodoreda’s letters, of which only a draft remains.
What was the nature of their relationship? Bruch is convinced they were simply very good friends. “Manrubia fell in love with Rodoreda, but somehow they all fell in love, because she was a beacon, and sometimes it seemed they competed to see who loved her more. Going to Romanyà did Rodoreda good, where they shared their passion for plants and she was very happy.”
Araceli Bruch advocates for the theater
Besides Rodoreda’s letters, the book contains a profusion of notes that put them in context, along with an introduction that explains in detail the process leading to the edition. It is also enriched with three portraits that Saludes wrote of Amat, Franquesa and Manrubia, whom she knew well; a text by the scholar Giuseppe Grilli, who is occasionally cited in the correspondence, and a photographic and documentary appendix.
Finally, Araceli Bruch has been able to advocate not only for the writer’s theater but also to undo a misunderstanding from years ago. It had been said that due to the poor reception of the staging of L’Hostal de les tres Camèlies in 1979 in Sitges, Rodoreda had been discouraged as a playwright, which Bruch denies by explaining the relationship she established with the writer, who shortly after had sent her a new play, El maniquí, which was not performed until 1999.
For years, Bruch worked to publicize and promote Rodoreda’s theatrical facet, which was finally collected in an edition by Enric Gallén and Gerard Guerra in 2019 (Fundació Mercè Rodoreda del Institut d’Estudis Catalans), and which includes Un dia, La senyora Florentina i el seu amor Homer, El maniquí, El parc de les magnòlies, L’hostal de les tres camèlies and the unfinished Maria-Blanca, Joc de bruixes and Sense títol.
Mariàngela Vilallonga, emeritus professor at the UdG and expert on the writer, has another view, drawn from the study of Manrubia, of whom she is preparing a biography. For her, there is no doubt that the relationship they had was as a couple. But she is grateful that finally “the letters are accessible to everyone, and that each one can make their own interpretation. Publishing writers’ correspondence is like removing the bandages from Egyptian mummies.” In any case, now it is up to the readers.
Are there unpublished letters left? There are still letters, as well as a brief diary written in a notebook after the death of Joan Prat, Armand Obiols, the writer’s partner, which Vilallonga says is “very raw,” but she does not know if it will be published. Rodoreda never ends.
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