From now on, the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Library in the district of Sant Martí, will shine in its signs the name of Carmen Balcells, with whom the city has settled a debt by dedicating a square, in an act presided over by the mayoress Ada Colau and that led, on Friday afternoon, the writer and journalist Juan Cruz. Myth and essential addition that of Balcells in the feminization of the Barcelona gazetteer.
Surely the literary super agent With a license to kill, he would have protested for some detail during the inauguration of his square, but deep down he would have loved the location, next to a library. Because of her love for books (“I am a paper woman”) and, second, because of her complicity with the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, as the writer and academic recalled. Carmen Riera in a parliament full of juicy anecdotes. Like this conversation between the two:
“Do you love me, Carmen?” Gabo asked him one fine day.
“I can’t answer you. You are 36.2% of the agency’s turnover.
And this note in verse that the great sent him Juan Carlos Onetti, another of the mainstays of the Latin American ‘boom’ between 1960 and 1970: «I love you, Carmen Balcells, / whether with or without a check. / My heart vibrates more / when I discover a heel ».
One before and one after
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Boss, atomic, explosive, bossy, exceptional, hypergenerous, grumpy, an extraordinary personality. It is impossible to separate the name of the white popess of the discovery and consolidation of that batch of novelists who crossed the ocean to dazzle us and turn the city into the international capital of literature and publishing: Barcelona was the place to be in those effervescent years. Balcells also meant a before and after in the defense of copyright; the editors feared her more than a cloudy one, including Jose Manuel Lara Hernandez, another character, who, despite the affection he professed for her, said of her: “This bastard is going to teach all the agents to be equal and they will not let us live” (Riera tells it in the biography ‘Carmen Balcells, trafficker in words ‘).
It was a peaceful Friday afternoon, with an adolescent sun playing with the pines and plane trees of the triangular square, located in the space between Selva de Mar, Treball and Concili streets in Trento. The continuers of the agent’s legacy, her son, Luis Miguel Palomares Balcells, and her granddaughter Laura, they discovered the marble plaque with his name, while it sounded ‘Paraules d’amor’, by Joan Manuel Serrat. In the background, a handful of residents of Calle de Perú were protesting against the installation of a bike lane (another one) that leaves them without parking. The urban tetris.