Marsé already rests with Balcells

Carmen Balcells and Juan Marsé, in a photo provided by the writer's family.

Every January 8, my father [the writer Juan Marsé] used to search the pages of this newspaper for a little hidden wink, on the occasion of his anniversary, because many of his friends wrote here and still write.

I am writing to them - to their colleagues and to their friends in particular, and to their readers in general - to tell them something that I imagine they will like to know, and that they will probably not find posted on social networks.

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Juan Marsé was also human

Let's see, last December my brother and I delivered 10% of our father's ashes to Luis Miguel Palomares, Carmen Balcells' son, at the helm of the literary agency since she passed away in 2015. We were thus keeping our word given by our father to his agent "of all life, of this and that of hereafter", making one of Groucho Marx's brilliant ideas his own. He did not care about the remaining 90% of the ashes, for him as if we threw them into the toilet, he said, and then flushed them. He didn't believe in anything, but he did. He believed in Carmen Balcells. He also believed in Groucho Marx.

We heard her say it so many times, jokingly and seriously, in public and in private, sober and less sober, but the fact is that in the end she left five years before, and the subject was not discussed again. It was during this past month of July, preparing the tribute that the Barcelona City Council dedicated to him to the year of his death, when I had to listen to his speech at the Cervantes award ceremony, and there I heard him say it again, loud and of course: "Dear Carmen, you have given me so many joys that I have ordered, for when I die, that they incinerate me and give you 10% of my ashes." Okay, understood, I said to myself this time. Why not.

It was Tuesday, December 14, in Santa Fe de Segarra, the town where Carmen Balcells was born, and where she is buried. Luis Miguel received us with his usual generosity and sensitivity: a cup of broth that he had prepared for us at dawn, a hole dug in the frozen ground, and a tree ready to be planted, a strawberry tree, since the carob tree was chosen as the first option, cold climates or frosts are not for him ... Well, with four degrees of temperature we got down to work. Witnesses in the fog, the

from the entire Balcells Agency, from the newest to the retired.

Then we ate and drank, we cried and laughed, we celebrated life and death, together for a while in that space so fascinating as rare, increasingly difficult to find, that so exotic territory called intimacy.

Juan Marsé would be 89 years old today.

Alejandro and Berta Marsé, children of the writer and Joaquina Hoyas, in front of the place where the author's ashes have been buried.