Jordi Boixadós: “Is regret or remorse better?”

Novelist, translator, musician and actor, Jordi Boixadós (1958) wrote in his last novel, Donar-ho tot (The Bell), a story that “is neither autobiographical nor autofictional, although it is true that there are many personal anecdotes that made it easier for me to follow the course of the narrator's way of thinking and try to write as he thinks.”

The play begins with a man in his sixties living isolated in a remote house in Occitania, where a visit from a woman leads him to take an exhaustive look at his life, marked by his lack of initiative, an element that, the author explains, was one of the sparks: “I wanted to build two characters who approach life completely differently: one is very daring and ambitious and will step on whoever it takes, and the other is not at all ambitious, has ideas that he can't quite put into practice, he's a coward, and life takes him away because he's incapable of facing it. I don't know what's better, I suppose being daring, but you never know.”

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For the writer, the narrator, whose name we don't know, "has reactions that can be difficult to understand. He reminded me of some of the strange reactions of characters in Swedish novels—in addition to Swedish, he translates from English, French, and Italian. They have a different mentality, and in the end, this character explains himself. In my early youth, I also got a little carried away and lacked drive, but at a certain point, you shake yourself and decide you can't continue like this, unlike the character. Now, after writing it for a while, I began to identify with him, to the point where I had to remind myself that I'm not like that."

Its protagonist, moreover, is marked by a fatherhood he can't fulfill: "Someone explained to me that he had a married lover and she had gotten pregnant, and I wondered what I would do if it happened to me, how I would react. I have a 44-year-old son; I was already a father at 23, and I thought I'd do it quite differently now. There's a lot of talk about motherhood, but it's just that I don't care, and very little about fatherhood."

"Those of us who were 17 and entered university the day Franco died have been very lucky."

A third element that triggered the novel was mental health, as there is a character with significant issues, “the typical person who is incredibly sensitive but has psychiatric problems, who is very creative but has a terrible time,” says Boixadós. “Not many years ago, all of this was hidden, but the person who suffers isn't to blame; it's like someone unlucky enough to have a liver or heart problem. It's clear that experiencing these issues firsthand has left a lasting impression on me, because there are three consecutive novels where it appears, although here it takes on greater importance. It also reflects on how fortunate it is that today there are medicines thanks to which sick people can lead normal lives.”

The novel is narrated on two levels: on the one hand, the present, and on the other, the past, especially the excitement of the transition: "I lived through it. Those of us who were 17 and started university the day Franco died were very lucky, because we lived it as if it had no limits and as if the world were wonderful and magical, and in part we still retain that. We didn't notice many of the problems, because at any moment everything could have exploded; just think of the Atocha crimes, ETA, Puig Antich... We had a bit of a post-hippy mentality."

These are elements that make the narrator wonder if he could have had a different life, if he had been more determined or had led the band he had, as he also asserts the role of the second in command: "It's a figure who is part of the leadership, but it doesn't seem like it, because he's often in the shadows. The narrator is lucid, and in his reflection he feels great regret. But what's better: regret for not having done what you should have done or remorse for having done something because you believed in it and then hurt someone? As a consequence of this, there is loneliness, and in fact his big decision is to break away from everything, lock himself away, and go live far away, where he rebuilds himself."

In addition to having had a couple of bands as a teenager and young adult, Boixadós has made a career as a singer-songwriter, with six albums released—and currently in the writers' band Malalletra—“a passion that fades and rekindles, but always returns,” he explains. And then there's theater, which plays a role in the novel and in his life: “Now that I turned 50, I started studying acting and have participated in some projects, and now I'm in the company La Pèrfida. I've recovered some of the emotionality I had when I was younger; I was hypersensitive until I had to put on the handbrake to avoid hurting myself. My life has been filled with theater,” he says, aware that “I gave up writing a long time ago, thinking I had to sell it.”