The last song

In December 1995, the Association of Industrial Engineers of Catalonia published a book with the unequivocal title: Joan de Sagarra . Its authors were J.M. Garcia Ferrer and Martí Rom, who, based on conversations with Sagarra, analyzed his life and work and complemented this biographical exploration with commentary from friends and family—Josep Maria Carandell, Lluís Permanyer, Enrique Vila-Matas, Marcos Ordóñez—whom the subject of the biography chose with proud arbitrariness. The cover of the book features a photograph of Joan, a few months old. He looks at the camera with a scrutinizing, intense, terrible-baby expression. He doesn't smile, he scratches his head, and already has the same oblique expression that, from then on, he perfected without ever reaching the level of a grimace. It was a grimace that served him well both for sketching knowing smiles and for spitting contemptuous spits, or for singing songs steeped in Caribbean rum and a sentimentality with pedigree and bouquet.

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In 1995, Sagarra was fifty-seven years old and already a journalist worthy of a biographie with the methodical attention of the authors of a book that remains relevant today. In the introduction, Garcia Ferrer emphasizes the "iconoclastic, provocative, and shameless" nature of his articles. Years later, knowing that well-understood irony begins with oneself, Sagarra converted this simplifying sambenito into " iconoplastic ." The introduction also includes a confession that, while the "Et maintenant " that, according to the chronicles, closed the funeral, still resonates, is worth quoting: "I dreamed that Marsé survived, and so did I. We were both blind, and while taking a walk, we found each other thanks to the fact that our dogs recognized each other. Marsé spoke to me about Ava Gardner, and I to him about Gene Tierney."

Since journalism is an endogamous tribe, we can sometimes overdo it with obituary zeal.

Colleagues at the two newspapers where Sagarra wrote in recent years ( El País, La Vanguardia ) have remembered him with excellent articles (Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, Eugeni Madueño, Jacinto Antón, Joaquín Luna). Since journalism is an endogamous tribe, we can sometimes overdo it with obituaries. But for those of us who read him, trying to reciprocate with the same ferocity with which he wrote, or who came to know him—never knowing whether, at first, he would mistreat us with the clumsiness of the timid or adopt us with generous affection—we are grateful for this exercise of memory and for books like those by Garcia y Ferrer and Rom, which include this declaration of last wishes: “The burial will be in Paris, where I was born. When I die, it is planned that I will be cremated. Friends will take one of those boats (bâteau-mouche) that sail along the Seine at night; the music I love will be played, champagne will be drunk, and people will dance. As we pass the Quai Voltaire, my ashes will be thrown into the river. Meanwhile, the habanera La Paloma will be played. It will be the last song.”