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[This article appeared for the first time in Diari de Lleida, shortly after Manuel de Pedrolo’s passing, August 1990.]








PEDROLO





By Carles Reig

homenatge exaltat a una dona frígida apellada (ventissament) Llibertat












Volia escanyar l’estàtua d’una Venus,

Qualque curiositat que em deia adéu

Amb una mà, i amb l’altra em sospesava,

Com si fos l’estàtua de la Llibertat, els collons.





I ara fredolica la model, esdevinguda bruixa amb els anys,

Col·laboradriu de la conxorxa, i duent brou gèlid

Per a gaubança de tot el clan de romancers de l’estatut:

Els antics maçons amb qui es vol d’estatura semblant si més no.

L’estatut que deia que l’estàtua no podia tindre nom.

The visitors






The visitors. A story written by Carles Reig i Morell and
translated by O’Donovan
McCracken.

















Quina casualitat que a tots ens vingui avui la mateixa
dèria









Van trucar a la seua porta, però no calia. La vella ja els havia ajustada la
porta, perquè entressin empenyent-la una mica. Els havia vist vindre
per la finestra. Dues dones i un home, entre els cinquanta i els seixanta
anys... La Rosa, la Violeta, l’Indaleci. La Rosa amb el seu vestidet
violeta, la Violeta amb el seu vestidet rosa, l’Indaleci de blau, amb el seu

[Here the little story scanned in Reig, Reig against...



Strange little tale where certain sensitive machines prove more humane
than the human beings themselves. The easiness with which the robotic
anchors ubiquitously parading their platitudinous pates flat on the
television screens effortlessly shift from the most heartrending news to
the most spurious banal jolly crap is shameful and demoralizing.




Damn the unimaginative brutes who are unable to feel the pain felt by
others! From this lack of fellow fondness stem all the wars and all

[This other “frightening” tale, surely unpublished till today, is dated “Zurich – 1972.”



After a first “utterly failed” try to “escape the smothering tide of fascist castilian shit,” into Paris in 1967, this second try into Zurich was successful.

[This straightforward tale of horror written in 1965. Apparently unpublished, unless it appeared in one those cheap leaflet-like anthologies where it is known that Reig was included but which now the family can’t find. Written before his “nuthouse rest.” In 1965, still seventeen, Reig himself had been not in sant Boi, but in can Pigem (where he turned eighteen). Sant Boi was (and I guess is) a town near Barcelona with a grand insane asylum where all the Catalonians used to be sent who let’s say had a noggin whose machinery was somewhat “faulty,” so that it became proverbial the saying: “You’ll finish yet in sant Boi.” Carles Reig’s mother was wont to say it to him.