‘The more people die, the more I want to live’: the fighter Maruja Torres

With her bones in tatters, monthly eye and bladder operations, 10 centimetres shorter and an elephant’s memory, Maruja Torres keeps her vital signs unusually… alive. The book reveals an undisciplined Maruja, sometimes angry, so often jovial and always on the verge of doing something even though she complains about how little she does, blesses laziness and succumbs to endless phone calls, like in the old days, and even dares to travel again, despite the fragility and new fears of pure old age. At 80, Jordi Évole took her for a walk around Rome for a brilliant programme, and thus resurrected her in the memory of many people and perhaps even more, she appeared before a huge crowd of young people who barely identified her with a ghost from another era (and a boring rumour on Twitter, and weekly on SER, with Àngels Barceló). Well, no: the ghost touches all the keys of this era except resentment or posturing bitterness, he frequently gets carried away and laughs almost non-stop, although he also gets angry without restraint against Israel that crushes Gaza, against the pain in his very old Lebanon or against Ayuso and her Old Testament right.

Between the practical diary and the almost involuntary memories, Maruja Torres comes to say goodbye to those who believed she was already dead. Without pretensions or fanfare, she sometimes tells in a moving way what the press profession was all about 50 or 60 years ago, and without bragging or posturing once, the story distills evidence: this poor-class woman, with an abusive father and a victim and castrating mother, born in Barcelona’s Chinatown —whores, poor people, thieves, manual jobs and fear— was literally a pioneer from her twenties onwards. And in the face of the pioneers of a profession and their attitude to life, the only thing that can be done is to thank them, pamper them as a group of friends do right now (with Edu Galán at the head, and regulars like David Trueba) and transmit to them the certainty that they did against all that which today we assume as normal and orthodox. They were the odd ones out in a sexist and savage profession – like journalism, and banking, and fishing, and commerce, etc. – when they learned to rebel against the advice and habits of families frozen with fears and mistaken models, where the heteropatriarchal structure persisted even though there was no father and where drastic decisions had to be made and they had to go out into the open.

In this book the natural mischievousness that is in her is still there, uncut, disjointed and capricious, although I still believe that the best literary book by Maruja Torres is A heat so closeand she thinks it is While we liveIt doesn’t matter: Maruja has been a character, she has rotated through several newspapers – including her own, which is this one – and there is something moving in what beats in the depths of these diary memories: the desire that not even Christ pay her a tribute when she dies while what she basically does is thank those who made her life a little happier than it would have been without them, despite how bastards some and others could be.