Some writers visit a neighbourhood. Others are born there, carry it with them all their lives and give it back as literature. Terenci Moix was one of the latter. Before he became one of the most widely read authors in the country, before the prizes and the television, he was a boy from El Raval who played a few minutes’ walk from Carrer de la Cera.
A cinematic birth
Ramon Moix i Messeguer was born on 5 January 1942 on Carrer de Ponent, today’s Carrer de Joaquín Costa, where a plaque has marked his birthplace since 2004. He liked to tell in his memoirs that his mother went into labour while watching Luz de gas (Gaslight) at the cinema. Small wonder that cinema became one of the great passions of his life.
He was the son of a painter and a seamstress who copied Hollywood designs from magazines, and the brother of the poet and novelist Ana María Moix. His Raval was the Raval of the post-war years: narrow streets, neighbours who knew everything about everyone, and local cinemas where he took refuge every Saturday.
The neighbourhood as mythology
That Raval never left his work. He portrayed it in El dia que va morir Marilyn (1969), one of the key novels of post-war Catalan literature, and returned to it years later in his memoirs, El peso de la paja, which open with El cine de los sábados. In these pages the neighbourhood is at once setting, family and myth.
His career was extraordinary:
- 1968: La torre dels vicis capitals, Víctor Català Prize.
- 1969: El dia que va morir Marilyn, Serra d’Or Critics’ Prize.
- 1986: No digas que fue un sueño, Planeta Prize.
- 1992: El sexe dels àngels, Ramon Llull Prize.
He wrote in both Catalan and Spanish, asking nobody’s permission, with the same mix of erudition and popular humour as the streets where he grew up.
At the table in Can Lluís
For someone like him, Can Lluís was no ordinary restaurant. It was home cooking just steps from home. In the 1970s, the dining room on Carrer de la Cera was one of the informal headquarters of Barcelona’s theatre and intellectual scene, and Terenci Moix shared the room with Els Joglars, Dagoll Dagom, La Trinca, Ovidi Montllor, Rosa Maria Sardà and his sister, Ana Moix.
The down-to-earth, unpretentious atmosphere of Can Lluís suited his way of understanding Barcelona: a city better explained from a neighbourhood table than from a shop window. Here the conversation could drift from Hollywood cinema to the Egypt of the pharaohs, his great obsessions, with the ease of a long after-dinner chat.
The loveliest proof is in the house’s signature books: in 1973, Terenci Moix left a dedicated auca there, next to the bullfighter drawn by Rafael Alberti and the dedications by Saramago and Harold Pinter. An auca, the traditional Catalan picture strip with rhyming couplets: he could hardly have chosen anything more typical of El Raval.
Always returning to El Raval
Terenci Moix died in Barcelona on 2 April 2003. His ashes were divided between three places that sum up his life: the port of Alexandria, the village of Deir el-Medina next to the Valley of the Kings, and Carrer de Joaquín Costa, in the Raval where he was born.
Today, a few minutes from that street, Can Lluís is still open. The tables where he and his contemporaries sat are once again serving classic Catalan food. If you want to understand the Raval that Terenci Moix turned into literature, reading him is not enough: you can come and have dinner here.
Book your table at Can Lluís →
Read also: Authors who visited Can Lluís · Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Can Lluís
