A photograph is often more satisfying than a few minutes of continuous film. In its starkness and its singleness, the photograph both falsifies and solidifies. It creates a fiction. And that seems to fulfil a mission.  

Without the photograph, no one would remember that moment. It would go on its way.

In Barcelona in 1988 I saw enough images – photographs in newspapers and on the jackets of books – of the novelist Eduardo Mendoza to make me feel that, in some way or other, I knew him. Since I was writing a book about the city, I interviewed a great number of notable people in that year, but not Mendoza.

Instead, I devoured his book ‘City of Marvels’, first published in 1986, and attempted to become familiar with his sources, especially those centering on the re-creation of Barcelona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mendoza has that same ability as E.L. Doctorow in his novel ‘Ragtime’: to write about the past in a way that is light and effortless and can only come from a deep and abiding knowledge of the sources.

Such knowledge cannot be gained in a year or two, no matter how much time you spend in libraries. And so I envied Mendoza. I didn’t meet him, however, until we both won a literary prize in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in 2012. Mendoza came with his wife, the Catalan actress Rosa Novell. 

I wonder if it is possible that we were collected at the tiny airport at the same time and travelled into the city together. In any case, at some point, myself and Rosa Novell noticed that the city seemed to have interesting shops. I am sure that Mendoza did not join in that conversation.

On the day of the prize-giving, Santiago de Compostela being a most Catholic place, it was decided that there would be a mass said in the cathedral in honour of the two novelists. While it is always difficult to be sure about anyone’s atheism, Mendoza gave me the distinct impression that, like most Catalans, he did not have much time for Holy Mother Church.

Despite this, we sat close to the altar and knelt and stood up at the appointed times. We listened to a short sermon. And then the big moment came. They were going to swing the botafumeiro in our honour. This is an enormous incense-burner hanging near the altar. When it is made to sway, it is big enough to reach across the entire nave of the church. To say that if it hit you it would kill you is a gross understatement. It takes many men to control it as it flies up and down the inside of the church. It really is a sight to behold. Mendoza was amazed by it.

Maybe that would be the moment to stop. To take a photograph of him raising his head in wonder in the great cathedral. Perhaps the camera could catch the textured stone background and a hint of skepticism in his gaze.

But more happened and that might be a photograph too: Rosa Novell and myself went shopping, leaving Mendoza behind in the Parador, the hotel in the main square. I remember that, under her kind and careful guidance, I bought a hat. And I also bought some ceramics, which I still have. (I also have the hat.) I enjoyed her company.

So when I heard that Rosa might perform my play ‘The Testament of Mary’ in Catalan, I was excited. Two productions were planned, both to be directed by Agustí Villaronga, best known for his 2010 film ‘Black Bread’. The Spanish version, translated by Enrique Juncosa, whom I had known when he was director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was to be performed by Blanca Portilla, who had been in Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Broken Embraces’ and ‘Volver’.   

In the summer of 2014, when the play was done in Spanish, I would go after the performance to a bar opposite the theatre in Barcelona with Blanca Portillo to have a few beers with her so that she could recover from playing the Virgin Mary. Sometimes Agustí would come too, but never for long. Like most theatre directors, he was wary of writers, or maybe he was just wary of me. (He would later direct a version of my novel ‘House of Names’ for the theatre.)

One night in his flat near Carrer Trafalgar he gave a party and there was music and dancing.

A photograph from that night would have seemed definitive – actress, director, writer and their friends laughing and drinking, the show over. We might have all waved to the camera.

But that is not the story. That night is not the story. The story begins with absences, silences. As the play went on in Spanish, I had noticed that there was no mention anymore of Rosa Novell doing the Catalan version. I wondered if she was working elsewhere or if plans had changed. I didn’t ask. If someone needed me to know, they would tell me.    

It was a while before I heard what had happened. Rosa was not well, had been diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis was not good. And it seemed that she was going blind. Clearly, she would not be doing the play.

But she decided that she would try. She would begin by learning the lines by using tapes and having a prompter. And Agustí, supporter by Javier Pérez Santana, the producer, began to film her as she learned lines she would never say on a stage and prepared a role she would never play to a live audience.

After Rosa died, they sent me the film – ‘El Testament de Rosa’ - but I didn’t watch it. A few times, however, I found myself looking at the two and a half minutes of it that appeared on youtube. I could see how sick Rosa was, and how gentle and careful Agustí was being with her. The blindness was new. She had no idea how to come into a room. She was feeling her way through spaces with great unease and nervousness. But she was nonetheless learning the lines in Catalan and working out ways of saying them.

This summer, since the film was streaming on one of the Spanish streaming sites, I watched all forty-five minutes of it. Rosa had died in 2015 at the age of 62. And, also, Agustí Villaronga had died in January of this year, aged 69.

There is one moment in the film that could have been a great photograph. It is Agustí asking Rosa about her sense of the Virgin when she was a child. For a second, Rosa is not struggling with her blindness, but she is working out the level of personal emotion she can offer the role. Agustí’s question is serious. He wants Rosa to think, start talking about her early religious feeling. Actress and director are both working. If the photo were taken from a certain angle, it would look like a normal, intense moment in a rehearsal.

But this is a film. Rosa is speaking some of the lines, the ones that deal most with fear and grief, with a sort of internalized, coiled pain. She knows the microphone is on and can capture her voice. But she cannot see the camera. And, thus, the camera seems to intrude on her. How can it not? It is her helplessness that emerges now. I wonder how much of this is performance, or how little. I would love to think that Rosa moved her face towards the camera deliberately or lowered her voice or spoke with concealed emotion because she knew how much power it would have in this short film about a woman at the end of her life who is also an actress working out how best to play a part.

There are a few images in the film that were shot in the house on a hill above Barcelona that Rosa Novell shared with Eduardo Mendoza. I think I can see Mendoza’s study and his bookcases.

And that takes me back thirty-five years when I first read his novel ‘City of Marvels’. How little any of us knew then what was coming. How nice it would be to push back time so we could start again, just show some photographs of the good times we had, with no one making a film about blindness or death or the effort to continue working in the face of the sure knowledge that life would end soon.

Colm Tóibín (September 2023)