“Hello, I am Beatriz de Moura.” The voice, over the phone, sounded with a slight accent that perhaps was not such, but rather a slightly slowed, Brazilian way of speaking Spanish. The “z” sound, I also noticed at the first moment, eluded her. I think about all this carefully and with sorrow now that I have received the news of her death at an advanced age. Back then, in 1994, there was only one voice for me that from Barcelona announced the intention to publish a novel of more than 600 pages; to publish me, an unknown distant person with no other credentials or recommendations than a text worked on by hand and with patience for nearly eight years, and sent one day by ordinary mail in the form of a bundle of sheets wrapped in brown paper. She asked me during that first phone conversation if I had more writings; if so, she counted on them. I thought, like a good nobody, that she was mistaken, especially when immediately after she thanked me for choosing her publishing house. Two years passed between the mentioned call to my home in the German city of Lippstadt, where one earned a living through teaching, and the publication of the hefty book. I was pleasantly surprised by the editorial criteria, guided by the firm purpose of doing things well, carefully attending to every last detail. To that end, Beatriz sent an employee of the publishing house to Germany to review the manuscript with me page by page, to question commas, to propose improvements. The book was published with good reviews but few sales, from which I deduced that my relationship with Tusquets publishing house would end there. A mistaken prediction.
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One morning I started the car and went without prior notice to meet Beatriz de Moura at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I arrived at the booth, the stand as they call it; black and white photos of authors from the publishing house were hanging (Almudena, Lucho Sepúlveda, who was around, maybe Landero, I don’t quite remember) and also mine with a full beard that spilled down to mid-chest. I pointed to the portrait and said: “Hello, that’s me.” They went to call her. She appeared after a while with the look I saw so many times: the penetrating gaze of black eyes, barely shining, severity softened by a smile that rather seemed a cordial hint, the fine cigarette, the jacket suit, the shoes without heels (later I found out she was an experienced dancer) and that air of people who know they are attractive but have plans and goals in life that go far beyond the free merits granted by Nature. She was affectionate, very direct in the ways of showing affection, I saw that too; but what really disarmed me was her second or third sentence: “We thought you were fat.” From the beginning, she gave me the nickname of “house author.” She exercised without the slightest discussion the literary leadership of the publishing house. The money was his matter, Toni López Lamadrid, already her partner by then. Neither she nor he demanded immediate success from their authors. The rule for accepting an author consisted of something else. Let’s call it, to shorten, literary quality, in line with the idea of the publishing house as a space to establish as rich a catalog as possible. It’s not that one had been making guesses. Beatriz clearly expressed her non-negotiable desire to foster a catalog. Fortune gave her a few profitable authors that allowed her to sustain collections (of essays, poetry…) aimed at select readers. She recounted with obvious satisfaction the achievement it meant for her to have built a publishing house from economic modesty to what Tusquets Editores finally was, her house built book by book with independence, with tenacity, with taste and good manners, yes, but also with that look of black eyes that seemed to read the thoughts of her interlocutors, forged in certain youthful rebellions. The great fortune that my novel Patria brought me caught her at the beginnings of her loss of lucidity, when her editorial creation was increasingly walking away from her. There is photographic memory of the strong congratulatory hug she gave me. I understood instantly the message of her gaze, this time accompanied by a wider smile. “I knew from the first day that we had made the right choice with you.” She wanted and she could. Here I record my admiration and gratitude.
