El carrer de les Camèlies

Rodoreda is fifty-eight years old when he publishes 'El carrer de les Camèlies'. La Colometa already embodies Catalonia in the eyes of many, she is becoming a legend: it is the moment she chooses to enter the skin of a new heroine. While the author, interviewed, confesses to having saved her life by sewing, her character abandons the needle to make gentlemen. Prostitution is his state, elected at the age of twenty and never abandoned. Is it a journey that Rodoreda makes with the help of his Cecilia? A journey into the depths of the night, an exploration of the weather? A journey through Barcelona, ??with legs that disturb men and project sexual fantasies wherever they go - on the Rambla where it all begins, on the Eixample where it is caged in a flat, by the Carmel huts where she undresses between a sheet of zinc and a silk umbrella ... Cecilia is a survivor. Keep walking, never stop or lose your composure. He gets up, falls again, continues. In the end she is a real heroine who has learned to live with her wounds and who knows how to take advantage of this new strength. A huntress who becomes prey. Too strong to die as a victim, even as a victim of multiple rapes, as a sex slave, as a woman with moments of psychosis, writes Stefanie Kremser in the afterword. 'El carrer de les Camèlies' has been widely read, but little has been said about it. Officially, it is not part of the crown jewels. It has never been mandatory reading in schools. More than twenty editions have been sold, in silence.