Readings on the phone against the pandemic

He made his offer on Twit­ter. It was on March 19, when we were all con­fined at home: “Avail­able to read over the phone nov­els, short sto­ries and po­etry, free of charge to those who need it, in Cata­lan or Span­ish, de­pend­ing on avail­abil­ity of texts and at agreed hours.“ Lluís Agustí, pro­fes­sor at the UB’s Fac­ulty of In­for­ma­tion and Au­dio­vi­sual Media has a long CV: li­brar­ian, grad­u­ate in Por­tuguese philol­ogy, doc­tor in in­for­ma­tion and doc­u­men­ta­tion... he has lived, and lives, among books. For a few years, he trav­elled the world from li­brary to li­brary, work­ing among books in Lis­bon, Paris, Brus­sels and New York. Back home, in Barcelona – “I have a son who has al­ready been to so many places!” – he also lives among books, an es­ti­mated 4,000, plus a cou­ple thou­sand more that he keeps at his par­ents’ house.

There are plenty of words to read. Lluís did not know, how­ever, the re­sponse that his mod­est offer would get: “I could see that there was a lot of anx­i­ety around. I’ve al­ways been busy, and all of a sud­den I was at home for the first time doing work but qui­etly, and I thought I could lend a hand, “ he says.

Nine months after of­fer­ing his voice, he con­tin­ues read­ing over the phone, but now only on Sun­days. Gi­anni Ro­dari’s Tales by Tele­phone is a point of ref­er­ence for every li­brar­ian. But he thought more of Marek Hal­ter, the French writer and ac­tivist, who as a child man­aged to es­cape from the War­saw ghetto to the refugee camps of the USSR and who ex­plains how in those mo­ments of hard­ship, hunger and vi­o­lence, the only time where it all stopped was when sto­ries were told.

That same March 19, from his Twit­ter ac­count, he started with the read­ings, first with three re­quests, which by July had gone up to seven or eight a day. He put aside 15 min­utes for each of them – “I couldn’t abuse peo­ple’s pa­tience” – and the time to de­cide what to read: three poems about the mem­ory of hap­pi­ness, three more about flies, short sto­ries, poems, or frag­ments of es­says, from Plato to Godot, Segarra, Calders or Es­tellés. “We met on the phone at a spe­cific time, I put on my head­phones and read, noth­ing more.”

The voice es­tab­lishes very pow­er­ful links: “They are peo­ple I’ve never seen but we keep call­ing each other, it’s been nice,” he says. Lluís has read for dozens of peo­ple, and some look for­ward to hear­ing his voice every day: “There’s a woman I called every day until the last day of lock­down,” he says. Peo­ple have sug­gested he do the read­ings through video con­fer­enc­ing, or that he do pod­casts so as to reach more peo­ple... but he was not in­ter­ested in doing that. “It’s some­thing ephemeral, and for a spe­cific per­son. Read­ing helps you to stop think­ing about other things. And that’s what I wanted to offer, a few mo­ments of peace,” he con­cludes.

covid sto­ries