[this little dainty item is dated Leeds 1977]

Rígid Règim en Cel·luoide







This is then how she lost it, the weight. I mean, my first wife. Under my discreet guidance or tame hinting, she bought with her own money the film “Rígid Règim en Cel·luoide”, by one of those very well considered Catalonian doctors, and she started watching the tape. She was at the time at her most enormous, kind of whalish, no end of her, a vast soft continent where all the jungle of untraceable parasites could hide at will. So, meanwhile, the good slick doctor, his warm caressing voice, was telling her “That’s what you’ll do, dear... you’ll find among all the models we have strolling and lovely interfacing on the tape just the one that looks, face-wise, like you; once you’ve got her tagged, give her your name... and never give up; be constant, be firm, be faithful... steady come rain come shine in your metempsychotic improvement... on your mystical becoming... for indeed she’ll be you... as you become her, and no mistake... and here is where the strict diet or regime comes up... you’ve got to fix your eyes without flinching on her perfect shape... for she is you, and you are her... and the power of suggestion and the concentration slowly are working hard for you... and all the static time you will consume... all the active immobile time you are consuming being her, shall... shall make you, with every blessed passing day, a little bit more herself... until her shape and yours are one and the same... her shape yours, your shape hers, my dear, and both are... just... perfect...” So my sweaty hippopotamus of a first wife spent her days and nights watching and watching “herself” being so... so fucking likeable, and svelte, and elegant... until one clammy afternoon, after so much gazing at the endlessly impertinent parading replica of “herself” on the steamy wavy screen... her eyes eternally looping the very same loop where “she herself” proudly showed off all she got... and the crooning doctor perennially getting the hots for her... she herself got woozy... she got... she got of course... all dizzy... muzzy... and she had to stop the film... Not that she ever quit looking. She kept looking at her “own” image... now turned to a shape the envy of every “friend”... but the tremulous image at least had stopped, and her head with it had stopped turning and caroming around the room like a crazy die crazily spotted... So, while the celluloid stood frozen... the divine image stationary... her sedentary eyes now were sighing a sigh of... I don’t know... of much needed rest, I guess... they felt much more the better for it... All in all, only just such a natural thing... the relief of a well-deserved rest... What a relief indeed for her whole shapely body... the imaginary one... and even for the other one also, the body still monstrously fat... until... until, alas, the burning bulb in the projecting apparatus, all the while stuck on the same little bit of tape... at last... flash... the film also burning, the celluloid exploding... a rush of flames... a flamethrower shooting at her horrified eyes... A stain of excited white and red embers grew and grew around her fantastically projected facsimile... She saw herself burning... she... elsewhere... hypnotized by the good doctor’s velvety voice, naturally thought without thinking that she was also in flames... she shouted “Spontaneous combustion, shit!”... she started running up and down the house... everything she touched... started burning... the curtains, the tablecloths, the lampshades, the bloody doors... she went into the garden... deeper and deeper she ran... the hazel bushes took fire... the gooseberry bushes... the tall firs... the tails of the screaming squirrels... she was combustive indeed... she was being eaten by the fire to the very fucking core of herself... she was becoming cinders with every fast step... All this in her own mind, of course... for in fact... at least in my own eyes... nothing was even smoking... everything had remained solid, intact... untainted by the corrosive flames... At the end of the garden, smack in the middle of the forbidding spinney, there lurked the dark pond... and there she went headfirst... and, hey, apocalyptic splash... a resounding falling... an asteroid heavy indeed spectacularly dipping, diving into the ocean... and here also the pert alert snapping turtles had themselves quite a delicious meal... Soon my first wife... was a skeleton... a skeleton... and the tape of the good Catalonian doctor an indubitable success.



That night a skeleton awoke from the dark pond... Maimed, lame, it came... smiling... accomplished... to the door... I was at the window... laughing... Downstairs the skeleton tried to knock at the door... where it crumbled... a hazardous throw of scored bones. A winner. I was silently applauding, pleased... the whole spectacle a crying triumph... you bet, of the spirit at least... though probably not of the flesh... I’d say... at least not this time... no.





[this little dainty item is dated Leeds 1977]

Xavier Fàbregas, 1975.

Xavier Fàbregas, 1975.


Once the murderous inquisitorial shackles of francoist castilian fascism were starting to slacken, the great Xavier Fàbregas, the critic who for thirty years systematized the whole magnificent Catalonian theatrical movement of the second Renaixença, was the first to realize that Reig was something else – a force onto himself.


He recognized Reig’s genius, and at the beginning of the seventies it was him who really brought Reig to the conscience of the cultural elite; he was also the one who first defined the Reigian character, and the first to come up with the phrases “Reigian style,” “Reigian constant,” etc.


Later, in sparse notulae, or more notably in the preface to the first edition of Travessa deserts, his lame pupil, G. J. Graells, followed the trend, trying to pin down the “estil reigià,” the “obra reigiana,” the “textos reigians,” the “peces reigianes,” and so on...



[That preface, by the way, is extremely funny, and totally idiotic.

“The Reigian text (he says) it’s scenic enough; until suddenly it falls into excess, even gratuitous excess; the coprolatrous author, often he’s just gone, adrift on slippery tangents; addicted to upmanship; and now and then even, he’s, ah, so mean... no holds barred, wading in brackish mirth, wallowing in caca, lolling and hiving... a degenerate hero, spontaneous boners in his trousers, his pockets in tatters, spent, plus the churned up shits or jizzms staining the whole fabric of plots and characters... Then voilà... here comes the moikhos (the adulterer,) strangely considered a victim... identifiable with the current lover of the author’s wife, whom the author must somehow repay with services and favors... or else... as when Aristophanic characters speak of moikhoi, and immediately something fishy wafts the public’s way, so Reig’s cuguços, upon whose appearance the public must titter... for almost invariably the husband is the pimp (a pimp paid with a beating: cocu et battu)... while the dignified Romans saw it differently... in Tacitus’s field work, for example, one sees the muscular hero pointing to the fact that the elsewhere vilified cinaedi (the passive catamites) are better behaved than women... that all things considered, men, and not women, are civilization’s torchbearers... but for Reig, alas, his Reigian instinct tints with reds of menses his murkier outlook... for him women are goddesses and whoever is hostile to them must be depicted as not quite there, and as a damned loser...”]



Slight matter indeed; instead, let’s to the gist of it.

Here the excellent “killer” article that Fàbregas published in Serra d’Or, the foremost literary magazine of the time (almost unique in scope and quality even by contemporary European standards).


Serra d’Or. 1975 (pages 279 and 280)

Pre-Biografia de Carles Reig, by Xavier Fàbregas.