Rafa Tarradas, one of the grandsons of the founder of Bultaco, publishes 'The heir', a story of the Spanish society of the 1930s with biographical dyes
Los Bultó, a saga marked by the murder of the patriarch
Rafa is a night owl, as was his grandfather Paco. The two stayed until the many when everyone went to bed in the farmhouse San Antonio, the family summer house of the Penedés that housed a lot of cousins and uncles. The grandfather told him the adventures of the family during the Civil War and he listened, fascinated. Over the years, Grandpa Paco's little battles were captured in a notebook that Rafa wrote in a lost cabin in the Sierra de Gredos, where he escapes whenever he can. "That little house is my refuge. It doesn't even have light and there's not much to do, so I started to play the stories of grandparents," he says.
As I wrote, the notes were derived in a fiction story of more than 600 pages that just saw the light. The heir (Espasa) is the first book by Rafael Tarradas Bultó (42), a Catalan businessman based in Madrid and a member of one of the best known sagas in Catalonia : the Bultó . But the work, he explains, is not a family biography, but an account of Spanish society in the first third of the twentieth century, with the Civil War as a backdrop . "There is a 20% reality and 80% fiction ... more or less," says Tarradas about his work, which has raised great expectations in the publishing world and has swept through celebs like Eugenia Silva, Carolina Herrera or Casilda Finat All three are part of their circle of friends, which includes more known names of the jet.
Through the pages of the heir, the Bultó, the Marquis and the Sagnier , sagas of the Barcelona bourgeoisie and ancestors of Tarradas, as well as the Campo, a working family - yes, fictitious - that cross their paths.
One of them, Antonio Campo, is the one who gives the title to the novel. "It is the illegitimate son, the hereu , who had to have been an heir. In my family there is a legend that the hereu had an illegitimate son with the town's pond . They took him to an orphanage. I didn't know what happened to him, but my grandfather told me that the San Antonio estate is named after him, by Antonio. My character is inspired by him. "
Grandpa Paco , founder and owner of the motorcycle brand Bultaco and Montesa, is Pablo in the book. And his brother, the businessman José María Bultó, killed by the terrorist group Exèrcit Popular Catalá (Epoca) in 1977, is José Manuel. Rafa has changed his family's first names, but not last names. "My great-grandmother Pilar Marqués, for example, is Blanca in the book, a woman who was widowed and had to take care of her four children and the family textile company because her brother, the heir, had died. Uncle Pepe [ José María Bultó] did very important things during the Civil War but at home there was no talk about that. I think he was a spy, he collaborated with SIFNE , the Border Information Service of the Northeast of Spain, "he explains. Uncle Pepe of the novel manages to put his mother and brothers in a plane and send them to San Remo. The real story is that he organized the family escape to Rome.
The maternal family also has a great role in the heir. " Eugenia Sagnier is inspired by my great-grandmother María Cristina, a woman who could seem haughty and did not like everyone . She had 14 children , including my grandmother Ines, who married Paco Bultó . When the war broke out they were in her Puigcerdá's summer house and one night the village baker called them to warn them that they were going to be killed. My mother told me they said: 'Children, take the toothbrush and the rosary, that we are leaving', notice that it is surreal to take those two things ... They fit in and crossed the border on foot, "he recalls.
The family farmhouse of San Antonio , built in 1900, plays an important role in history. The estate, located in Cunit, about 30 kilometers from Barcelona, was inherited by Paco Bultó and the large family clan continues to meet there. "It's our meeting point, there we meet all the cousins at Christmas, summer and weekends. There my grandfather built his first Bultaco and we all learned to ride a motorcycle with him," Rafa recalls. In San Antonio , valuable documents and letters from the Civil War years that have been used to document and write the novel are also stored. The farmhouse is the scene of several episodes, some of them real. "On July 18, 36, Republican militias stormed the farm while Mass was celebrated in the chapel. The farm workers prevented them from being harmed. The priest who gave the Mass used to hide in a cave that had been conditioned and still it exists, "he says.
Given the success of the book -is the great bet of Spain of the season, with 20,000 copies in the first edition- Rafa is already preparing the prequel to The Heir , with the story of a Marquis who sent to Cuba and made a fortune. He was the one who built San Antonio and the one who started the saga. Surely we have packages for a while.
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