How was Josep Ramon Cerdà, according to his sister: “We see him as the brother with a star”

PalmaIn an 80-square-meter apartment in Madrid Square, six people lived: four siblings, mother, and father. At times, the grandmother was also there. It was a noisy house with a large terrace, and while some were returning from high school, a baby was crying. There is a 14-year age difference between the eldest brother and the youngest in the house. “It surprises me how, in the middle of that chaotic house, full of shouts and playing children, Pep could read, completely absorbed. He had a brutal capacity for concentration, it was as if he escaped.” Pep is Josep Ramon Cerdà (Palma, 1971), a playwright and professor. His younger sister, Margalida, known on social media as Madò Llucia, introduces us to him.

In Margalida's first memories of Josep, he already had a beard. They come from a family where studying had never been a priority: “We know that the priests who taught my father wanted to pay for his studies because they thought he would be good, but his grandparents never allowed it. He had to work.” It is with this culture that the four siblings have been raised, so the first thing Margalida highlights is that “what Pep has, he has earned through hard work.” In the family, they see him as “the lucky brother,” and the youngest says it's because he started acting at a very young age, and “he knew how to sell himself very well.” He is the least easily offended brother, she says: “He has a knack for dealing with people. He is the most sociable, with a reputation for being charming.”

He tells that Josep Ramon watched TV3 and Canal 9, read and played a lot of basketball: they had a large terrace with a basket, and also a ping-pong table that later became a blackboard. “He read a lot, and I sat next to him. Since he was little, he has had character and leadership skills, and he grew up fast”, points out Margalida. To pay for their studies, the older brother did summer jobs, such as washing glasses at the spas in l'Arenal, an example that all the siblings followed: “We all paid for our degrees and our driving licenses with our own money”. At home, Josep Ramon has been a role model.

He studied Catalan Philology. And this had an impact on the family: “When people hear us talk, they don't believe we're from Palma because we have a Catalan accent that is rarely heard nowadays. Until Pep started studying Philology, we spoke worse. When he started, corrections arrived”. And they are a family, Margalida specifies, llongueta, llongueta, fourth generation: “We don't have a single uncle from outside the city”.

All the siblings except Margalida went to Guillem Sagrera institute, which is quite a distance from Madrid Square: “They went there by moped, and that marked them. There Pep started with theater, with the company Xicarandana, from the institute. They performed plays and we went with the family to see him”. The playwright's biggest critic has always been his mother: “There wasn't a show that she didn't tell him what he could have done better!”.

Despite not having grown up much together, Margalida has a clear vision of her brother that has been built over the years: “Pep is very demanding of himself and others. At the same time, he is very sociable and has good friends, many linked to the theater. If he has come this far, it's because he has earned it and because he has a touch of obsessiveness. He has prioritized this a lot, perhaps failing in other parts of his life. But it impresses me that, at 50 years old, he hasn't stopped and still has this energy to dedicate to one of the things he likes most in the world: theater”.