How was Marga Melià, according to her friend: "She was a devourer of books"

PalmaLike so many other young people born in the eighties, she grew up with series such as Sesame Street, David the Gnome, Full House and Around the World in 80 Days; and with the films Back to the Future, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, which she watched over and over again. A particularity of her home, however, is that both her father and her mother were great film buffs (and readers), so they also habitually watched films by Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Woody Allen, Bergman, and Italian and American classics. All these stimuli made that “shy girl” spend part of her early years curious about the great questions of humanity: who we are and where we come from, how big the universe is, death. Marga Melià Rigo (Palma, 1982), “restless and curious,” is still looking for answers. Her lifelong friend Deborah Florit tells us about it.

They met in Colònia de Sant Jordi one summer at Los Pinos, “an arcade where we used to go in the afternoons to eat sweets and play on the machines.” They must have been between 12 and 13 years old. The two young girls spent every day of the summer, the holidays, and the weekends together. Since Marga was an only child, Deborah was like a sister. This is how she remembers it: “We used to go to dinner with her parents every weekend at restaurants all over Mallorca, singing Antonio Molina’s I am a miner. We would make our own rock band t-shirts, painting them with markers, and when we were a little older we would spend Friday nights at Tunnel, in Gomila.”

Between sharpeners and t-shirts made with markers, Deborah describes Marga as a “super-intelligent teenager, with great curiosity, very creative and critical thinking, and endowed with great sensitivity”. She was a “book devourer”, and enjoyed watching movies “with her parents and listening to music with her friends, lying in bed”. One of Marga and Deborah’s favorite bands was (and still is) Extremoduro: “We recently went to a tribute concert together for Robe, the singer of Extremoduro. We also listened to NOFX, Nirvana… Alternative bands in a time of nonconformist and revolutionary adolescence”, she specifies.

The teenager who devoured books started with the El Barco de Vapor collection. Some of her favorite titles were The Merry Travelers and Until Next Summer; she also collected the The Famous Five publications. Two readings that especially marked her when she was a little older were The Catcher in the Rye and A Confederacy of Dunces. All in all, it is not surprising that Marga was a “very creative” girl who invented stories and games. A part, however, is also an inheritance from her parents: her father read her fables every evening, and sometimes he invented stories where he mixed characters from fables and from the cartoons that Marga watched; her mother always had a good story to tell, since they were five siblings and it is known that as children “they had a blast”.

Beyond all the stories lived and the memories of a whole life together, Deborah assures that one of the best things about having Marga close by is that “you can talk to her about any topic, no matter how differently you think, she is an open-minded person and willing to understand any position and opinion”. And she adds: “She is tolerant and respectful, capable of listening and accepting points of view with which she does not agree”. Some capabilities that not everyone has.