What Miquel Bezares was like, according to his younger brother: “You saw him and thought: this guy will eat the world”

PalmaA family snapshot: the six members squeezed into a three-door orange Renault 5. They are four siblings born in Llucmajor. At home, Spanish was always spoken: the father had arrived from the Peninsula and married a Mallorcan woman, the mother. The family's linguistic idiosyncrasy changed when the third brother was about 17 years old. We will tell it later. The third brother was born in 1968 and today he is a poet, narrator, and professor: Miquel Bezares. A fire at his home, when he was about four years old, impacted him so much that even today, when he starts to smell burning, he feels a certain dread, as if that smell had stayed stuck in his nose forever. The youngest brother, Jesús – although everyone knows him by the nickname Tuti – says that Miquel "was an extraordinarily bright child": "At eight years old, he already had the head of a fifteen-year-old boy; and at fifteen, he looked like an old man," he laughs.

 As a child, he was an “authentic physical marvel”. He grew up very quickly and at seventeen years old “he was practically at his current height”. Tuti remembers that he was a great basketball player, and that he also played tennis. “He would arrive from training starving. At that time, he didn’t like vegetables at all, and like most kids of that era, we ate pork loin with fried potatoes. My mother didn’t prepare a plate for him, but a basin! He ate an enormous amount and didn’t gain any weight”. He was, says his brother, “a natural leader” because of the way he did things, the way he spoke: “You saw him and thought: this guy is going to eat the world”. Tuti defines Miquel practically in opposition to himself: “I have always been very shy, reserved, I only spoke with my two school friends. My parents took me to the psychologist because they thought I was very different from my older brother, Miquel”. Nothing was wrong with Tuti: “I simply learned to do things more slowly; I was much lazier than him”.

Miquel kept to himself a lot and was not accommodating to others: “When he decided on something, he did it, whether the rest liked it or not”. Thus, he recounts that the writer had started BUP in Science, because the future “seemed to be heading towards him studying Pharmacy”, an illusion his father had. But he had a teacher who marked him profoundly: Damià Pons. “So he decided to completely change direction and switch to Humanities to study Catalan Philology”. Tuti says that the decision, right away, caused significant distress to his parents. This is how Bezares began to fill notebooks with poems, ideas, and texts, all already written in Catalan. And one fine day “he woke up being a Catalan speaker”. It was a radical change but one that was experienced very naturally within the family. “Even though he began to live Catalan fully, he never tried to impose it on us siblings. Even today I speak to him in Spanish and he answers me in Mallorcan”. Today it still strikes them as curious to hear him speak in Spanish because it is very uncommon. This change enriched, to give just one example, the musical atmosphere at home: “We grew up with the songs of Perales, Rocío Jurado, and Raphael. Suddenly, we discovered Maria del Mar Bonet and Lluís Llach”, recalls Tuti.

For him, Miquel is a very intelligent person, with “very solid principles, even when they end up harming him personally”: “He has often made decisions because he considered them to be the right ones, even if they were not what he really wanted”. He explains that he has a very special relationship with his mother, and believes it is because they share a very similar way of being: “They are very sensitive, with great inner strength and capacity for sacrifice”. Over time, he has become a true “bon vivant” –“he has developed a real passion for cooking and knows how to cook at a very high level”– who, when he retires, will be fully happy just with his notebook.