What Antoni Llabrés was like according to his cousin: "He was 16, and Llach dedicated 'L'estaca' to him at a concert."

PalmAs a child, he played with his cousin with the plastic soldiers from Fort Comanche. He pretended to be John Wayne in Desert Centaurs oh The diligence. We're talking about the jurist Antoni Llabrés, a professor of Criminal Law at the UIB and president of the Obra Cultural Balear since 2024. And we hear about it from his cousin, the architect Pep Martínez (incidentally, brother of the current mayor of Palma, Jaime Martínez). Toni and Pep were born in 1968. They had a very close relationship until they were 18 years old, and they are still very close today.

The reference to Desert Centaurs either The diligence It explains why they have both been big movie buffs since they were children: "We were trained in movie theaters... Every weekend we would go to the double feature (premiere and rerun) shown at the Coll d'en Rabassa cinema, which was demolished in May. If for some reason we always arrived late, we were lost," Pep recalls.

Toni lived in Ciutat, but when summer came, the family emigrated to Can Pastilla: "The 'labressos', as we call them at home, would stay at our godmother's house for a few months, and we would live upstairs." It was almost inevitable that the relationship between two cousins of the same age would become so strong. The "labressos" are three brothers and Toni is the eldest.

Pep fondly remembers the summers when they were teenagers: "On Sundays, after family lunch, he and I would go for our walk, perhaps thinking that this would make us bigger. We would walk for hours and hours through the streets of a seaside resort that was perhaps growing bigger than us, offering ice cream from the machine from the front row, donkeys loaded with souvenirs…".

A hobby that united the cousins: the Mallorca football team: "We went to the general assembly every Sunday standing with our flags. We were from the Peña Independiente, and we had our headquarters in the Bar Londres," says Pep.

In addition to being a film buff, football fan, and a walker (like good philosophers), the eldest cousin of this branch of the family was an avid reader: "He was tireless. On his bedside table, he would often find books that surely wouldn't have been suitable for a child of Pepa's age," another characteristic of the current president of the OCB: "He has boundless curiosity and memory. He was, and is, capable of recalling anecdotes, facts, and places from the past in a fascinating way."

The cousin knows that all this gives Toni a serious demeanor, but according to him, it doesn't do him justice: "He has an intelligent irony and a very fine sense of humor that he only shares with people he trusts. He wasn't, as some might imagine, a bookworm. He liked to go out, to have fun. Gomila was Gomila."

His commitment to the Catalan language and culture was awakened at a very young age: "At 16 or 17, we actively participated in the second Congress of the Catalan Language. His activism is not the result of chance, but of prior information, deep reflections and convictions." Together, they experienced concerts by Raimon, Maria del Mar Bonet, and Lluís Llach. In fact, the latter, when Toni was 16, dedicated The stake to a concert at the Auditorium of Palma: "He said two concerts in a row. We went to see him in the dressing room after the first concert, and Toni asked Llach to play The stake The next day, a song that wasn't in his repertoire. And so the musician did."