Albert Om: "My father did not know how to write in Catalan and did not know how to speak in Spanish, and that is the portrait of a country"

BarcelonaThe journalist Albert Om (Taradell, 1966) immerses himself once again in the memories of a time, of a country, in his memoir Què dirà la gent (Univers). If in El dia que vaig marxar he explained his parents' end, now he goes to the beginning of the story: to his repressed republican grandparents; to his parents' marriage, which renounced politics but achieved well-being, and to a childhood shaping its national spirit with Llach, Serrat, and La Trinca. The result is a politico-emotional portrait of an entire generation, and an approach to Catalan identity made with the very genuine language he imbibed, of course, in Taradell.

Què dirà la gent is the intimate portrait of a world that has disappeared, which is the world your parents handed down to you. Why are you writing it?

— Surely to thank them. To my parents and to a whole generation of parents who gave us a very placid life coming from a very grim past. I could intuit it, but it is one of the things that has surprised me the most: to verify how there is a generation that eats all the shit, in silence, to forget all the death that is behind repressed republican families, and leaves you life in a place that is unimaginable coming from where you come from.

The book aims to break this ancient and very long silence. Let's look at our grandparents. You are the grandchild of a stonemason grandfather who died at the front and a grandmother who had to deal in the black market, and you are the grandchild of a shoemaker and republican councilman and a housewife... To what extent do you feel that these ancestors shape you as a person?

— It is curious because my generation had to politicize ourselves alone. Because, at home, the great watchword was silence. My parents, in order to survive the dictatorship, the option they chose, like many families in this country, was to blend into the crowd, to stop being a family of leftists so as to be no one, so as not to give reasons to talk. It is evident that this marks you, knowing up close all the injustices that they lived through. The first moment I think "something is happening here that doesn't seem normal to me" is listening to the Lluís Llach album Barcelona, January 1976, on a Sunday morning, because at home music was only listened to on the weekend; during the week, we worked. I was nine or ten years old and I heard that live album, that atmosphere, those shouts of amnesty and freedom, of "Long live Catalonia", the emotional Llach...

Or the La Trinca records, which you didn't understand until years later.

— You didn't understand them, but you saw that your parents were laughing as if scandalized at "the Holy Christ hanging between the two thieves". Oh, right, they aren't the two thieves from the Bible, they are Franco and José Antonio... A small child's only option was to listen and gradually discover the world.

Our parents lived through the Franco regime, but also the construction of the welfare state, this "gifted life" that they later gave to you. You confess that you lived in a house with a garden, a swimming pool, and a tennis court, and you had an apartment in Calonge. This also contrasts with the present day.

— We won the Christmas lottery, the 1972 raffle, when it hit Vic, and some years of splendor followed. My parents traveled after thirty years of absolute misery. They experienced the great contrast, as they had two different lives in one lifetime. My mother always used to say one phrase: "They stole my youth." Because they killed her father in the war, because later they didn't let her get married in white, then she had to stop working as a shop assistant... It was a whole generation of women who had a talent that, if they had been able to be born thirty or forty years later, they would have done everything.

The grandparents still held the philosophy of "we came here to suffer" and the parents were the first to say "but also to enjoy a little".

— Yes, with the corresponding tensions. There is a scene that explains it very well: when the parents get married and go on their honeymoon to Mallorca, they don't even bring a swimsuit. It doesn't even cross their minds that they could go swimming in Mallorca! In the seventies, they start to break that and they have an accident coming back from the beach. A relative of the family saw my mother in Vic, in the hospital, with a cervical collar because she had broken a vertebra and five teeth, and the first thing he says to her is: "Go ahead and take sea baths, blood baths is what you're doing." Can you imagine? He is effectively saying to her: "Laugh, laugh, but you'll be crying soon." That, of course, is quite a job to get rid of. My parents' generation, but also ours. Kapuściński said that the effects of a dictatorship last a hundred years and we are still fifty in.

Are you nostalgic?

— Do you mean it in a negative sense?

No. I am asking.

— Because nostalgic sometimes has a negative connotation that I do not share. I mean, I am now at a point in my life where I experience new things and relive others. And I find it a privilege. Sometimes, in the act of reliving, I even find a calm that I do not find in the present moment. If nostalgia has this connotation that I am explaining to you, I am nostalgic. If nostalgia is sadness, "the past was better", we cannot go back, I do not participate in that.

In the book you portray your childhood. I didn't know you were a boy at an all-boys boarding school in an era that was already a bit outdated. The Pive School was a place where they took the naughty ones, you and Carles Capdevila!

— But I wasn't an inpatient. It was more of a reformatory, a private school for people from Barcelona and for some people from Osona, children of parents who thought that if they paid a little more, their child would have a better education. It was a lie. I saw things there that seem medieval: being hit on the head with a lighter, having your sideburns pulled, being slapped in the face... How can it be that it was so long ago and yet you still had to endure that? I reproached them for that mistake my whole life, my parents. I understand it, because they were trying to give me the best. Well, sometimes the best is not what costs the most money.

You explain some crazy things from your youth in a small town and, on the other hand, you define yourself as someone serious and moderate in adult life. What has made you more reserved, being from Osona or being famous?

— They are two synonyms [laughs], in the sense that there is the gaze of others. The very title of the book, What will people say, I had heard a lot at home. This popular tribunal that you didn't know who it was, but that would judge badly what you did... That went well for me as training. So, when you have a more or less public job, that people can comment on, you are already used to it. What surprises me most is that, since I don't have memories of the first four or five years of life, they describe me as a very nervous child. My mother used to tell me: "You would make a dead person nervous". That is very strong. Or "you have St. Vitus' dance". Apparently I bit a dog, I peed on a carpet...

Boy bites dog is news.

— All this means that, as it grows, the beast is inside. The beast is there, and tries to stay calm by day, but at night it does not sleep.

You have insomnia. And what do you do? Write? Think of programs?

— Something very curious happens to me. When I get into bed, I have a moment of very good mental activity. I have my phone and I write in my notes, ideas, pieces of the book, I think of chapters... I don't experience it with anxiety, but you say, damn, where is the switch to turn it off?

Today this type of court, sibylline or savage, is on social media, where you are not present, at least under your own name. Why? Are you preserving yourself to spare yourself from what people will say? Do you have no temptation to open the curtain and take a look from time to time?

— Sure, if I had Instagram, I would post the book cover, I would post all the presentations that we will be doing in the coming days...

But people would like to see your vacation and your friends, eh.

— It's just that I don't like that. The more exhibitionist part of Instagram is not my way of doing things, and the more controversial part that X might have, either. So I give up having a bit more influence on social media, to have a bit more freedom and a touch of mystery, which is also good. I am better off this way. It doesn't seem like heroism to me, it seems to me that it works better for my life.

Of all these memories you have been weaving, where would you return?

— That's a difficult one. The book has shown me that words have stuck with me more than images. And now a sentence has come to mind, which is one of the first in the book, when I was explaining to a friend of my brother's that I was the smallest of the Taradell Alevins and he, who worked at the Taradell slaughterhouse, said to me: "So you're the runt of the litter". Look at how silly, I was ten years old, fifty years ago!, and I have never been able to get it out of my head.

In this book there is a linguistic enjoyment that you had not explored so explicitly before. Perhaps it is that, when parents leave, some words disappear from the dictionary. And when you rediscover them, your neurons celebrate, suddenly a window to a world opens for you.

— These words are the way to keep them alive, the parents, the grandparents, and also the language itself. But don't think that I had to do archaeological work because we have these words and expressions quite incorporated into the family.

When you came to Barcelona, were you embarrassed by those heavily accented neutral vowels, that Osona lilt, the vermeis, the cardars, the eixavuiros? Did you polish yourself up to appear on television?

— I have never been ashamed of my accent and my words. Have I changed? Yes, but it has happened against my will. It is like growing old. When I see myself in my first TV appearances... Those L's from Malalts de tele, I have lost them. I have been assimilating to the accent of the place where I live.

The filter of the standard can end up eroding this speech, these seeds that you still say.

— Then, then, then, then, we could say it in all sorts of ways. In the early eighties, there wasn't a standard like the one we have now, which is an advantage that it exists, but there is also the risk of standardizing the way we speak a bit more, and even making the language a bit more rigid. Sometimes we have believed that our way of speaking wasn't the right one, because the right one is the one we hear in the media, and no: the right one is the living one, the genuine one, the one of my parents. My father didn't know how to write in Catalan and didn't know how to speak in Spanish, but he had a spoken Catalan of staggering phonetic, syntactic, and lexical richness. This is the portrait of a country, of a generation.

The book's subtitle is "a family, a language, a country". Do you suffer for the disappearance of all three things?

— Look, I don't worry about family, what happens is that the centers of gravity change. When one day the parents are gone, in my case all of this has shifted towards my brother, who has children and grandchildren, who are the offspring of the lineage. Language is the homeland, it is the family, it is extremely important. The language worries me, but I do not want to see an apocalyptic situation in it. It is evident that, all of a sudden, many people have arrived from abroad who, in many places, do not need Catalan for anything, in others they still do; so it is not a political choice to speak Catalan or Spanish for the people who come from abroad, it is a practical choice. If Catalan is spoken, then I will have to speak Catalan. There are things that have improved. Before, not everything was better, neither the country, nor the language; there are things that are and things that are not.

There is trademark humor, especially with some expressions that quite define the Catalan identity. For example, the most euphoric compliment a Catalan can say to you: "Not bad".

— Carles Capdevila used to say that you can still add another negative word to it. The great compliment is: "It's not bad at all". Four words and three are negative. My mother had a very good one. When you asked her how she saw something, she would say: "Going well, badly".

It also portrays an era and a temperament the fact of not saying to the family, to the parents or to the children an "I love you". And here you have developed a theory about "I love yous": that they get used up.

— That is what happened to me, at least. When I was young, I said them more than I do now, when I feel I know how to love a little more than before. When you are young, you surely say I love you, I love you, I love you a lot, but you say it so they say it back to you. Or as a way to possess the other person. And I think it is good to save them for the right moment, neither rushing nor repeating it too much, because when you repeat things too much they lose all their value. To my father, the first time I said "I love you" was the last day he was sedated, and I do not even know why it came out to tell him, but I thought "damn, luckily he is sedated, because if he had heard me I would have caused him a problem," he would not have known what to do with it. We had never said it to each other in our lives, he had already shown it to me in other ways.

Do you think your grandmother from Perafita would understand today's world? Or even your parents? At what point does the world stop being your world?

— That's up to everyone... There is a moment in life when you want to participate in every competition: I'll be the last to go to sleep, the first to wake up, the one who will work the most, the one who will travel the most... And there is a moment when you relax and that no longer makes you happy. I don't have the feeling that I don't like this world. But I do look for places where I am more comfortable.

You have earned the right to do whatever you feel like. Do you have any pending audiovisual project? What appears during your nocturnal insomnia?

— The desire to do new things appears more than the desire to revisit places where I have been. Doing only the things that make sense and that I feel like doing, that would be the ultimate privilege.

Now that you reach the watchtower of sixty, what do you see behind the hill?

— I see that the best sixty years of life remain.