Sebastià Alzamora: "The last words I was able to speak to my mother were through a walkie-talkie."

BarcelonaAugusta Hall, the first of the two poems – moving and shocking – contained in the new book of Sebastián Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), begins with a movie screen projecting the image of a ship moored in the port of Palma. The beam of light takes us on a journey back to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The reader soon learns that this ship, the James I, was converted by the Falangists into a prison for a few weeks in 1936. The cinema where the film is shown had also been, during the war, "a prison for locking up the Reds", known as Can Mir, because it was owned by a Falangist family with that surname.

Thirty-five pages later, all the death and ignominy we have read in Augusta Hall It becomes light thanks to the evocation of a childhood memory of the author related to his mother. Mother tongue, the second poem, proposes a return to Mallorca in the mid-1970s through the portrait of a rivetera (shoe sewer) who used to work with a small radio at her side and who, once a week, accompanied by her son, would take the completed work to the factory and pick it up. Published by Proa, Augusta Room followed by Mother Tongue It is the seventh book of poems by Sebastià Alzamora, which arrives seven years after The cleaningIn the middle there are novels like Kings of the world (Proa, 2020), Rage (Proa, 2022) and The Federal (Proa, 2024). Also the collection of stories Commissions are accepted (Ensiola, 2023) and the reissue of his literary debut, Rafael (1994; Leonardo Muntaner, 2024).

With Augusta Hall You set out to write a poem about memory related to the imprisonments, torture, and murders suffered by many Mallorcans during the Civil War. How did it come about?

— I should have put myself around 2018, when I was finishing Kings of the worldThe referendum had already passed, there were politicians in prison and others in exile. The far right was growing in Europe and also in Spain. It was then that I learned that the Francoist prison of Can Mir, located in the middle of Palma, was on the site where a well-known cinema, the Sala Augusta, has stood for decades. I was shocked to learn that the movie theater I'd been going to all my life had been a fascist prison. This shock set the poem in motion.

When did the cinema open?

— It must have been around 1946, or perhaps a little later. Fascist regimes usually took care to erase all traces of the sites where war crimes and major massacres had been committed. This week, six more people from those exhumed from mass graves have been identified. from Manacor and Formentera. Even in Formentera, there was a kind of prison where Republicans were sent, tortured, and killed.

Augusta Hall It's a harsh poem: it explains, without sparing any details, some of the many war crimes. Gruesome executions, rapes, mass shootings... "They killed for the homeland / they killed for Spain and for the faith," we read.

— Patriotism always makes me suspicious. It's like with religion and football: they're emotions I can see in others, but they don't really ignite me. I really believe in that phrase. Samuel Johnson which says: "Patriotism is often the last refuge of scoundrels." In the name of the fatherland, we have swallowed a great deal of shamelessness. And it still happens today.

You name some of the victims of the war by name and surname.

— During the Civil War, those who invoked the homeland were the executioners. They took up arms and went out to kill their neighbors... Even in the 21st century, there are people who think that what failed during the Catalan independence process was that there were no deaths. This disgusts me greatly. You have to be extremely cynical to think that way. In any case, those who propose this should go to the front lines and let themselves be killed.

Remember that the murderers were not satisfied with killing, but instead robbed their families and mocked them: "The informers / became rich by robbing them and insulting them / pointing them out in the light of day / as they had previously killed them at night."

— They defamed them to justify their crimes. They looted and robbed them of everything. In a war, there are two impulses that shouldn't be underestimated: hatred and greed. In my town, there were shoe cooperatives that were dismantled and looted. Some became rich.

You talk about it in the book, right? I think this was the story of Joan Garau, president of a shoe cooperative who loved to read. They burned his books "before taking him to the Sóller road to be killed."

— Yes. I name both the victims and the executioners because these stories have been researched and published. I owe a great deal to Civil War historians who have done excellent work, such as Josep Massot i MuntanerTomeu Garí, David Ginard, Toni Tugores and many others.

In one of the sections of the poem, you mention another prison, Can Sales: what is now "the provincial library dependent on the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Spain" was, during the war, the women's prison. One of those who were held there was Aurora Picornell, one of the symbols of the Mallorcan left.

— Until recently, very little was said about the persecution of women. Often, in addition to ending in murder, it also involved rape, a specific aspect of the treatment of women as enemy targets during the war. This is what happened to Aurora Picornell, who, at 24 years old and the mother of a two-year-old daughter, was tortured, raped, and murdered on Twelfth Night in 1937. It has even been suggested that she may have been pregnant. It was the complete nightmare that Picornell had to endure.

In Augusta Hall You connect the murder of Picornell and the Rojas del Molinar with a recent event: the day that Gabriel Le Senne, from Vox, tore up a photo of her in the Parliament: "They wanted to repeal the memory law / they found it divisive," you write.

— It's a way of saying that the dead of the war not only carry within us as a duty of collective memory, but they directly challenge our present. We live with politicians and citizens who believe those crimes were well committed. This fascinates and frightens me. Hatred never dies; it's passed down from generation to generation, like fear. The moment he tore open the photo, Le Senne, who is president of the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, had a fit of hatred and lost his temper.

But Le Senne is five years younger than you. His exposure to war must have come at most from what he's read or been told by his grandparents' generation.

— Sometimes people who haven't experienced any of this reproduce the dynamics of the past. Many of the discussions that occur in Catalan and Spanish politics are reminiscent of the 1930s. And in Europe and the West in general, too. The emergence of so-called illiberal thinking in the West inevitably leads us.

Yeah Augusta Hall proposes a journey to the reader through the darkness of the human condition, Mother tongue It is a luminous poem dedicated to your mother.

— I wanted to share the memory of going with Mom to deliver work to the factory. She was a rivetera: she sewed shoes. She held the bowl where the shoes were carried in one hand and gave me the other. We walked along a path that wasn't yet paved, with weeds everywhere, and we passed empty lots and wooden gates... The shoe industry was very prosperous in Llucmajor, but was later swept away by tourism.

And your father, what did he do?

— My father worked in a paint and chemical factory. He was a delivery man. He got up early in the morning and delivered paint all over Mallorca. He was born and raised in the countryside. He came from a family of non-proprietary farmers, those who worked the land for others, and they decided to leave the countryside and go to the city. They chose Llucmajor.

And the mother's family?

— My mother's father was from Almería and came to Mallorca as a carabiniere. I never met him, but despite having been a carabiniere and later a Civil Guard, he had a profound aversion to Franco. However, politics was rarely discussed in my mother's home.

To your father's more?

— Neither. They weren't at all politicized. But my paternal grandfather had a strong dislike for Franco. Whenever he came up in conversation, he would swear. He was mad. I remember my grandmother saying to him: "Leave it alone..." One day, as we were walking down the street, he stopped and pointed to an old man like him, but more battered; he must have had Parkinson's because he was trembling a lot. He said to me: "See, that one over there? During the war, he was a... bully". It was the way we in Mallorca call the hitmen who kill people for a few cents.

Did you know him?

— Everyone had identified the bullies from each village. They went house to house, looking for the people they needed to kill, took them away, and dumped them in a well or a ditch. It was a terrible and surreal situation. The person coming to kill you was someone you'd seen in the café that same day. It's sometimes said that there was no Civil War in Mallorca because it wasn't the scene of any major battles, but many innocent and helpless people were killed, sometimes politicized, but in other cases not.

Unfortunately, Mother tongue It ended up being a farewell poem to your mother.

— In October 2021, she contracted COVID-19 and was placed under isolation at the hospital. The last words I was able to say to my mother were through a walkie-talkieThey had her locked in a glass room, from where we could see her and her, but words barely reached her because she was already half asleep from the medication. Neither Dad nor I had a chance to say a proper goodbye to her.

Was it difficult for you to finish the poem?

— I had to put it on hold for a while. I was finishing other books, such as Rage and The Federal. Then, due to life's circumstances, we had to empty the apartment they'd lived in because my father came with me, and during this process, I found the toy blackboard she'd used to teach me how to write. Since I sometimes couldn't go to kindergarten because my nose would bleed, she'd made me write my first letters on that board: she didn't want me to waste time and fall behind.

FOUR BOOKS OF KEY POEMS BY ALZAMORA

Reissued by Lleonard Muntaner a few months ago on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of its appearance, RafaelAlzamora's debut as a poet, written in decasyllabic verse, was prompted by the death of a high school friend in a car accident. "Rafel, you were only seventeen when you knew your blood," it begins.

During the first decade of his career, Sebastià Alzamora alternated books of poems and novels, with such notable goals as The extinction –Documenta Award equate 1999, shared with Vicenç Pagès Jordà– and Well-being, with which he fused lyrical and narrative impulses and which he awarded with the Jocs Florals prize.

With this collection of poems, the author set out to bring two books by Ramon Llull closer to the present, Book of friend and beloved and Book of BeastsThe love story between two animals won the Carles Riba Prize: "The visible part is always too close, / and makes it clear that, no matter how you look at it, the clear truth / is that you have nowhere to hide."

Divided into four sections, The cleaning He arrived after a decade dedicated almost exclusively to the novel – in 2012 he won the Sant Jordi with Blood crime– and at a delicate personal moment for the author. The book closes with a long narrative poem in decasyllables: "Now that you no longer know or care, / have you ever truly loved?"