Anna Balletbò: joy, drive, tenacity
Recently, with the daily tragedy in the Gaza Strip, it distressed me to speak to Anna on the phone, even though, in Brussels and she in Barcelona, we had a habit of doing so, exchanging opinions and gossip. I knew perfectly well how much energy, how many hours, how much tenacity (in her own way) she had dedicated over the years to practical solidarity with the Palestinian people. Now, it's one thing to be shocked and saddened by all the images on television of missiles and destruction; it's quite another to have these images closely associated with so many stays in Gaza, so many friends, so many hopes, so many shared projects. Hence my qualms about speaking to her, who must have lived through these last few months of criminal war with unbearable pain.
A dear friend has passed away, extraordinary from more than one point of view. One of them, international solidarity, exercised without grand proclamations and with many concrete achievements, I just mentioned. Another has been her combative feminism. With Maria Aurèlia Capmany, she was the driving force behind the Catalan Women's Days of 1976, foundational in so many ways. That the PSC has the honor of being the first party in Catalonia and the State, and one of the first in Europe, to establish progressive quotas on its electoral lists and governing bodies, until achieving parity between men and women, is due in large part to her drive and stubborn tenacity.
Solidarity, internationalist, and feminist, Anna has also been a staunch socialist. She actively belonged to the PSC from the very beginning, and she did so wholeheartedly and without wavering. Those who despise politics and political parties, or have a purely instrumental vision, cannot understand the concept of public happiness that can be associated with it, and which, in contrast, is felt, with the inevitable associated disappointments, by those who give themselves body and soul. They are missing out: you don't have to be too clever to understand that the maxim that says that charity, properly understood, begins with oneself, cannot stand up to the one that tells us that selfishness, properly understood, and the happiness that accompanies it, begins with others.
When Anna joined the Congress of Deputies in 1980, with Ernest Lluch and Lluís Maria de Puig, who had been there since 1977, we wrote a welcoming sonnet for her. I don't have it, but I remember a tercet: "'I am here now,' like the Man with the Freckles / You have exclaimed, and it seemed to us that it thunders / Ave va, Ballet, Balletbò, Balletbona…" The "Man with the Freckles," I'll clarify for the younger ones, Tarradellas evoked, and the meteorological simile (the thunder) alluded to the undeniable fact that both the president and Anna were, although not thundering divinities, people of enormous energy, strong character, and extremely kind hearts. I can firmly attest to this, and I could multiply the details.
Shortly after that welcome with an incorporated poem, Anna found herself in Congress on February 23, 1981, when Tejero and a group of Civil Guards burst in, shooting. "I've always been surprised," she later commented, "by the strange and unexpected way people react in moments of maximum tension or danger." Her reaction proved effective. She decided she wasn't willing to remain hostage and wanted to go home. She succeeded, with a stroke of genius, and so I had the unforgettable opportunity to follow with her, live, at the Socialist headquarters, at the Ministry of the Interior, at the Palace Hotel, the crisis and outcome of that attempted coup d'état. Years later, one of the coup plotters remarked, regretfully: "A coup that allows pregnant women to leave the country, for example, isn't a revolution or anything. There are no revolutions without bloodshed, even though it's painful to say it.". We have been warned.
