Balls or cojones? Doubt. Hamlet drinking hydrochloric acid. This happened to Jesús Moncada. Writer, eh! No street name. He had it inside him. Inside: his heart, his head, his blood... And balls. Outside, balls. His sister Rosa Maria tells us.
"In Jesus, in Jesus, I wanted to be able to write." collons, No balls". Collons was home, the streets, Mequinenza. Balls…compulsory education, dictatorship, law, unnatural was balls. In the end, they swelled, and he wrote what he was like. What everyone was like. What disappeared, evaporated, drowned by the waters: Mequinenza. We grab the diving suit.
Shall we talk about what isn't there, or is it? Literature emerging from the swamps. Behind an ocean of time: the exhibition and the book The emerged Catalonia, by journalists Òscar Palau and Jesús Jordi. The country that the marshes drank. Catalonia is a liquid society. Drop by drop: San Antonio, Terradets, Camarasa, Baserca, Escaleras, Canelles, Santa Ana, Oliana, Rialb, Sau, Susqueda, La Baells, Darnius-Boadella, La Losa del Caballo, San Poncio, los Guiamets, el Catllar, Siurana, Riudecanyes, Foix and Riba. We are not a nation: we are a dehydration. And balls have to do with and drink water.
Josep Carner-Ribalta, during one of the driest moments of his life and of Catalonia, wrote the biography of a river: Sícorios (Segre). It was 1941. I'd been parched, drained, thirsty since 1926, always alongside Francesc Macià (the man, not the plaza): Prats de Molló; Brussels, Moscow, Havana, New York, Catalonia, Mexico, more NY, and California... I still believed the Allies would drive down to the fraud-bull's hide in the Willys jeep to liberate us. They died of thirst, and they had water.
When we don't have a clear answer, we take the jug of mythology out of the fridge. Necessary as water. Mythology, like energy, transforms. And Segre was an aspiring myth. A dream. That of a country going from darkness to light. From candle to light switch. Sícoris is the fictionalization of reality: the construction of the Camarasa Dam ("El Dorado," La Canadiense, 8 a.m.). The story of a country that believed anything was possible by turning on a light bulb. Goodbye to the Argonauts of the Segre. Goodbye to that poor Marçal, a raftsman from La Pobla, who carries wood downstream but dreams of driving trucks. To Marianet and Xatart, who discover a coal mine in Santa Linya and dream of transporting the black gold on the Lleida-France train… Which has never arrived. Like everything: from dream to nightmare. From thirst to dehydration.
We haven't made fiction of our reality. Our reality has been absorbed from us. And now we're left with a few pages. A dialogue of Sícorios. In a hotel on the banks of the Thames in London. The Catalan engineer Carles Montañès and the American engineer Fred Stark Pearson. And where is his youth from? "Catalonia? Yes, Catalonia, a nation that doesn't appear on the map, nor in official statistics." All real, but not at all fictional. Bleeding in the sink.
I say this because I have deaths moved by water in two cemeteries: Rialb and the Urgell canal. I say this because millions of people owe everything to the history of Catalonia, to very few. Some were left without homes, lands, landscapes, feelings, and futures so that others could remain in their homes. I say this because when you turn on the tap, it doesn't come out water: it comes out blood. And the blood isn't yours. Like the balls of your tongue.
