Dear Montserrat Roig

Today as we advance with a firm step towards the abyss of a dark post-fascist Spain (and with the danger also close at hand of our own intransigent Catalonia), one can always take refuge in the trunk of memory to rescue a benevolent image of what we are, or what we would like to think we are. I now hold on to the memory of a character who has suddenly become close to me again, Montserrat Roig, of whom I was an obsessed reader of the articles on the back cover of the Avui, collected after her death in the volume Un pensament de sal, un pessic de pebre. Roig practiced a free, critical, and intelligent feminism. We could use the same adjectives to define her journalism and her civic, political, and cultural commitment to the country, always tinged with a cosmopolitan outlook. Montserrat had traveled and read a lot.

Since I have been given a prize that bears her name (thank you!), I feel like remembering her. In a few days, on November 10th, it will be 35 years since she died. She left very early, at 45 years old. I was then a young apprentice of 25 years, loaded with illusions and prejudices. She, at 24, had already won the Víctor Català prize, an award she found out about at the sit-in of intellectuals at Montserrat in December 1970 against the death sentences for the Burgos trial of ETA members. A few years earlier, in March 1966, she had participated in the Caputxinada. She was a girl from the right side of the Eixample, restless and combative. Her parents were orderly and literary Catalanists. Things don't happen just because. President Macià had sent Tomàs Roig i Llop, a lawyer and writer, to Nazi Germany to buy Telefunken equipment to create a Television of Catalonia that was not to be. His daughter, in years to come, would be among the first to conduct television interviews in Catalan...

Her mother, Albina Francitorra, had also written for the republican press. Her daughters and a son (six in total), the war, and the dictatorship kept her away from her vocation, but in her later years, at age 70, she graduated in Catalan philology (at 64 she had gotten her driver's license). I met Albina when she was in her nineties, when Montserrat had already passed away. It turns out I ended up—and I am still there—in the building next to where the Roig Francitorra family had lived their whole lives. From my patio, I would see her reading and smoking every day on the balcony. The first few days I asked her if the noise of my children bothered her: "Not at all, I'm as deaf as a post!" She died at 101. She had acted as secretary and archivist for Montserrat.

Voracious, with a huge capacity for work, Montserrat did not stop. Among her 45 books (as many as the years she lived), is the monumental Catalans in Nazi Camps, a commission from the politician, lawyer, and historian Josep Benet, that man with an incredible inner strength who spoke in a whisper. She started on it in 1973, when she was working as a lecturer in Bristol. "He alone has made, remade, thought, rethought, built, and rebuilt Catalonia throughout his entire life," said Roig about Benet. This book transformed her; it turned memory into a combat tool. Those were the final years of the dictatorship. She interviewed and befriended about fifty witnesses, among them Neus Català, in Paris and other parts of the exile. In 1975 her second son was born and the dictator died. She lived in a frantic whirlwind. The book ended up being published in 1977, at the same time as the novel The Time of the Cherries.

She always lived with a fabulous intensity, unstoppable until the end. One day before she died, her last article was published, A traitorous muscle, in which she blamed the ETA terrorists for whom she had locked herself in Montserrat as a young woman. Days earlier they had left a little girl, Irene, without legs, and now they had killed a child. "It is they who force us to write recurrent articles. To repetitions. We would like to fall into tedium, to sigh for autumnal melancholy, to celebrate such a benign November (...) I would like, above all, to be bored. That the horizon of the world were a mile and a half of eastern beach, with fine sand and killer seagulls. And not to have to count dead children again to achieve the emotion that was missing for the actors who had to perform King Lear. But what do the terrorists know about King Lear, about the heart as a resistant muscle and about the pain felt by those who have to admit that a two-year-old child has just disappeared?" Her heart stopped the next day. Now that our world is darkening, let us ensure that her heartbeat, her lucid and tender gaze, her generous struggle, continues to resonate in all of us.