Fifteen years before Franco's death, in 1960, Salvador Espriu published The bull's hide, a poem in which the author sets aside meditations on death and the sarcasm of God and proposes one on postwar Spain and Catalonia. It has often been read as a pragmatic proposal: given that victors and vanquished were forced to coexist, the best course of action was to strive for a dignified reconciliation. As Espriu himself has the character of the Almighty say, in Esther's First Story"Let a reciprocal offering of forgiveness and tolerance be given without wavering." It was about looking ahead, although this in no way meant surrendering to oblivion and forgetfulness. In one of the fragments of The bull's hideIn poem XLVI, the poet puts it this way: "Sometimes it is necessary and unavoidable / that a man die for a people, / but a whole people should never die / for a single man: / always remember this, Sepharad." To Sepharad (the Sephardic name Espriu uses to refer to Spain, but not to the bloodthirsty Francoist Spain, but to the truncated Republican Spain in which he was young) he addresses a plea: "Make the bridges of dialogue safe / and try to understand and love / the reasons and the diverse voices of your children." An affirmation of diversity, we would say now, that connects with another fundamental poem on the same subject,Ode in Spain by Joan Maragall. Only in this way, Espriu concludes, will a dignified future be possible: "May the rain fall little by little on the sown fields / and the air pass like an outstretched hand / soft and very benign over the wide fields. / May Sepharad live eternally / in order and in peace, in work, / in hardship."
Espriu's pragmatic proposal for reconciliation also addressed the conflict between Catalonia and Spain, an idea that Catalan nationalism embraced during the Transition and the early years of democracy. Or at least, Pujolism did: that's why Jordi Pujol wrote in 2009—when he was acting as a political analyst with an authority that would be irrevocably curtailed in the summer of 2014 with the announcement of his grandfather Florenci's death—that Espriu had... It was Pujol's way of acknowledging the failure of his own gamble on integrating Catalonia within a Spain that was inclusive and respectful of cultural, linguistic, and national diversity: "I no longer have any arguments against independence," he stated on another occasion. It was from that moment onward, and not before, that the dirty laundry regarding the financing of Convergència and the Pujol family's assets began to surface: among these dirty laundry, some true, some false, and others that have led to a trial that Pujol is facing at ninety-five years old and in frail health. It is pointless to say that Espriu failed, because poetry, fortunately, cannot be read in terms of success or failure. But it is obvious that "the reciprocal alms of forgiveness and tolerance" are far from being granted. And that is indeed Franco's great posthumous success.
