A Valencian People's Party (PP) councilor from Godella, a municipality in l'Horta Nord, vented her anger during last Thursday's council plenary session by insulting the memory of the poet Vicent Andrés Estellés. This was in response to a question from the Compromís group, which was interested in knowing what had become of a ceramic mural by the artist Cuca Balaguer in homage to the poet, installed in 2015 in a municipal building for the 27th Meeting of Schools in Valencian, "that what counts is the awareness of being nothing if one is not a people." Compromís had offered to safeguard the ceramic panels of the mural. But councilor María Lurueña's response was furious: "Estellés is the poet of hatred, vulgarity, and Catalanism." She added: "We cut up the panels and use them to cover holes, and that's it."
Estellés would undoubtedly have been amused if a figure like this councilor had called him ordinary. He wouldn't have been upset if she had called him a Catalanist either, because he was, although, as is the case with great poets (Estellés is, one of the great poets of the 20th century, and not only in Catalan), his work is recommended to any reader who isn't a sectarian or an ignorant person content to be so, like the aforementioned Lurueña. Now, certainly not a poet of hate. On the contrary, within his work (I'm thinking now of an extraordinary book, The great fire of the garbones) Expressions of solidarity and appreciation for the victims of fascist hatred are frequent, whose memory María Lurueña's party does defend and protect, as do her Vox partners.
Godella rhymes with Morella, the monumental town in Els Ports, rich in history and landscape, which Estellés evokes when he writes: "A daily stone breastplate, / the deep inscription of the ring." These verses inspire the admiration of Joan Francesc Mira, another of the great Valencian writers of our time in Catalan. The verses form part of the poem. Morella Document, which in turn is a piece of the enormous Mural of the Valencian Country From Estellés, a mural made not with ceramics, but with words. These are things Councilor Lurueña can't understand, and with which she would simply, proudly, cover up holes. In fact, the Spanish nationalist right has long had the idea of throwing people into holes, poets and non-poets alike.
The Godell councilor's outburst had the wisdom, perhaps unconsciously, of being evacuated on March 27, years after Estellés's death and the events commemorating the centenary of his birth were formally closed. It's just another anecdote in the grotesque carnival we experience daily, if you will, but it's also a reminder of the deep aversion the far right feels for writers, thinkers, and artists they consider contrary to their patriotic and fanatical vision of things. Dark times are coming, and the parasites of public life are announcing them.
