Love in Spanish
Scenes of marriage. Mercè Rodoreda used to say that “Love, the further away the more beautiful”. A writer and a street name for towns in Catalonia by the cartload. There are many little birds that choose small towns to build their warm-blooded nest. They don't come from far away. They are couples who take flight from nearby cities (15, 20, 30 thousand inhabitants) and land here, parading their nearby passion that comes out of their mouths in Spanish.
Now there is a village love in Spanish. There has never been so much of it heard. These young people (in their late twenties and thirties-whatever you want) opt for villages for a thousand reasons: housing, the arrival of the first neuronal confluence of the we-are-growing-up entity, the astrophysical geometry of the terrace to better see the next eclipse in 150 years, or, as in most cases, the children's school. Behind the church's nagging about the advent of the seventh door without a lock and bolt of new pedagogical cosmogonies is a flight on foot, and nervous grease, from schools due to immigration, conflicts... Rural and small schools (with nursery and primary) are filling up with couples like this.
Little birds who have gone through the Catalan educational system. Supposedly they did a linguistic immersion. But perhaps it was just a synchronized swimming class. Now the free choice is to speak Spanish. The children will be spoken to in Catalan at school. Real, live life is in Spanish. Their ideology is that of I-don't-care-at-all. This idleness in the air, this gestural, verbal sloppiness. This walking and acting in slow motion. This aesthetic of disorientation sold as victory. This poverty of everything.
There are some newcomer village loves in Spanish. They will say a stray phrase in Catalan to the person at the weekly grocery store, to the lady from the FBI-KGB on the rocking chair who they greet when they leave home, but at some point in their existence these young people left Catalan neglected, abandoned, at their first home. And now they export Spanish everywhere: like a moving company.
They work hard for the same thing. It's a business. Add to this collective team the regular suppliers who don't speak Catalan even with their children, the bank in the square, the shade of the mulberry tree in the main street... Not even if you give them a coin. And we could continue adding multidisciplinary professionals, multipolymorphic, multi-whatever-is-needed, but not in Catalan. And in front of them are the people of the town. The usual ones, the ones from all our lives. And what do they do in the face of this unstoppable new concrete structure? Speak in Spanish.
Many a flat-brained-sunny-photosynthesis-subsidized brain thinks that Spanish is only heard in Barcelona. Illiterate nationalism is cured by traveling... through Catalonia. Linguistic tourism is needed. To hear Spanish in the villages. Yes, of course, smart ones, many languages, immigrants didn't arrive yesterday, eh, but the vehicular language, normal, natural, rational, legal... is being built brick by brick: Spanish. We all work on it. We strive hard. We do everything possible to make it so.
“Love disgusts me,” says at the beginning of Aloma Mercè Rodoreda. A book written in 1936 with the last scent of magnolias that were already turning with the war. Published in 1938, when everything was withered, shriveled, dead. Love, yes, love is very beautiful, but when it's in Catalan... Far, far, far from the city, the town, the world, the universe... the mouth, the air, everywhere.