Scenes of marriage. Mercè Rodoreda used to say that “love, the further away the more beautiful”. A writer and a street name in 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 close passion that comes out of their mouths in Spanish.
Now there is a village love in Spanish. Never before has there been so much of it. These young people (in their twenties and thirties, whatever you want) opt for villages for a thousand reasons: housing, the arrival of the first neural crossroads of the “we're growing up” stage, the astrophysics 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 key and bolt of new pedagogical cosmogonies is a hasty flight, and nervous grease, from schools due to immigration, conflicts... Rural and small schools (with kindergarten and primary school) are filled with such couples.
Little birds who have gone through the Catalan educational system. Supposedly they did a linguistic immersion. But perhaps it was only a synchronized swimming class. Now the free choice is to speak Spanish. The children will be spoken to in Catalan at school. Life, real life, live, is in Spanish. Their ideology is “I don't care at all”. This idleness in the air, this gestural, verbal carelessness. This walking and acting in slow motion. This aesthetic of disorientation sold as victory. This poverty of everything.
There are some newcomers' village loves in Spanish. They will utter a stray phrase in Catalan with the weekly grocery store owner, with the lady from the FBI-KGB on the rocking chair who waves 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 Carrer Major… Not even if you give them a coin. And we could continue adding multidisciplinary, multipolymorphic, multi-whatever-is-needed professionals, except in Catalan. And in front of them are the people of the town. The usual ones, the ones from forever. And what do they do in the face of this unstoppable new concrete construction? Speak in Spanish.
Many a sun-drenched, subsidized photosynthesis, flat-EEG 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, from everywhere.
