A novel about the post-war period

In 1944, Robert Surroca's family moved from 108 Muntaner Street to 128 Rocafort Street in Barcelona. He was 10 years old. They took him to study at a local academy. We went in…

"The Catalan teachers, everything in Spanish, needless to say; when we went out to the playground, even the Spanish-speaking kids, who were there, all spoke in Catalan. I mean, in the street we spoke Catalan then, and when you went to ask the teacher something at the table, you spoke in Catalan with Catalan." vox populiTo get up, ask questions, whatever, all in Spanish, typical of the time. Singing the Facing the sun "When you went in, praying and all that stuff..."

At 14, he and his twin brother were told by their parents, "It's either the box or the girdle: study or work." They weren't good students and started working in the family butcher shop. We didn't know that Catalans had a tough time, had housing problems, and also emigrated. Incredible, unbelievable. It's about time we started doing socio-psychological studies on plants to overcome intergenerational traumas for the Catalan animal minority.

Robert had to wait until he was 18 (the legal age of access) to be able to read books in the Central Library. Despite being Catalan and a Catalan speaker for generations, he had never read anything in Catalan. Curious. He had a story. And well, the day he found out that the Central Library was called the Central Library before 1939... "I realized I'd been tricked," he says. By day and by night, he joined the National Front. of Catalonia (1940), first political formation Loctite from the remnants of the war. He did everything. From the clandestine apparatus: printing and distributing propaganda that he carried all over Barcelona on a Vespa so that other militants could then distribute it to people's homes; painting (with tar) the names of the unofficial assassinations: Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, Lluís Companys, Joan Peiró…; training militants in security; organizing teams to cross the border… A thousand actions like the one on the Diada of 1971 when they played The reapers blasting music from speakers lying in a hotel room overlooking Trafalgar Street… We wouldn't finish the mandongo

There are many Surrocas. And many Surrocas in Barcelona. In the postwar city. But don't worry: they'll never appear in a novel about postwar Barcelona. Because they're Catalan, because they speak Catalan, because they're Catalan immigrants, because they're from the working class, and because they were the first to fight against the dictatorship that wanted to fleece them, that wants to keep fleecing them. And if they ever do appear, they'll be slaughtered: in pieces, the opposite of what they are and what they've been. They want to make bacon out of the butchers. They want the flesh of the living. Barcelona is falling more now than it did in 1939.