The other day, Enric Prat de la Riba wanted to take the train to Cunit. He waited 234 hours, 36 minutes, and 10 seconds. He died, devastated. To clarify false information, Enric Prat de la Riba hasn't been a street name for over a century. On August 1st, the first president of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya and railway organizer since 1914, kicked his heels on the platform of life.
He was with some coworkers on a siding, looking at a map of the country and sipping wine of hope. Look here. In 1914, Catalonia had 1,533 kilometers of railway track. And now look there. The Netherlands, 3,399; Switzerland, 5,112; and Belgium, 8,814. They'd already had a few drinks and understood that we needed 3,200 kilometers of track here. They made a drawing: "Graphic of the Catalan railway network in relation to the new territorial division." Sorry, eh! But I don't know if you're from Cal Perspicaç, but you've noticed that the word "commuter" doesn't appear, eh? Everything is central. From the Aran Valley to Alcanar. And from Fraga to Torroella de Montgrí. Everything is the yolk of an iron-made egg. Nothing is far, everything is close. And the train leads the way. It took two centuries to get here.
There was a lot of confusion. For a long time, Catalans believed that 1714 was a defeat that had wiped them off the map. No, no: it was the beginning. That's why, when he came in 1914, the country's odometer was reset to zero. Blank. Suddenly, something appeared on the map of Catalonia that no one knew what it was. The speedometer began to race. The blank country filled with dots, squares, pixels... The railway worker from Prat de la Riba screamed and the train left the station: "We want our municipalities to be able to provide themselves with all the educational, urban police, and rural development services commensurate with their importance, until they reach their importance, until they become the only municipality in Catalonia that no longer has its school, its library, its telephone, and its highway, apart from police services." And all this sprang up, and more, multiplied by much more.
When the trains of the future arrived, people spoke, looked, and dreamed differently... All those tiny, scattered, hopeful, contagious forms together formed an image, and we saw a country that went beyond its physical and mental limits. The Commonwealth of Catalonia (1914-1925) is the first kilometer, period. Pixel of pixels. The moment when Catalans across the country stopped being alone. They recognized each other. They connected. But if this happened, it was because the Commonwealth wasn't working to draw the present: it was working for "tomorrow." Today, any image of our lives is made up of hundreds, thousands, or millions of pixels. And Prat de la Riba, shortly before dying in 1917, broken, said:
"We didn't create the Commonwealth to have a larger provincial council, nor to give the Catalan soul a small, subordinate, secondary administrative body: a province. Everyone, going beyond themselves, comes beyond, and stopping everyone, going beyond, everyone going beyond, everyone going to Catalonia, a body of state." He said "body of state." We repeat: "Body of state." Not body of ice cream. We are on the platform of the dead life-track, unraveling.
