They swelled their roasted peppers. They robbed a bank. In 1994 a crisis shaved Venezuela: socialized pocket alopecia. Some bald citizens enter the headquarters. In an office next to the end of the world there is… a Catalan working.
He is small, eaten by the chair, with glasses stuck together by responsibility, with an economic mustache. The manager, the existential foreman, the one in the middle who receives blows from above and below. He works while everything collapses. Clash of civilizations. They ask him how to say: "Pujol!" They correct him: "Wow!Voiced and deaf. Phonetics is a war, a struggle, an identity. running gagThis recurring, repetitive, recurring joke is repeated dozens of times in the Venezuelan film 100 years of forgiveness (1998). Saying, shooting, defending that you are Pujol, no Pujol. It is the only thing left, when there is nothing left, for that son of the Catalan emigration in Venezuela. The truth is in fiction. And one can only (survive) here.
Jordi Pujol in From the hills across the river He makes us see the repeated dialogue of the French politician Georges Clemenceau: "You tell me that South America is the country of the future. The bad thing is that it is always the country of the future." Like Catalonia: it is always the future. The future that never comes. The future has always worried Pujol. He wrote the book in prison at the beginning of the sixties. He knows that, from 1936-1939, Catalonia has been torn between fiction and reality. That's all well and good, the effort, the work, the hope, but this must be manufactured in reality. The future cannot be "a kind of opium", virtual popcorn.
Pujol has been the Woody Allen of politics: actor, director, screenwriter, producer. Stanley Kubrick: he has touched all genres. He is one of the few politicians who have written. He is a writer. In 2016 he writes when he sees Josep Maria Forn's film again, The cremated skin (1967). A real fictional story of immigration in the 50s and 60s. Deny and hope. Pujol writes recalling that Catalonia went from 2 million in 1900 to 6.3 in 2000 and 7.4 in 2016. And he asks: what was said in the Catalan Parliament in the 1930s about immigration? He answers: "A bit of everything. Partly distorted by the social tensions and radicalism of the time. But also with positive approaches such as, for example, that of [Joan] Comorera and [Pau] Romeva. In Comorera, then a socialist and in 1936 founder and general secretary of the PSòC. Not entirely in agreement, naturally, but both of an integrative nature. Because, despite the ideological differences, both were nationalists and their project for the country involved an important social burden and an integrative purpose."
Today neither Comorera (don't miss Antoni Batista's latest book, The truth of the Comorera case), nor Romeva. A country without nationalists has no future. And nationalism is the real integration of everyone. And we all want to be real non-fiction. The actor who played Pujol in 100 years of forgiveness He was also Catalan in reality. Armando Gota, born in Barcelona in 1940 and died in Venezuela in 2019. He was an emigrant. And a legendary Latin American actor. He always spoke a rebellious, spirited, real Catalan that brings out from within: "Pujol!" In death is where the truth is. When he left, his ex-wife, the legendary Venezuelan soap opera writer Mariela Romero, wrote: "Goodbye, dear". A nationalist farewell. A real goodbye.
