One summer in the 1980s, a man made a revolutionary decision. He packed his things—his six children, his wife, the exhaustion, the dust, the damn heat, the fucking scaffolding he was carrying—and went on a four-day vacation close to home: to the swimming pool in his village in the miserable misery of inland Catalonia. People dismissed him as a madman. What's this guy doing? What he could do, what he had: there was no top for more. And they were happy.
Today that man is already dead. And his children will die too, but burned. That man, those men, those women, those children, those swimming pools, that everything, that, this is the border that runs from the fires of the Noguera and the Segarra to the Ebro. We are the check-point that burns. We are those who work... What do you call it, non-neural-illiterate-subsidized-lazy pseudo-intellectuals? Working classes, popular classes? Go give birth to panthers! We are those who sweat, we have always sweated. We are those who speak Catalan. We have always spoken Catalan. We are those who don't have bus 47s to launch heroes from nowhere and murder those of us who have given everything and been denied everything. We are those who don't have inhuman cement in the decadent Empordà district 11 of Barcelona, the resigned capital of Catalonia. We are not the periphery: we are the center. We are not marginalized: we are the community that makes this country live. We are not the junkies: we are those who cure it of its addiction to nothingness. You are the sick ones, out of sadness, out of ignorance, out of desperation, out of emptiness, out of everything it doesn't have. Out of everything.
We are those he wishes to ignite. For working, for speaking Catalan. For being in our home. For having a home and veins. For existing. This is burning. Here is the Catalan burn unit. People bandaged and poisoned like mummies. Their skin fragile from the sun and mourning. Their crusty bark. We can't be bricklayers, farmers, or engineers, we can't be. Nothing. We can't speak Catalan. Nothing. We can't breathe Catalonia. Nothing. Don't let us be anymore. And we've grown tired. Well, we're not tired, we tell you no. No means no.
No to the bayonet violence of a play in Barcelona that wants to penetrate the entire country like a rape. It wants us to be fiction when we're real. We call it "tururuuuu." No to the violence against farmers from illiterate offices. No to what doesn't feed you. No to what doesn't clean up the shit and mess. No piece of shoe that you mistake for a lettuce with a fluorescent light. Not in the territory. We only die in the country, in the real Catalonia: peasants and firefighters fall here in the flames. And that's why we light the fire.
Before you are the living and the dead. Yesterday and today. Fires crossing oceans of time. Those of us who have built this country. We are the conflict and the pain. We are at war to stay alive. On our faces we have the sweat and the tongue. The root and the love: the tree. Perhaps it will uproot us, set us on fire, peel us. We'll see. If it does, it will have a border of corpses before your eyes and before everyone else. A melting pot of immorality, injustice, cowardice, impotence. The responsibility for evil will be the rope that will accompany it. We are guided by a greater force: the dead. We are the dead you don't wish to see. We are the dead who give us life. We are the living. Those who still go to the pool with their heads held high. We have pride: what it doesn't have. You have not killed us. Burnt, red-hot, blazing. If you touch us, you'll be the one who'll ignite. We're here.
