In 3/24, they do an extraordinary report on the flood victims. There's a grandmother who shares her heartbreaking, simple testimony. "I don't know if I'll be able to tell you what I'm talking about," she says. And she knows how to tell you, when she explains that it makes her brave to enter the house she had that was flooded. Beside her, a young woman, moved, says: "She is my Valencian grandmother".
My paternal grandparents, both from Valencia, one from Castellón, the other from Burriana, often explained to me that, "out of good will," there were people, like them, who spoke to their children in Spanish "to help them become better people." She seemed full of love and respect for her grandmother; she was the daughter of someone who was no longer educated in her grandmother's language. Perhaps she was, but she married someone from outside and the other language prevailed. At the train station, a girl about the same age as this one who was on TV surveyed me about my travel habits. She said, "Can we take a photo?" It's for my parents, who are very Catalan." She, well, no. She wasn't "very" Catalan, perhaps only "a little."
Language is one aspect, the most important, of the interrupted transmission to children by my generation, the one before and the one after. Cooking has not been passed on either; cooking has not been passed on either; throughout Italy, in Switzerland, needless to say in France, men and women cook, taste wine, dance, play instruments.
