One day, Tremp was on the verge of disappearing. Right in the holm oak wood. The trempolines and Cuenca residents (Llimiana, Guardia, Salàs...) watched as everything faded away, taking flight, and without a plane. Legs help me. It happened when it all happened.
We are lucky enough, and have the Ouija board technology, to chat with a trempoline from the early 20th century. What's happening to him? "The misfortunes of the countryside have impoverished the region to the point where life has become impossible. Young people have gone to the Americas to find work that would provide a piece of bread. Populations have been reduced by two-thirds." Nothing less. Droughts, floods, phylloxera! The dying grab their district representative in Spain, Josep Llari, by the neck. Paio, the government demands from us "the same taxes as before, when Tremp was rich and prosperous," and "we cannot pay because poverty has consumed us, and the government, faced with such a justifiable excuse, responds by having civilians search the dead villages where the elimination of poverty has given them the tranquility of cemeteries." But the niches of the cemeteries are moving.
Pieces of tombstones in hand, the entire Tremp DF, in assembly, decides on a path toward resurrection. The town and the basin "agree to ask for lodging from American countries, more generous than this ungrateful Spanish land. If they respond satisfactorily from America, it will be the first time that an entire district emigrates. The elderly, women, even the sick want to leave; everyone will leave, and only the tax collectors and the forces will remain in Tremp." Hay replies.
Tremp went from 6,996 inhabitants in 1875 to 4,682 in 1910. Llimiana, from 855 people in 1857 to 476 in 1910… And in the rest of the towns, they emerge from their graves in swimsuits and floats. You'll find much of their DNA in Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay, and Panama. The Pallars exodus is oceanic and against all odds. A heroic zodiac example: of the seven Catalans who went on the Titanic (1912), only four survived... and three were from Pallars Jussà. They were there, precisely, for the oxygen of the Americas. Precisely, there's little talk about the existential gas of freedom. Everything was dying. The vineyard was strangled, but the wine could neither get in nor out. Gulp!
El Pallars, the Western Pyrenees, is bleeding because the greatest wound is the one that cannot be seen, nor is there: the train. Many Pallars residents who make their way to the Americas leave because the train that was supposed to connect them with Catalonia, France, and Europe hasn't appeared. Not since 1856, with the first rail... It didn't reach Llimiana until 1949. In Tremp in 1950. In La Pobla in 1951. A dead end. Never beyond. One coitus interruptus of the country. A frustration, a denial, a disappearance. Commuter trains in the 21st century are going terribly, but in the Pyrenees they've never seen the trains that were already conceived in the 19th. Catalonia is always a railway hypothesis. The future never arrives. And infrastructure is violence.
From the primitive cemetery of Mur. From this mortuary hill. From the village of Collmorter, from Cal Soldat, you can see the resurrection. The castle of Mur blowing at us since 969. It is the immortal vine of Pallars Cellers DF before a valley of crystal life. Tomorrow's glasses are made of this air. High-altitude wines that put heaven in the bottles. We toast those who had to leave. We toast those who ensure that Pallars does not disappear. We drink the earth. Truth is in the wine. The vineyards are now an infrastructure of the country. They are an invisible train that, without leaving home, reaches the whole world. Cheers!
