What do we do? That's the question on the minds of parents who still have brain cells when they feel their child doesn't speak Catalan, even when their child from other families who also speak Catalan speak it. children They repeat like a machine gun (we're at war and they've been given weapons): "Catalan isn't fashionable." Catalan must be the only language on this planet and in the galaxy that isn't fashionable. Is Icelandic in vogue? Malay? Portuguese? Huh?
Castilian "makes it finer", is "something good to look at"And it's fashion and we must talk to it," says one of the protagonists of the play. Nice peopleFrom the morphine addict of life, Santiago Rusiñol. Premiered in 1917, the farce portrays that fad of those Catalans who suddenly decided to speak Castilian to children, streetlights, and squirrels. They believed that social mobility was in Castilian. Only Rusiñol could write it.
God of Modernism. "Prince of the Catalans," a title bestowed upon France. Rusiñol is the father of Catalan and cosmic Modernism. He made Barcelona (and Sitges) a co-capital of international Modernism with Paris. Total art. And it was 360 degrees like nowhere else in Catalonia: literature, painting, theater, architecture, sculpture... The Catalan Modernists did it all in a language that wasn't fashionable: Catalan. They incorporated Catalan into Europe without this European Union, a national-bureaucratic state. Catalonia is denied in the 21st century what was not denied to the Catalan Modernist para-state of the 19th. But the point is fashion, isn't it?
The one Rusiñol describes. The one about the "Counts of Ribeiro." They throw a party. Protocol dictates everything in Spanish. They struggle with it. Catalan slips out, those Catalanisms, those constipated faces. And in this hubbub, everyone is a Catalan speaker, but they all speak in Castilian. A zombie masquerade ball. That's why a friend of the Count tells him that if he wants to be resurrected, if he wants the approval he seeks, he must master the other language: he must make out, grope, with another lady who isn't his mistress. And the Countess with another gentleman who isn't him. They each need a lover. It's the ISO 9000 of social acceptance in Spanish. The truth is: the friend tells him this because he wants to take advantage of his mistress.
The buddy runs his tongue and all his DNA over the Countess's public body. And the count looks for a victim: the senator's wife. He takes her close to heal her, and all the chastity belt alarms go off. The senator explodes, and the count makes excuses:Nothing, nothing. They're parlor games.The atomic senator: "I'll give it to him myself, the loungeInsolent! Bandit! Parnales! Go flirt with her grandmother"Lost!" All he can think to reply is:This is not correct, Senator. Nor is it Catalan.The senator: "Romances with the Castilian! Who translates when he is exalted?" And he marches shooting in Catalan, leading him to a duel at dawn.
Wounded and taught, what the count did not want to know is that in Catalonia the counts spoke Catalan. That we had our own counts, kings, princes... And that the language, like that of fashion: is to fuck us and rob us. Avui encara is viu d'that modernisme artístic and material. The idea and the bitllet. nins and no nins, ha assenyalats per parlar català, es lo tienen queda de tener todo: cuerpo y alma.
