"Yes, I know I have a reputation for being unpleasant": A walk with Miriam Nogueras

Miriam Nogueras meets us in Dosrius, the town where she was born. Her father was also raised there; her mother arrived when she was older, from Dos Hermanas, Seville. They maintain a relationship with the maternal family in Andalusia, and when we ask her if her mother receives comments for having an indepe daughter, she puts on an Andalusian accent to say: “Montse, what is the girl doing?” It is the phrase they repeat to her the most. She, Montse, was only 16 years old when she met her father. He, ten years older. She explains this to us while we walk towards the town pools where the Junts leader learned to swim. She also met her husband very early, in fact, at only three years old. They coincided at the same school in Llinars del Vallès, a cooperative located at the Can Bordoi estate. They started dating in their early twenties. “I still keep a poem he wrote for me when he was only ten years old. Back then, I didn't return his feelings much,” she says smiling. Today, he is a SEM helicopter pilot, they live in Cardedeu and have two children.

We cross a bridge and on the right hand side a large Spanish flag appears. Look, I tell her. Nogueras turns her head to the right and claims that before meeting us she passed by the house where her parents lived and there was an 'estelada' three times larger. Was politics discussed much at home? I ask her. She says yes, that her father was from Esquerra Republicana, but that she had no political interest as a teenager. It was later, after she turned thirty, when she already had her own business and joined business associations.

We arrive in front of a large football field next to the pool. It is a landscape that is not part of the childhood of the Junts leader in Congress. “There used to be sand and fields here”. Despite this, football has been a part of her life; she played for many years until she broke her radius and decided to stop. Now, she explains to us, she likes boxing. I think of the Congress podium, of what the exchange of blows represents. “Are you aware that you have a reputation for being unfriendly in Madrid?”, I ask her. “Of course, my job is to defend the interests of Catalonia. It is a hostile place, where you have to hold your position; I don't believe that going there to schmooze helps”. She assures that she is a person who laughs a lot, but that she drinks beer with friends in Catalonia. In fact, she says that she hasn't made any friends in Congress. “Not even Gabriel Rufián? We were told that you get along well...” She understands the irony, smiles, and says that they have followed different paths, that she believes they both entered “the Catalonia lane” and that he has exited it”.

We arrive at the pool. Here she learned to swim. “Do you remember it as a nice moment?”, I ask, innocently. “No”, she replies. “I remember it as horrible. Carles, the instructor, would throw me into the water and I would cry. And he would make me stop and throw me in again”. She was very young when she finally learned, she was only three years old. Later, she says, she remembers it as wonderful. We prepare to sit in the chairs before the purely political interview and I think about how small things forge character, like, for instance, precisely, throwing yourself into the water with the fear of not knowing how to swim.