First sight

Nowa­days, the word 'Cat­alo­nia' no longer pro­vokes a frown of be­wil­der­ment on most for­eign­ers' faces, the way it used to, say, half a decade ago; on the con­trary, for rea­sons that are close to ob­vi­ous, Cat­alo­nia is pop­ping up with un­com­mon fre­quency in the media abroad; and when­ever I see signs of this new-found fame, I can­not help but cast my mind back to when I first stum­bled across the place, at the tail end of the sev­en­ties. I had come to Cat­alo­nia to meet my in-laws, and had only the faintest of ideas about it: I knew what the na­tional flag looked like, and I may have known there was a lan­guage other than Span­ish some­where in the pic­ture. In gen­eral, how­ever, I had the mono­chromic, mono­lin­guis­tic, monona­tional vi­sion of Spain that had been in­stilled in my gen­er­a­tion and the 20 pre­ced­ing ones. I turned up in my wife's vil­lage, aged 19 and tim­o­rous as a dis­placed cat, and was over­whelmed by every­thing I en­coun­tered: how on the day Franco died every­body had quaffed Cata­lan cham­pagne (the word 'cava' hadn't yet been in­vented) like it was going out of fash­ion, while the Civil Guard reg­u­larly launched rogue raids on the vil­lage to show they were still in charge; the daily, nor­mal, ubiq­ui­tous use of Cata­lan de­spite it hav­ing been banned so re­lent­lessly for so many years; the fas­cists dri­ving around with pis­tols snug in their pock­ets and Span­ish flags flap­ping from their car win­dows; a na­tional his­tory that in­cluded a mur­dered pres­i­dent and a two year siege of Barcelona; the fam­ily friend who in 1974 had shared a cell with the soon-to-be ex­e­cuted an­ar­chist Puig An­tich; the ex­is­tence of count­less Cata­lan lan­guage singer-song­writ­ers and writ­ers and poets and trans­la­tors... The per­son who ap­prised me of these things and many oth­ers in just a few brief months, thus help­ing me get my bear­ings in an un­charted world, was my brother-in-law, an ex­tra­or­di­nary man who didn't feel in the least Span­ish but who had friends all over Spain; who loved his coun­try, but made a point of trav­el­ling to as many oth­ers as he could (Africa alone he vis­ited over 40 times); a per­son who wasn't par­tic­u­larly lit­er­ary or mu­si­cal but who had and has a vast knowl­edge of books and music. He, it seemed to me, was a liv­ing ex­am­ple of the only way in which Cat­alo­nia could es­cape its anom­alous, con­cealed, mocked sta­tus: to be both in­tensely local and in­tensely in­ter­na­tional. And this, in­deed, is what it's been doing over these last few years, both po­lit­i­cally (thanks largely to the spring­ing up of sev­eral major grass-roots move­ments and a smart, if shoe­string, diplo­matic pol­icy) and ar­tis­ti­cally (thanks to the suc­cess­fully eclec­tic na­ture of Cata­lan cul­ture, which gulps down every­thing for­eign it can take on board). Back in 1979, I could not have pre­dicted Cat­alo­nia's unique sit­u­a­tion today, but it was cer­tainly due to that early crash course from my then brother-in-law, that noth­ing of what is cur­rently going on here has come as much of a sur­prise .