My Catalonia an indelible day

A heavy still­ness fell upon our Cata­lan val­ley tonight with the fad­ing to black. The con­trast with what has just passed is numb­ingly stark. This sud­denly bat­tered coun­try, far out on a limb, is hold­ing its breath. The sparsely-lit vil­lage streets and square are empty but for cats, and there is noth­ing tan­gi­ble of the in­deli­ble feel­ings of the rup­tured day­light. These now tum­ble on, in homes across Cat­alo­nia as screen blink shock­ing vi­o­lence, dig­nity, fear, and blame, as peo­ple of all ages and per­sua­sions try to take stock of what they are liv­ing through, of what change has come.

For it is im­pos­si­ble now to rea­son a way back to the past, and with the Cata­lan In­de­pen­dence re­sults flash­ing up vil­lage by vil­lage, town by town, it seems the ma­jor­ity are de­mand­ing “never!”. We will know soon and then an­other day of un­be­liev­able, defin­ing events will come, of edicts, clam­our and ac­cu­sa­tions - but, I beg, no more bru­tal­ity.

You will judge for your­selves. I just want to talk about my com­mu­nity.

I have lived here for 17 years, and just like any­one rooted in a co­he­sive so­ci­ety I have come to un­der­stand and ap­pre­ci­ate the val­ues and char­ac­ter of those around me. They be­long to a vil­lage like any other, a vil­lage where fam­ily, iden­tity, tra­di­tion and com­mu­nity are para­mount, that is. They gather at the drop of a hat. They share so much blood and be­lief. As one old enough to re­flect across half a cen­tury and more, I feel it has been a jour­ney back in time. Such is the glue, the un­pre­ten­tious spirit of rural Latin life.

That iden­tity has never waivered in my years here, or for cen­turies. These are in­de­pen­dent Cata­lans. La Diada, the Na­tion Day, Sep­tem­ber 11th, com­mem­o­rates the fall of Barcelona in the Span­ish War of Suc­ces­sion in 1714 and the coun­try los­ing its free­do­mafter a 14- month siege of the city. It was an un­for­get­table loss, yet for a vast part of the last cen­tury any­one mark­ing it would be pun­ished by dic­ta­tor Franco. Like the lan­guage, though, it lived on in soft, de­ter­mined voices in houses, back streets and vil­lages and then surged again when fas­cism was ex­punged.

My Cata­lan neigh­bours do not sup­port Spain in sport be­cause, they state, they are not Span­ish. And now the weight of the shadow they feel has hung over them for gen­er­a­tions has sud­denly lifted in the course of just a few years. It seems it could be heaved away by col­lec­tive strength. You may have seen that on La Diada mil­lions have taken to the streets of Barcelona to try and build a con­sen­sus for free­dom again. It is a pas­sion em­broiled in con­sti­tu­tional pol­i­tics and fun­da­men­tal rights, that de­mand con­ti­nent-wide com­ment and com­mit­ment, far more so after today.

But I need to re­fo­cus on what I truly know, the peo­ple here. I sensed that some in the vil­lage square were dis­ap­pointed at the end of the ref­er­en­dum wait­ing, vot­ing, watch­ing, eat­ing and ab­sorb­ing the news of in­tim­i­da­tion and in­jury all around them, that the Span­ish mil­i­tary po­lice, the Guardia Civil, had not come to their vil­lage to try to stop them. Just a hand­ful do not want in­de­pen­dence and did not join the gath­er­ing. Oth­ers who did not vote told me why. They were among the very el­derly with clear mem­o­ries and were afraid.

The threat was al­ways there. Eyes con­stantly flicked to the street cor­ner, for the green mark­ings of the mil­i­tary po­lice cars. Other polling sta­tions were being stormed and bal­lot boxes seized, peo­ple bru­tal­ized. Oc­ca­sion­ally ru­mours bloomed and vil­lagers would shoal in front of the main door to the coun­cil room where votes were being reg­is­tered. The ref­er­en­dum was painfully slow be­cause as well as send­ing riot po­lice to scores of sites the Span­ish gov­ern­ment had sab­o­taged the ref­er­en­dum’s com­puter sys­tem. But the Cata­lan Gov­ern­ment and thou­sands of vol­un­teers seemed to find a way to get through.

I stood at the edge of what felt like a cel­e­bra­tion pic­nic and ob­served the mayor, the mother of young chil­dren, fret that the day would be bro­ken. It wasn’t, here at least. Peo­ple sang the na­tional an­them, ap­plauded, and then went home to watch and wait to see if their iden­tity, self-be­lief and dig­nity would help to win the day, the week, their long dream - in­de­pen­dence. We are still wait­ing, to know what will be the con­se­quences of today’s shock­ing chal­lenge, for the whole of Spain, the con­ti­nent and, yes, this sin­gle Cata­lan vil­lage which is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of so many. Ex­hausted though I am, I fear sleep will be fit­ful.