An education

For­get mor­tal­ity for a pre­cious while. Too alarm­ing. The cur­rent shadow scar­ing the world needs qual­i­fied per­spec­tive, and I will leave that to the ex­perts.

Let’s talk about im­mor­tal­ity.

What’s in a name?

Most of us dur­ing our lives have re­peat­edly ref­er­enced an­other per­son’s name. We have mem­o­rised it - writ­ten it count­less times, a sur­name and some­times the first name too of some­body we do not know or have lit­tle or no knowl­edge of. But they be­come a part of who we are, our jour­ney.

Strange, no?

There are sto­ries on so many street cor­ners, should we care to won­der.

My sis­ter and her hus­band, both ded­i­cated and now re­cently re­tired teach­ers of whom I am sorely proud, are leav­ing Britain for at least a year and have cho­sen to breathe in the Pri­o­rat. The logic doesn’t need un­wrap­ping. The Cata­lan classes have al­ready begun. Good peo­ple in our vil­lage, Marçà, have rented them a house, and so many more good peo­ple have wel­comed them. The hope is to fur­ther their writ­ing, com­pos­ing and paint­ing.

They will be able to walk to the rail­way sta­tion and, hence, ex­plore Cat­alo­nia and Iberia, to im­bibe the colours and rhythms that rip­ple with sense. The wind­ing train line of tun­nels and bridges through these chal­leng­ing lands con­tin­ues to bring so many pos­i­tives.

The house they are rent­ing is in Car­rer Bonaven­tura Roig. And as I stood and stared at it and the weld of com­mu­nity, so began the tale....

Car­rer Bonaven­tura Roig is peace­ful. It is one of the two high­est streets where homes nes­tle into the north­ern lee of the lit­tle Mil­o­quera peak.

Bonaven­tura Roig Quer­alt was a Lleida rail en­gi­neer who went on to de­sign and build the fu­nic­u­lar rail­way at Tibid­abo in Barcelona, the first of its kind in Spain. He was work­ing on the Zaragoza rail line into a Pri­o­rat wine land­scape blighted by the phyl­lox­era vine plague. He met and mar­ried a woman from Marçà, Maria Soler Bar­celó, and they lived here in our vil­lage and had a fam­ily. Maria, sadly, died young, leav­ing three daugh­ters. Now an­other street in our vil­lage bears the name of one of them.

Rosa Roig i Soler was born in Marçà 130 years ago, the home com­mu­nity she al­ways came back to when she could. Late in her life she re­flected on her achieve­ments and two as­pects shone out from a few words by this ded­i­cated hu­man­ist. “In my classes I al­ways worked for peace.”

Rosa’s mark was, as a pi­o­neer­ing Cata­lan ed­u­ca­tion­ist dur­ing a dark age of in­equal­ity, to cham­pion fem­i­nism, paci­fism and school­ing that would be open to all, re­gard­less of back­ground. It was to lead to ide­o­log­i­cal and po­lit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion under Franco, but she con­tin­ued to teach.

What is less known is that she was a poet. A pri­vate poet, rarely shar­ing them.

And this is where sen­ti­ment takes me to the edge. We feel so for­tu­nate to have found our way here, where the thyme is about to come flower…

Marsà jeu vora els teus peus

Oh muntanya ma­ter­nal!

No ets pas bella, mes t’estim

Com a la mare el bon fill.

Jo es­timo ta roca roja

Tos ametllers ex­hau­rits

tes alzines iso­lades

i el teu timó ja florit...