THE CATALAN WOMAN FROM PERU

Last month, Rosario Palomino, born in Lima 53 years ago, left us for good after a five year struggle with cancer. I met her nearly 30 years ago, when she became the girlfriend (and later the wife) of a close friend, Francesc Colom. Both of them were psychologists, which I imagine is how they managed to find each other. From the start it was clear to all who knew them that they were not only very much in love, but also got on like a house on fire (not always the case with couples), making it a pleasure to spend time with them. During one of these get-togethers Rosario explained why she had just started to learn Catalan: her own forebears - and indeed her entire native country - had originally been Quechua-speaking, but that language had been minoritised due to the imposition of Spanish; so she understood why Catalan speakers were hanging on to their mother tongue for dear life and trying to make it as normal as possible in a state which regarded it, at best, as a barely tolerated nuisance. Once she had learnt it, she made a discovery as astonishing as it was sad: most of the Catalan speakers she met - influenced, apparently, by her non-European phenotype - automatically spoke to her in Spanish, even when she continued to speak in Catalan to them. For example, in a pharmacy in Barcelona’s Sarrià neighbourhood she started off by saying ’bon dia’ and went on to explain what she needed, in perfect Catalan. The chemist, who had a Catalan accent that you could cut with cheese wire, answered everything she said in Spanish, and when she left with a loud ’adéu’, he answered with a loud ’adiós’. Episodes like this - given the effort she had made to learn Catalan, a language she came to love - became frustrating enough to occasionally reduce her to tears. Over time, she realised that other foreign speakers of Catalan were finding themselves in similar linguistic situations, and then did a remarkable thing: she asked two Catalans - Carme Sansa and Toni Albà - and myself to form a small informal group (’nothing more than a Twitter account’ as she put it) which began to travel around Catalonia to hear about the experiences of people born outside Spain who had learnt or who were learning Catalan. We would give four short introductions and then an astonishing range of Catalan speakers from the five continents would tell us about their experiences, some of which had been like hers, others had been more positive, but all those who spoke were convinced that learning Catalan was the way to feel less foreign - or not foreign at all - in the country they had come to live in. All this took place in front of audiences which contained, of course, many native-born Catalans, with the result that the scales frequently fell from their eyes. Rosario’s name for our group was ’No Em Canviïs La Llengua’ (’Don’t make me change my language’), a name which eventually became the title of a book which she moved heaven and earth to get published, and which contained a series of the most interesting exchanges with the foreigners we’d met over the years. She was one of the most energetic, driven (and humorous) people I have ever met. We have lost her far too soon, but I have no doubt that she will remain in my memory, and that of many other people across Catalonia. For good.

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