My Cataluña. Remininscences around 1993

"Summer 1993" by Carla Simón, 2017 Please read the beautiful synopsis of this incredibly moving film by pressing the above link.

My Summer of 1993

I was fresh out of Barcelona in the Summer of 1993. I never learned Catalan, but I ended up no longer finding the Sardánas torture after one of my older students turned out to be a flabiol (fipple flute) player in a Sardana band. I think he may have single-handedly turned my somewhat wary opinion of the Catalans for me, at the eleventh hour.

Please be advised, this music might drive you up the wall!

Below: dancing the Sardanes, photo by bernatff

This middle-aged man was shy in my class of eternal Book One students, but he clearly had a better command of English than his colleagues, who trundled in at nine on Monday morning to learn a language they loathed, spoken by a people they found had no right to dominate the world with their toungue. (They invariably turned to compare the colonists - and favour their own - whenever they got fed up with irregular verbs.)

Xavier

This stout man with his bald pate, an accountant at the Bolsa, looked older than he probably was to my 21 years of non-experience at life. He always had a smile upon his face and something peaceful radiated from his eyes. I learned about his story only after teaching him for a year.

In class he always gave example sentences with children in it, as if describing his own. One day he asked me for the word for nephew and explained he had meant this instead of "his son" all along. His wife and he had lost a baby boy and had never been able to conceive thereafter. It had made him the favorite uncle of a number of nephews and nieces, with which he consoled himself. Apparently, his wife had never been the same since and she lead a recluse life. He divided his time up between keeping her company, work, his love of Sardánas and petanca (a Catalan version of jeu de boules). I remember being in awe of how his congenial nature betrayed nothing of his loss.

more on the game here - in Castillano

Maria-Dolores

He was not the only Catalan who impressed me. Since I was all by msyelf for Christmas, one of my pupils invited me to Christmas lunch. A place was found for me at the large table in her tiny flat accommodating fifteen other family members (the table, not the flat! Albeit accommodations can be very cramped, in the modern city of Barcelona, with a family of children and, not seldom still, a grandmother living in).

This woman had never managed to write a single intelligible sentence before (in a virtually illegible scrawl), and she refused to take her turn in reading an exercise out loud. I am not quite sure how I could have heard of dyslexia back then, but I managed to understand that a non-language learning issue lay at the root of her perpetual failure to graduate to a higher level.

We sat down to discuss this possible reason, and that alone seemed to have shifted something for her. With renewed confidence and verve she started handing me short pieces of writing, in a very neat hand, which were word perfect. I don't know if she got some help from anyone to explain the miraculous transformation, but the effort she was taking, either way, was heart-warming.

Finding my expertise at the cost of ease

I never am one to give myself much of a pat on the back, but I rejoyced for my pupils when they finally were ready for Book 2 (after 4 years). Sadly, I was not to be the one to follow-up on their success, because the Old Boys School establishment that is the upper-range language school was not charmed by my straying outside THE BOOK with home-made supplementary materials referencing to Barcelona instead of London, and personable home-made audio-tapes. I also did the taboo thing of translating into Spanish whenever we really got stuck down a grammatical alley and the class was about to walk out on me.

It was then that I began to specialise in one-on-one teaching, getting handed - by word of mouth - several other learning-disabled students , into whose fairly priviliged homes I got invited to get some rudimentary business English down. I had to keep very quiet about such lessons, and got paid accordingly: this is how I learned of the great taboo that surrounds any kind of learning disability (in Spain, but elsewhere no less, albeit awareness and sympathy is being raised as we speak).

Jordi

One of my students, I referred to as the dinosaur, but mainly for his giganormous car he drove - at 18 already - was in retrospect autistic, with an IQ that may well have only scraped over the 78 bench mark (considered"normal-enough"). Clearly he had some speciality he shined at, for he was meant to follow in his father's footsteps in a state-of-the-art computer technology company. But the father was a typical Spanish autocratic head of the family and the atmosphere in the flat where I taught him, once a week, was oppressive. His mother looked like a bird with both her wings broken, bored senseless, stuck in their flat, practically clad in gold. I recall how very akward it was to communicate with him - in ANY language! And how desperate the mother was to be reached in any HEART-FELT way.

Catalan blubs and clacks along

The film "Summer of 1993" did not directly bring back my own experiences of Cataluña and the hard-headed Catalans, but it was surprising to me how much Catalan sounded familiar (and a tiny bit comprehensible) to me. Something had lodged itself deeper in my system, imperceptibly while I had been merely taking personal biographical notes. I realised, from all the French I detected that I had finally arrived at an objective standpoint for this language, I never much was sympathetic towards prior.

Much of its vocabulary comes closer to the French than the Castillian, but that got lost on me at the time (I found it an "blunt" tongue and representative of the staccato business-mindedness of the average Barcelonese. When I totted up who were my best acquaintances or lovers in Barcelona, they were invariably import Andalusians...). French or not, however, one must also place Catalan instantly on the Iberian side of the Pyrenees, for reasons that become very interesting in esoteric science when we study the various archai, or principalities in charge of the development of man on a national level.

Yes, also Catalans appear Spanish to a European, in as much as there can ever be a unified Spain - just look at the expanse of the country and its diverse landscape, not to mention its pluricultural history. Like Cees Nooteboom, whose book, "Roads to Santiago" I just finished, I have an inexplicable passion for Spain that is quiet and in it for the long-run. I am shamefully a-political (I don't even give a hoot about the vote) but I can just as well understand the separatists as well as warn against division and fragmentation. It is also a part of human development to want to be alone for a bit to consolidate better your own strengths AND discover better your own weaknessess (and why you need to form larger units for the sake of world peace).

Flamenco dancer with Paco Peña in the background

On the surface of it, I find the Spanish tediously loud, frequently full of platitudes, ceaselessly nattering about nothing and crassly xenophobic. May I add mysogenist? I'll spare you my pregnant-stories which involve the Guardia Civil persuing me all around La Mancha for driving around in a "suspicious" German car in February, pregant with a dope for a partner, at the time. And confused regards authority? Oh, and by far, way too Catholic- then again, that in combination with the Arabic sensuality of the South (I also lived in Sevilla) is maybe what makes this country for me the Mystery Centre of my Self. It is where I found my feminine self, despite many biological impediments to this "normal" woman any girl grows up into. Here I found a flow I could step into, with a rock-bed I could plant my toe upon to try and dance the dance of life.

May I quickly follow all that with the observation that I don't think there isn't a Spanish film maker around who doesn't gloriously defy all of the aforementioned qualities. Spanish cinema rocks!

Me and Fiestas aren't friends

In the film, "Summer 1993) which makes you a heart-wrenched fly on the wall, there is a scene where la Fiesta de la Merce - see more here - is celebrated with "Gegants" - giant puppets.

Such parades are completely NOT my thing. I would stay a mile away from any such procession and I failed to learn which were religious and which were other. It turns out this one belongs to the latter category; celebrating the birthday of Barcelona. The tradition and meaning of these (fairly hideous, if I may express myself freely here) puppets (the children get to wear purposely and ludicrously disfigured enormous heads, see below) turns out to be fascinating, especially when I read about the Queen of Sheba and Solomon having something to do with it (a very pivotal story in esoteric Christianity, that reaches - indeed - beyond any specific religious festival we celebrate currently).

More on gegants here, incl. a flavour of Catalan

.... Barcelona to be continued?

I cannot help but feel that Barcelona for me is still an SD card with many bits of unread information. I did go back in 2004 to find a city that felt empoverished to me - deprived of something that had made it authentic and full of promise. That was probably just me not needing what it had to offer at the time. Should I then have put "I cannot help but feel that MY Barcelona still has something that needs decoding?"

Parents, sisters, self: have we any choices?

In the film "Summer 1993"

there is so much going on for me, to make me weep and ponder deeply.

It contains something that reaches below my years in the Big Bad B. (yes, times were trying for me mostly).
There is the theme of growing up without your parents. To this we add the very silent but overbearing presence of Frida's invisible but cursed viral infection, never mentioned, since we look at the world from her own 6-year old perspective.
At the same time there is this wide-eyed total innocence of the three (?) year old cousin who feels like a sister. The roles are reversed as compared to my little sister and I, where I would be looking for her and following her around (from one corner with her book to the next) in the attempt to get her to play with me. In the film, the youngest girl looks up to the elder, who is too wrapped up in her inexpressable loss of both her parents to appreciate this welcome into her new family (where her aunt and uncle become her new parents).

How many such children might there not be in this world after the AIDS epidemic of the nineties? I know from my mother how losing your biological parents is an abandonment hard to come to terms with, even if your new home is more than alright. It just istn't the home you signed up for, though, is it? Or is it? Do we know our fate before we are born in such detail? Is it then just a matter of overcoming nature and teaching the free spirit to feel truly free and empowerd regardless of external circumstances?

Another film comes to mind, now, "Vengo" (a French film by Tony Gatlif, about a group of very Spanish gypsies), which came out in 2000, the year in which I planted my other foot into the stream of life by falling in love - as much as I ever could and did - with an impossible love. Was it even the man I fell in love with? Was he even a man, yet?

And so our travels bring us closer to home.

While the Berlin poplars tinkle and the Atlas cedar moans in the summer winds.