The Republic and the Requeté

Following the groups of men that ambled up Carrer Ferran from the Rambla, I eventually reached Plaça de Sant Jaume. It must have been shortly after Lluís Companys had unfurled the Republican flag on the balcony of the City Council to proclaim the Catalan Republic. But even though I can no longer recall the exact moment of my arrival, the applause and the cries of “Long Live Catalonia!” that greeted Companys every time he stepped out onto the balcony to rouse the people with triumphal words and gestures are still ringing in my ears.

In those days there was no such thing as a public address system, so the words of public speakers travelled through the crowd from mouth to ear, passed on by enthusiastic listeners. In hindsight, the crowd in Plaça de Sant Jaume that afternoon on 14 July 1931 was remarkably small, and there was an uncanny lack of flags.

I had just turned fifteen and I still dressed as a boy, wearing plus fours and chequered socks after the English fashion of the time. My young age, however, did not prevent me from taking a keen interest in politics, being an active member of the Requetés1 of Catalonia, and I was irresistibly drawn to the political and social events unfolding on the street. It was this sentiment that drove me to follow the people to that historical square whose traditional name would shortly be laicized to ‘Plaça de la República’.

A feverishly anti-monarchist mood emboldened this popular rally after the previous Sunday’s local elections had revealed a majority in favour of the Republic that had been decisive in the fall of the Bourbon monarchy of Alfonso XIII. Like a good Requeté, I proudly wore in the buttonhole of my lapel a silver badge with the fleur-de-lis of the Carlists, which on the back bore the motto “God, Fatherland, Local Rule and King”, in keeping with Carlist demands that the King return to Catalonia. Although it was fashionable at that time among schoolboys of my age to wear badges, especially those of automobile marques, a burly working-class man wearing a cap and espadrilles threatened to cuff me if I didn’t remove mine right away.

For the rest of the day, Plaça de Sant Jaume became the beating heart of the Republic, from where the demonstrators headed off to celebrate the unexpected dawn of the new regime, singing La Marseillaise through the streets of Barcelona. The anthem of the French Revolution by Rouget de Lisle, translated into Catalan by Anselm Clavé, was the revolutionary song par excellence for the Catalan Republicans of the day. Recalling his years as a lawyer, Amadeu Hurtado recounts how, at a gala function in the Tívoli theatre held in honour of the French fleet anchored in the port of Barcelona, “the Spanish Royal March was entirely drowned out by whistling, whereas La Marseillaise, which the public beseeched the orchestra to play, was met with a delirious ovation”. Now that the Republic had been proclaimed, between songs the demonstrators cried as one: “Long live Macià! Death to Cambó! Long live Macià! Death to Cambó!”

On returning home, as I walked up Carrer Balmes#3 between Gran Via and Carrer Diputació, the stillness of midday was only disturbed by a gang of street urchins led by an older hooligan who had seen the chance to smash street lamps with impunity. In those years, apart from Rambla de Catalunya and Passeig de Gràcia, which were the city’s most affluent avenues, Carrer Balmes, together with Pau Claris and Roger de Llúria, was the most prestigious street in the Eixample, one of Barcelona’s quintessential bourgeois districts.

Although commonplace, such incidents, together with the threatening cries of “Death to Cambó!” caused widespread alarm among the city’s bourgeoisie, which had placed its trust in the political leadership of Francesc Cambó, the founder of the Lliga Regionalista. In addition to being a politician, lawyer and financier, he was a leading proponent of Catalan culture: he founded the Fundació Bernat Metge, the Fundació Bíblica Catalana and the Fundació Cambó at the Paris-Sorbonne University, and sponsored the writing of a number of fundamental works, such as Història de Catalunya by Ferran Soldevila and the Diccionari General de la Llengua Catalana by Pompeu Fabra. Nonetheless, as leader of the Regionalist party, in the period leading up to the advent of the Republic, he had criticized Francesc Macià’s proposals for independence, while supporting a failed Spanish centre-right party in an attempt to bolster the discredited Bourbon monarchy. The fears of the wealthier elements of Catalan society, however, were unfounded, and the regime change passed without serious incident or bloodshed. Thanks to this, and also to the consideration afforded to the mythical figure of Francesc Macià, Catalan jaumins,2 to whom my father was affiliated, benevolently accepted the new Republican government. Some of them lamented the fact that Don Carlos had had the unfortunate idea of changing the colours of the Spanish flag and substituting the Royal March for the Himno de Riego, a military march that served as a hymn for the troops who revolted in 1820 to restore constitutional order. With its celebrated chorus, “Soldiers, the country calls us to the fight. Let us swear for her to succeed or to die”, the song was adopted by the liberal troops during the first Carlist war and was popular during the revolutions of 1854 and 1868, and even during the Rif War. As for me, I knew only the satirical version sung in Barcelona:

Si la reina vol corona, corona li darem. Que vingui a Barcelona i el coll li tallarem.

If the queen wants a crown, Then a crown she shall get. Let her come to Barcelona And it’ll be off with her head.

The Catalan Republicans had the good sense not to change the traditional quatre barres [four bars] flag, despite its aristocratic origins, and they declared Els Segadors [The Reapers] the official anthem of the Catalan autonomous government, the Generalitat. Preserved in popular culture down the centuries, Els Segadors was to gradually evolve into the Catalan national anthem from the time of the Renaixença3 onwards, which in itself was a literary movement that emerged from the bourgeoisie.

Despite my father’s elegant dandy-like appearance as a young man,#4 both well-educated in and respectful of the etiquette of 1900s Barcelona society, he was the type of Requeté who, in the manner of a Carlist shock trooper, would go to Ciutadella Park on Sunday mornings to protect the young women who danced the sardana from the attacks of the ‘young barbarians’4 of Alejandro Lerroux, a radical Spanish Republican leader who would not tolerate any public display of Catalan identity. It was on that sunny esplanade of the park where he and my mother fell in love.#5 My father was very much a man of the Rambla, at a time when the streets Portaferrissa, Ferran, Banys Nous and Avinyó, to the left of the Rambla, formed a well-to-do district. Even though the Rambla has always been a social mélange, at that time it was Barcelona’s most elegant avenue. As a child, I remember how we would poke fun at my father’s youthful vanity because, upon reaching the bottom of the Rambla, he would not resume his stroll back up the avenue without first flicking the dust off his shoes with his handkerchief. A high collar, a flower in his buttonhole and well-shined shoes were part of his lifestyle. Given these manners that he had acquired as a young man, during the 1920s and 1930s he came to be regarded as a ‘gentleman’, and was well respected among the shoeshiners at the Suís and the Lion d’Or and the waiters at the Sindicats Lliures.5

My father’s family was from Barcelona. My grandfather, whom I never knew, was musician for the Liceu opera house and the Municipal Band of Barcelona. He played the horn and apparently distinguished himself with a solo rendition of Marina, from the opera by Arrieta. Similarly, my great-grandfather, conferred the title Knight of the Order of Queen Isabella the Catholic, was drum major in a military band. Other forebears were building engineers responsible for major projects, such as the bullring in Ciutadella Park6 and, in collaboration with the young Antoni Gaudí, the famous waterfall that still presides over the park’s central esplanade, whose steps greet visitors like outstretched arms.

My mother’s side of the family came from the mountainous region between Pallars and Conflent. She was born in the ‘city’ of Tremp, as she called it, but at the age of eleven came to Barcelona on a mule-drawn cart, and forever lost the distinctive accent of the Pyrenean mountainsides. She had inherited from her father a great interest in medicine, reading the works of Abbot Kneipp, the Bavarian priest who at the end of the 19th century propounded a method based on hydrotherapy for the prevention and cure of illnesses. This prompted her to take up natural medicine based on the health benefits of sunbathing, fresh air, water, herbal infusions and a wholesome and varied diet, and this is the method she would apply to my brother and I from an early age.

My grandfather in Tremp, according to my mother, was highly esteemed for his affability, open character and for being an expert bone healer. He was both barber and doctor by trade – having abandoned his studies on being called up for military service – and he was popularly nicknamed el Barberillo, as he was immortalized in a popular rhyme:

Al carrer Soldevila, Mireu-vos-ho, no hi falta res, Hi ha metges, apotecaris, Capellans i tres barbers.

Down in Soldevilla street, As you see, we have it all, Doctors, pharmacists and priests, And even three barber’s stalls.

But he seemed to have spent more time in the bar playing cards with his friends than in his barbershop. This lackadaisical behaviour eventually became a burden for his wife, leaving my mother with bad memories of him. Another bitter recollection was the expropriation of the land where her father lovingly cultivated fruit trees, which ended up engulfed by the waters of the Camarasa reservoir. For my mother, the mere mention of Fred S. Pearson’s Canadenca electricity company7 conjured up the powers that be in all their despicable wretchedness. Neither my brother nor I ever knew our maternal or paternal grandparents.

I was seven years old when General Primo de Rivera banned the display of the senyera (the Catalan flag) and the use of the Catalan language in public companies. At this time we were living in Gran Via,#6 Barcelona’s longest and widest avenue, which traversed the city from east to west. We must have lived there for some years because, although I was born in Baixada de Santa Eulalia just next to the cathedral, the first home I can clearly recall is the apartment in Gran Via. In an outburst of patriotic indignation, my father, who like most Catalans of the conservative class had approved the dictatorship out of principle, gave the Spanish flag we kept for displaying on our balcony to a dressmaker to make a pair of clown outfits for my brother and me. Dressed up in these half-yellow and half-red costumes, we both strutted proudly around Gran Via during Carnival of 1924. Our conical hats were made out of cardboard by the bookbinder of the Gustavo Gili publishing house, where my father worked as bookkeeper and where a relative of ours, Eduard Fontserè Riba, was a legal advisor.

Our senyera, on the other hand, was carefully stored away until 1929, when it was draped over the balcony of our new home in Carrer Balmes. The occasion was the official inauguration of the subterranean railway line from Sarrià that had hitherto run overland, giving rise to more than its fair share of fatal accidents. At the same time, the street that previously ended at Plaça de Molina was extended to Passeig de Sant Gervasi and Avinguda del Tibidabo. We were the first on our block to place the senyera over the balcony, taking advantage of the relative tolerance of Primo de Rivera’s successor, General Berenguer, whose reign was jocularly known as the dictablanda.8 Gradually, one neighbour after another followed our example and finally the Catalan flag was to appear on all the balconies of Carrer Balmes.

The Catalan nationalist sentiment was always more deeply and enduringly rooted in my mother than my father. Later, in 1936, like many right-wing Catalans swept along by the Church-led crusade against laicism with the implicit support of the dissenting military, my father got caught up in General Franco’s National Catholicism. Despite this, his Catalan identity was sincere and unwavering, but the foolish monarchic ideology he professed made him hide this sentiment. Like so many other Catalan contemporaries, he only displayed it when dancing the sardana and cheering on the FC Barcelona.

Possibly because she was called Montserrat, my mother, on the other hand, was always loyal to Macià and to the Montserrat mountain folklore that imbued my childhood with Catalan religiosity. It was in Catalan she taught my brother and me our first stories, our first songs and the alphabet, and it was in Catalan I learnt the catechism at the Escolapios religious school in Ronda de Sant Antoni, where classes were given in Spanish or Catalan, depending on the pupil’s wishes. My brother and I took our first communion in that school;#7 as a memento of the ceremony, we were given prints that bore several lines written by the poet and priest Jacint Verdaguer. Some would now regard these strophes as trite, but they left in me a lingering, heartfelt emotion; my mother and I chose them from a wide selection, at a shop that sold religious prints in Carrer de la Llibreteria. I saw my first play, La mort de l’escolà [Death of the Altar Boy], also written by Verdaguer, with music by Antoni Nicolau, staged at the Escolapios school, and it has left on me a stark impression that time has not erased. For me, as a child, theatre was reality on stage. Every year, my mother would take my brother and me to see the nativity theatre production Els pastorets at the Teatre Català Romea, where the ushers would place a low stool on the seats so that we children could have a better view. Indeed, back in those days, the atmosphere in Barcelona had a far more distinctly Catalan flavour than it does today. Radio was yet to appear, and the interior patios of the Eixample district resounded with the voices of young servant girls fresh from the countryside, singing in Catalan, the language of the people.

At the age of five, I began to attend a Catalan nursery school, and later the Escolapios school of Sant Antoni, where I coincided with the journalist Manuel Ibáñez Escofet, who, like myself, bore witness to the “burnt walls and scorched beams of the fire that took place at the school during the events of the Tragic Week” of 1909. At that tender age, I already displayed a certain stubbornness with numbers. One fine teacher, a long-suffering fellow, failed to teach me how to tell time, a scene I can still vividly recall. Not long after, I continued my education at the Col·legi Catalunya, located on the first floor of a building in Carrer Pelai. It had a chapel and garden, which was run (as prescribed by the Montessori method) by a married couple of schoolmasters. The imposition of military rule led me to realize there was something called politics, beyond the confines of my house, which appeared set on frustrating the Catalans. That is how I first became aware of my Catalan identity. I had heard at the dining room table that Primo de Rivera had outlawed the cry, “Visca Catalunya lliure!” [Long live a free Catalonia!]. Thus, in order to see if a policeman would come and arrest me, I hollered as loudly as I could through the open windows of the balcony at the back of the house, “Visca Catalunya lliure!” Having tired of this subversive cry, I would continue by shouting another that I had heard on the balcony but didn’t entirely understand “Hi ha cap pell de conill?” [Is there any rabbit skin?] It was a line taken from a traditional rag-and-bone men’s cry who, in those days, plied the streets of Barcelona pushing a cart calling:

Draps dolents i ferros vells, pell de dona i pell-de-conill, vidre trencat de setrill. Qui en té per vendre un farcell?

Rusty iron, tattered rags, women’s hair and rabbits’ skin, broken bottles, shattered glass. Got a bundle? Bring it in!

More often, I would spend long hours playing on the floor of the gallery, amidst a spread of lead soldiers, those wearing the red cap of General Prim and the Moorish troops. The trading cards that came with Amatller chocolate excited my youthful imagination with scenes of the Rif War. Little did I know that it was such a wasteful and absurd conflict, thirty years of “Christian and civilizing missionary work” against the backdrop of a barren wasteland. The picture cards, for instance, failed to depict the beheading of Moorish prisoners and the subsequent display of their heads, used as trophies, impaled on the tips of the legionnaires’ bayonets (the same legionnaires that would fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War). The series of scandals and corruption that characterized this pointless waste of lives and money tainted even the King himself. To this day I can still recall a list of place names that few of my tender age were able to pronounce: Alhucemas, Melilla, Nador, Monte Arruit, Annual; the successive routing of an army that had more officers and generals than any other army in the world. The insurrectionist leader Abd el-Krim, who appeared wearing his turban and wool burnoose, left a lasting imprint on my psyche, far more so than the First World War, which ended when I was two and of which I also collected trading cards.

Reading the weeklies Blanco y Negro and La Esfera, I became interested in the treasures of the recently discovered tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen. It was my first foray into a strange, foreign art form. Another unforgettable image of that time was the silhouette of Montjuïc castle visible from the back balcony, and Puig i Cadafalch’s four monumental columns symbolizing the four bars of the Catalan flag, guarding the entrance to the barren land and gardens that would later be the venue of the 1929 World’s Fair.#8 Those four columns – blown up by the dictatorship in 1928 – were topped with winged victories in a striking poster painted by Josep Segrelles. The poster was commissioned for the 3rd International Automobile Exhibition and almost certainly formed part of the grand plan of this architect and politician of the Renaixença. At that time, the huge circular Arenes bullring, built in Neo-Arabic style by the architect August Font at the end of the 19th century, stood in haughty solitude on a small hill over an undeveloped stretch of land.

From the balcony overlooking Gran Via, where my parents would seldom let me go after I once dropped my silver First Communion watch from there, I would observe the carts and trucks coming and going, their reinforced wheel rims (they were First World War army surplus) carrying the red earth from the tunnel where work teams laboured with pickaxes and shovels, down through the subsoil of Gran Via, all to build the so-called Metro Transversal.#9 Service lifts, installed inside a makeshift gantry of iron struts covered with Uralita panels,9 hoisted the soil up to a platform from which it was then poured through a number of gigantic funnels onto carts and trucks in an incessant procession. Occasionally, the workers, many of whom came from the most deprived areas of Murcia, were driven to an early grave, entombed by a landslide. The pity I felt for the misfortune of those needy souls no doubt underlies my present stance against the social insensitivity of capital. That first metro line – Plaça de Catalunya-Bordeta – was opened in 1926.