A power without varnish
If we look at the front pages of the newspapers, we realize that the Spanish justice system has become the shadow that hangs over our existence, as was the army in the 19th and 20th centuries. Just as until the Civil War parties and ideologies depended on the favor of the military to get ahead, now it seems that politicians cannot do anything without the approval of the judges. The Spanish leviathan has shed its last cloak, and surprisingly what remains exposed is not an armed arm or a crowned head. What remains is, simply, a vision of the world in which Catalonia has no place, neither as an adversary nor as an issue.
A problem without a solution
All the drama, and all the frustration generated by the language situation, or the effect of the migratory waves, has more to do with this revelation than with the reality that is criticized or that is vulgarly tried to hide . What frustrates and scares the average Catalan is having to recognize that the existence of Catalonia is incompatible with the very essence of Spanish Law. It may seem like I’m exaggerating. But I still remember the confidence that the justice dictated by Madrid inspired the pro-independence Catalans at the time of the Pretoria case or the confession of Jordi Pujol. Now, not even having few children or writing in Spanish, or worrying about the world’s poor, will serve to hide the problem.
A conflict without shelter
Now it will be appreciated with all the harshness, and with all the ferocity, that Catalonia has no technical remedy, and that the moralistic excuses of the left do not provide any protection, neither collective nor individual. At the moment the idea of conflict is more frightening than the very idea of extinction, even if it sometimes seems the opposite. The fragmentation of the converging political space into three or four factions headed by puppets of the old regime is a desperate attempt to contain the panic caused by the attitudes of the world of justice. The so-called empire of the law is the codified soul of power and its performance has never reminded us so clearly that, in the end, the only thing that matters are the atavisms on which the State was built.
A struggle without end
Catalans and Castilians have arrived exhausted at the last stage of the national struggle. In the 19th century, the military took the reins of politics under the pretext of giving stability to the Crown and ended up sending it to hell for 40 years. This time the bodies of the State will not have enough to do without the king to dominate Catalonia. The 1st of October made the democratic limits of physical violence all too clear, and also the literary limitations of the School of Barcelona. Now it will be seen that the legal language is the last ditch of the State and that the Spanish justice is bent, by its very nature, to liquidate the Catalan nation, even if it is at the cost of losing prestige and independence in favor of of a superior power, as happened to the army, after the Franco regime.
A dead end mirror
In this sense, I was surprised that Xavier Pla invited Ignacio Peyró and the young followers of Clara Ponsatí to talk about the political self, in literature, at his symposium in Olot. The idea that the friend of Javier Cercas staged a dialogue of lyrics between the writer who compiled Rajoy’s speeches and the schoolchildren of Ponsatí made me think of a group of Egyptian mummies outside their sarcophagi pretending that the era of the pharaohs has not happened. Managers of culture, like managers of politics, will remember more every day the unbelieving courtiers of that Poe story called The Masque of the Red Death. You only have to see the surprise that the Spanish judges gave to the leaders of the PSC, when they were already managing the peace of the amnesty.
In the official world everyone knows what the situation is, but no one seems to want to face it because no one believes that anything can be done to try to solve it. So it will be years, or decades, or even a century until there is a winner, but like the characters in Poe’s story, we have no escape. The conflict between Catalonia and Spain has reached its final assault and it seems to me that one of the two sides will die of fright, not even of a shot, when they see themselves reflected in the mirror of history: “And each one died in the desperate posture of his fall – wrote Poe – and darkness, ruin and the red death imposed on the kingdom of Prince Prosperus its unlimited dominion”.