When I was little, my father often explained to me that ---more than Catalans, Barcelonians, or inhabitants of the enemy village--- at home, above all, we were Mediterraneans. When I asked him what this nationality was about, he replied (quoting a man whom I would later deeply love; a certain Blai Bonet) that the inhabitants of the Mare Nostrum are descendants of the Greeks, that is, of people who get emotional dipping bread in olive oil and who decline more or less the same language in every corner of the sea. If today I had to tell this to my non-existent son, I would use the same definition (we all sooner or later disguise ourselves as our progenitor), adding of my own accord that we also like the same women, with half-curly hair, mountainous noses, and Corinthian-style hips. The matter goes beyond the limits of a map; upon arriving in Manhattan, I encountered these goddesses and also the Italians, who spread bread with the yellow elixir and who ---despite the oceanic separation from their home--- stole them from us with equal care.
Life rationalizes a child's intuitions ---thank you, Mr. Proust--- and later I became more Mediterranean thanks to Glosari by Eugeni d'Ors and one of his privileged sons; Maragall's Olympism. More than a child of the living word, thanks to Rubert de Ventós, Oriol Bohigas, and also New York, Pasqual perhaps became the last noucentista politician of Barcelona and the last mayor who battled to turn us into what we truly are, the capital of the Mediterranean. The mayor had good intentions but, later, the cosmopolitan socialism of his own appropriated this great nation as a cheap excuse to Hispanize our capital. A
now that the identity of the tribe also suffers a certain cold, it is normal that the publication of the splendid Breviari Mediterrani by Predrag Matvejević (Edicions LaBreu) has become a small independent editorial success. Thanks to the same book producer, I became very interested in the prosaic strategy of the Bosnian-Croatian author in L'Altra Venècia, a portrait of the Serenissima woven through a microcosm of curiosities and places allergic to tourism. The Breviari is a very rich encyclopedia of our sea, very much in the style of its prologuist Claudio Magris, but without the historical and cultural weight that the author of The Danube knows how to find in any corner of a simple stream. Reading Matvejević one can find signs of our personality in aspects as diverse as the swear words sailors shout at each other, the sacrificial character of donkeys, and poor man's soups, seasoned with stones from the shore.
It is logical that the citizens of the tribe have enjoyed approaching this book, because it often cites us as an existential and differentially suffering country ("One would say that this land has been healing from something for a long time. Whoever does not understand this, will not understand it") and a lover of impossible ventures: "In Alexandria I met a Catalan, who worked as a watchmaker, who was trying to reconstruct the catalog of the destroyed library." However, we come from the Mediterranean of Josep Pla and -although Matvejević strives to finish his salads of knowledge with some well-rounded phrase- in the book one will miss that sentimental metaphysics that we so much enjoy conjugating while looking at the horizon.
In this sense, despite the undeniable enjoyment that the wisdom of this wonderful collector from Mostar gives us, this servant has finished this Breviary with a certain disenchantment, who knows if because I was looking for an unattainable answer about what leads us to consider ourselves children of Mare Nostrum. My colleague David Guzmán, from whom I stole the initial term of the article's title, is absolutely right when he speaks of a book of geopoetics which, I add, would perhaps benefit from fewer accumulated data and a few more ounces of geopolitics. I suppose the author spares himself this because he comes from where he comes from and knows perfectly well that identity struggles seasoned with divinities can end in butchery. Despite being a privileged child of many conflicts (during the Second World War he worked in the military mail of the Yugoslav partisans), Matvejević seems to theorize the Mediterranean as the last burrow where peace could be found. He often seeks the warrior temptation ("In the Mediterranean, archives are similar to tombs, and tombs, to archives"), but the tremor is always cured with the eye of the encyclopedist.
Surely, the final dissatisfaction produced by this Breviary is the poetic nebula of the Mediterranean condition itself. This would perhaps be our greatest existential problem; that of oscillating between the broken identity of this tribe and the very high metaphysics of the white dress of the Ben Plantada. Welcome, however, is the publication of this book and the splendid work done by LaBreu.