I suppose that the organizers of Barcelona's landing at the FIL de Guadalajara would never have thought that all their literary (and tourist, of course!) promotion work would be practically eclipsed by a piece of news or, rather, by a very specific figure: 80,000 euros. This is, as the reader will already know, the endowment of the future Narrar Barcelona scholarship, for which the City Council will pay for a three-month excursion for a Latin American writer with the aim of getting them to feel Barcelonan escriguera. Colleagues in letters and journalism have already written everything one can say about this provincial nonsense and its contempt for Catalan literature, so now it would be much more opportune to comment on the explosion of the news itself which, despite the City Council's incredulity, is not a product of polemical contingency or the monetary envy of those of us who live writing in Catalan.
Because the most interesting thing about this whole case is that, at this point in the movie, neither Jaume Collboni nor his eternal cultural right-hand man, Xavier Marcé, still don't quite understand what problem there is in promoting Barcelona with a literary checkbook (and forgive the rhyme) thanks to an author from mar enllà. Which, elevated to the category, would imply above all that the authorities of our capital imagined that they could parade the city around the world pretending that no kind of linguistic conflict is happening here and that, as my dear commissioner Anna Guitart insinuated, writers happily coexist in a sweet bilingual existence. This not only clashes head-on with the data on the habitual use of Catalan in Barcelona, which has fallen to 35% approaching substitution percentages, but also with the fact that such a decline has nothing to do with the attempt to Hispanize our city.
All this that I explain are not obsessions of a tribal nationalist (the decline of Catalan is not attributable to the strength of Urdu or Chinese, but to the invasive presence of Spanish), nor of someone for whom Catalan literature should be saved only through scholarships with a lot of big money and abundant subsidies. The issue, I insist, is another; because you don't have to be a genius to see how the socialism of the capital has wanted us to believe that, with the procés dead and almost buried, the apparent political pacification-normalization of the country should also translate into the world of culture. Said in more historical-cultural terms, if you wish; there are still many people who would do everything possible to return to the Olympic climate of the nineties (or, in the case at hand, to Franco's Barcelona of the Latin American boom) to folklorize Catalan by having it as a peasant and museum language, in opposition to Spanish, a vehicle of narrative prestige and global scope.
But this operation, which would have been widely applauded decades ago, has gone wrong for them, and not only because it is impossible to export a happily bilingual Barcelona without the invention causing vicarious embarrassment, but because ---despite the abusive presence of Spanish in our daily lives--- the literature of our intimate enemies is absolutely disconnected from the life of the city. Thanks to the work of independent publishers ---who have not only worked on contemporary narrative in Catalan made in Barcelona, but have recovered the foundations of its imaginary in our language--- today the citizen letter lives a more than hopeful moment. On the other hand, when it comes to publicizing Barcelona in Spanish in Guadalajara or wherever, the usual cultural mandarins have been forced to pull out 20th-century mummies and the old guard like Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Eduardo Mendoza, or Javier Cercas.
Things are falling into place, albeit very slowly, and that all this bilingual literary excursion nonsense has ended in a hurried coitus... is very funny. This also excites my particular Narcissus a bit, because nowadays ---if someone wants to get close to the pulsations of time in Barcelona--- they must write in Catalan. That's why, for so many years, we have been doing magnificent things like this one of mine and yours, Punyalada; we are not rich nor have we been paid visits abroad to act like idiots, but it has been worth it, and things are in their place. Now all that's left is for our colleagues not to engage in more collaborationism in exchange for a few ounces of guacamole and for all the work done by independent publishers to be able to establish itself as a proper industry. But for now, in the city, we rule and we are the ones who will set the rules for the future: here and in the rest of the world.