Summer is an unbearable time when everyone suffers a hypnotic desperation to travel (even the fellow citizens who recently demonstrated against mass tourism in Barcelona and will soon act as pixapins in Formentera, cramming their villas and beaches). If you wish to save yourselves the repulsive discomforts of airports and train stations or cohabitation with family and spouse, I recommend an incomparable journey in terms of enjoyment, for which you only need a good armchair and a desire to excite your imagination. I recently re-read La ruta blava, a masterpiece by Josep Maria de Sagarra, an enormous travel book written by an author with a privileged retina that my dear Narcís Garolera has published in Club Editor and which has the grace of having been transcribed following the dictates of Sagarra's own manuscript, very well polished of hypercorrections and errata.
In 1937, terrified by the bullangas of the FAI that had caused the death of his dear friend Josep Maria Planas, Sagarra flees to Paris with Mercè Devesa. They marry immediately and the Tharaud brothers suggest to the writer that he exile himself even further, to Polynesia, to write a book about his honeymoon trip. The adventure will end up being paid for by Cambó, trinco-trinco, because there was a time when ---to the bourgeois of our city--- they were minimally interested in the culture of the tribe. Sagarra packs his bags (after burning many letters and documents for which we would now give our lives), travels to Marseille and there embarks aboard the Commissaire Ramel to Tahiti. This journey, and the subsequent stay in els mars del sur, make up this exceptional volume, which in fact the author did not publish in his lifetime and which until now, as I told you, we had read with numerous alterations of the unmatched Catalan of my adored genius.
In an exile literature like ours ---mostly marked by longing, melancholy, and the inability to digest the Civil War---, La ruta blava surprises by being a wonderfully insulting text, brimming with Sagarra's usual joy of living. Anyone who wants to learn to write should pay special attention to the first part of the book, the ship's route through the Atlantic to the Panama Canal, because our best prose writer knows how to extract oil from a universe that takes place within the few meters of a merchant ship. No matter how much he writes it smiling, Sagarra narrates a Homeric route across the ocean that anticipates an anti-romantic book; our author had read the idealistic literature of the 19th century, but had very well learned the lesson of Gide, Conrad, and Somerset Maugham. Here, coconut trees are not idealized, nor is the tropics painted as an Eden; Sagarra plays in the league of the best global contemporaneity.
La ruta blava is the testimony of a colonial world that has few years left before globalizing. Sagarra sees it very well; in a wonderful theatrical conversation with a French political official who complains about the backward tropical life, Josep Maria shoots back: "Tots aquests canacs, aquests maorís, aquests papús de l'Oceania, com tots els negres i grocs del món, acabaran portant pantalons de golf, menjant sardines de llauna i prenent cafè amb llet per esmorzar. Què voleu fer-hi! I quan els vostres instructors i els vostres missioners hagin enllestit la feia, quan els vostres governs hagin donat totes les concessions a totes les companyies explotadores, aquesta massa humana ---que a vós i a mi ens l'havien pintada idíl·lica i coronada de flors--- acabarà cantant La Internacional o fent el pas de l'oca." Ironic but profound, our writer always mixes insolence with unlimited lucidity.
In this book there are wonderful scenes, like the instant when the author feels like bathing half-naked in the sea and hurries when he spots the teeth of a shark in the distance. Sagarra's language (and especially the musicality!) flows in a way that should be taught in all journalism schools. Notice how he describes bodies ---before political correctness forbade talking about them--- and how he scrutinizes the particularity of each race in a masterful way. Forget about prefabricated trips, I insist to the point of nausea, and rush to this magnificent edition of La ruta blava which, in turn, dignifies the pencada that Narcís Garolera has been perpetrating for thirty years. He alone edited twenty volumes of the author's critical edition at Edicions Tres i Quatre, and he still has four volumes to publish, a series of unpublished poems, and a lot of letters. But our païset has everything in suspension.
Don't travel too far, everything is a nuisance. Come home, listen to the living language and the unmatched sonority of my favorite writer. Read, and above all reread, this masterpiece that is La ruta blava.