Santa Eulàlia, queen of pop

This weekend has been Barcelona's main festival. If Merche is the last excess of summer, the drunkenness, the artifice with equally artificial fires and wonderful orchestras, Lali's is a festivity that seems designed precisely to spoil the party. Contained, moderate, virginal. This year's poster exudes an unbearable apathy, quite the opposite of the great expectation created by the plastic innovations (increasingly successful) of the false patron saint. If it were a party that had to be hidden, or semi-clandestine, the City Council would organize it in the same way. And yet here she is, Well Spoken (it seems she showed remarkable oratorical skills before Governor Dacian), ready to suffer all the contempt and marginalization, like the thirteen-year-old girl who endured thirteen tortures and who, nevertheless, still threatens with tearful rains every September when the aspiring patron saint begins to show her cleavage.

Mercè comes to tell us that she also has big-heads, and castellers and counted masses, but that she also offers us a free Bad Gyal concert. She also tells us that she is not so new, that the people of Barcelona invoked her in 1687 to end a plague of locusts, and that the Mercedarian order dates back to James I... but the fact is that a whole Pope (and Mayor Rius i Taulet) had to intervene for people here to really notice someone other than Eulàlia. And even so, there are the well-known popular stonings against the celebrations of the intruder (we don't like it too much, you see, when they tell us what we should celebrate). In fact, Merche would still be nothing in Barcelona had it not been for councilman Francesc Cambó, who wanted to disassociate her from the religious fact ("Merced" is still an abstract concept, an advocation, a generic act of charity) and unite her with popular culture. A popular culture that then was not Bad Gyal but sardanas, bestiaries, stick dances, castells, devils, giants and so on... That is, everything that Santa Eulàlia offers today. It is normal, then, that many of us feel her more ours. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that Franco preferred the Piromusical and that the military, apparently, still do today. I don't know. I venture.

But Santa Eulàlia has festivities that, when you see them up close, are anything but sleepy. The show Eulàlia, by Esbart Ciutat Comtal, is a brief and delicate marvel that has been going on for ten years, ever since it won the Ciutat de Barcelona Award in 2013, and is held every year between the central columns of the Cathedral (of Santa Eulàlia, by the way). It is within the central crypt that the saint's remains rest, and from where she will emerge in flesh and blood, as soon as the work begins, to start a beautiful spectacle of dance and interpretation. Half an hour that expresses everything with great aesthetic and musical force, which begins and ends with the singing of the goigs (the popular verses of "vetllau pels barcelonins") and which finds, in the arms of the soldiers/dancers, all the references to the cross in the shape of an x where the young woman was nailed (in sadomasochistic rooms they call it more like Saint Andrew's Cross). Coherence, beauty, sublimation. Despite the minutes of whipping, nails and flames (projected in light onto the body), the show is for all audiences and by this I mean not only children but especially agnostics, atheists and other heretics. Don't miss it next year. It ends, by the way, with a magical snowfall in the church. That snow that we were about to see fall in Barcelona this year but that has once again passed by, surely, again, due to the constant contempt we have for the saint.

Mercè would still be nothing in Barcelona if it hadn't been for councilor Francesc Cambó, who wanted to disassociate her from the religious fact

Upon leaving, the crowd of people dancing sardanas once again disproves that it is a dance for older people (really, nothing could be further from the truth), as does the parade of giants and big-heads through Ciutat Vella, which goes through several streets until it reaches Plaza Sant Jaume, where the Ball de Santa Eulàlia erupts. It's hard not to feel called, included, part of the family. Let's say these are the festivities for our people, for those from here, those of us who have grown up among these streets.Currently, everyone knows that folk means people, but it turns out that the root of the word pop is also that of the people. Well then,Santa Eulàlia is the queen of pop because something folkloric is, etymologically speaking, something popular.Nothing less. In fact, I like to say that the language we speak is a popular Latin, instead of that monstrosity of calling it vulgar Latin. And perhaps that is why there is a saint called Ben Parlada, no matter how much she spoke to the governor of Barcino in Latin. And undoubtedly that is why there are festivals that are popular and others that, thinking otherwise, cannot escape their visible vulgarity. We can celebrate both, but confuse them, never ever.