The Barcelonian journalist Pablo Mediavilla Costa published some days ago, regarding the Catalan independence process, something I found both sad and moving: “Lucky all of you that didn’t have to witness the fall into the folly of someone loved (and lost)”. All these words are accurate: fall, folly, loved, lost.
Barely a year ago, this Twitter post that would had seemed exaggerated and melodramatic to those who were trying to promote the idea of a nice festive process with no consequences for anyone. This was one more of the pro-independence movement’s fantasies: that a country can be shattered without tearing up the human relationships of all kind built in a common soil. Anyway, the lucky ones unscathed by the process can not be too many. Among non-Catalan Spaniards, the less affected have witnessed some friendships cooled. The possibility of moving to Barcelona for studies or entrepreneurship, once the aspiration for many, nowadays seems very unattractive. As for the politicised Barça, the football team cheered by half of Spain, now it does not feel like celebrating its goals. But the greatest damage has been definitely between Catalan Spaniards. Yesterday, a friend from Barcelona told me: “I voted only to not losing my best friend”. Another friend texted me what looked like a SOS message: “I’m sick of this. I want to run away from here. For them it’s a religion”. And someone else, a college teacher: “This is insufferable, I’m looking for a vacancy out of here”.
People who are closer to my heart also suffer. They fear they are not going to be able to recompose the affections that blow up like stones in an earthquake, ignoring where they will land once this is ended. I watch and think who important are the little loves in our lives. The complicity relationships we keep with dozens of people who would not inspire us great love poems, but help us to pass the day forgetting the valley of tears we know life can be: the bar tender, the colleague at work, the cousin or nephew we like so much. We use to think that a great love saves us. Maybe, but only little loves allow us to survive. Those little loves that in both Catalonia and the rest of Spain, pro-independence movement are endangering, while the rest of us, letting the astonishment do the outraging’s job, keep on wondering: for what, exactly? Where is your victory?
