“In Barcelona hardly anyone understood me at all”
Just like we did with Pablo Picasso Y Federico Garcia Lorcait is an imaginary and dystopian conversation, forcing the time line, so that we can get closer to what these figures would tell us today about their lives, about Barcelona and about the times we live in now.
— Welcome to the city of knowledge.
“Aren’t you exaggerating, young man?”
— I’m not saying it, they are the big names used by the various municipal governments when they have to talk about research, culture, knowledge and research.
— When they invited me it was only to carry out three interviews. And it was not the city council, but that type of autonomous government that…
— The Commonwealth, yes. February 1923, invited by the engineer and mathematician Esteve Terradas.
– That! terraces.
— It was quite an event, he received a recent Nobel Prize in Physics!
— They wanted to put him, yes. I remember the visit to the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts, the one to the clock building…
— Right here going up the Rambla, yes.
— Is it still official time?
— Now the official time is no longer the brand or Big Ben, teacher, but mobile phones. All of them perfectly synchronized.
— Here in the Museum not to make portraits of me with these junk.
— Not as many as Messi or Rosalía, I suppose.
— I have had to share a space with more discreet colleagues, like Marie Curie, or that gentleman in the wheelchair over there in the background.
– Stephen Hawking. A disciple of his.
— Disciple?
— He joined his theory of relativity with that of quantum mechanics, apart from his research on black holes and the origin of the Universe.
— Ouch! Do we now know why we exist?
— That would already be something more metaphysical, I’m afraid.
— The fact is that he takes many more photographs than me.
“Don’t tell me that matters to you.
– Nerd. They didn’t do many for me either, when I came to Barcelona. In fact, no one came to pick me up at the Estación de Francia.
“Are you serious?”
— It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I just hadn’t had time to send a telegram to confirm my arrival time.
— Well, near the station they are planning the “Ciutadella del Coneixement”, a kind of large area dedicated to biomedicine, biodiversity and marine sciences.
— I trust that they do more than put stones. You guys are very good at building buildings, but they need to be filled.
— They will also build a large provincial library, which is what is done in the provinces.
— Don’t complain, they have a beautiful city.
— A great “cultural co-capital”, yes. Where did you stay, by the way? They said that he declined the invitation to the Ritz and stayed at the Quatre Nacions, right here on the Rambla.
— Some also said that it was at the Hotel Colón, in Plaza Catalunya.
– And where was it?
— Elsa and I had a great time in Barcelona, I’ll just tell you that.
— “A great man has come to Barcelona”, wrote Sagarra.
I have good memories of everything. Friendly people, Terradas, Campalans, Lana, Tirpitz’s daughter… Popular songs, dances…
“Do you mean the sardana?”
– I loved them. I listened for many years to the discos that were given to me. oh and the Marieta de l’ull viu!
– Really?
— I am not made of stone, nor any figure of wax. Oh, and I also remember the Refectory!
– The restaurant?
— Yes, in the same Rambla. It was a curious establishment, like a brewery but tucked into a basement and looking very medieval. He was very popular. By the way, is that cinema still there, on the ground floor of the Academy?
– What cinema? Now there is a theater, the Poliorama.
— Well, there was a cinema… Martí, I think his name was.
– No idea.
— And I remember an impressive astronomical clock, in there, that marked the position of the planets and the Sun.
— Albert Billeter’s watch, yes. They are things of being an Academy founded in 1764, you can see that the desire for knowledge is old here.
– Time passes very fast.
That’s relative, isn’t it?
I don’t think you understood.
— Well, this Wax Museum is, precisely, a kind of time tunnel.
It’s even more complicated than that. In fact, in the three conferences that I gave in Barcelona I could see in the faces of all the attendees that they had not understood anything.
— It is that perhaps they spoke to them as if they were physicists or mathematicians.
— I would say that only Esteve Terradas understood me.
— And where did you do it, the first?
— At the headquarters of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
— Do you mean on Calle del Carme, next to the National Library?
– Nerd! I mean in that Renaissance palace in Plaza Sant Jaume. Palace of the Diputación, I think they called it.
— Ouch! The Palace of the Generalitat!
— There wasn’t even a needle, and that we had to pay admission to listen to me. Twenty-five pesetas, I think it was.
– It’s not little. For not finishing anything from someone who spoke in a mixture of French and German…
— Aren’t you the city of knowledge, you were saying?
– Don’t make me talk. In any case, you collected 3,500. For the three
— My salary for a year as a scientist.
– Caramba.
— I did the others in the same Palau, but in another room. And then they gave me a big Ritz tribute dinner.
— But apart from Barcelona, you also visited Poblet, L’Espluga de Francolí, Sant Cugat, Terrassa…
— I was accompanied by President Puig i Cadafalch and a very nice man with a bow tie, I don’t remember his name…
—Ventura Gassol.
-That. And then I remember the School of the Sea in Barcelona, the Baixeras School Group, the Industrial School, the Somorrostro, the visit to the Town Hall…
— And the colloquium at the Academy. But he also met with a CNT leader, right?
— I recommended this Pestaña guy who made his trade unionists read Spinoza.
— Spinoza? The philosopher?
— I only believe in Spinoza’s God.
— A god united to Nature, to science. He should read Francesc Pujols.
— In any case, the dinner that Rafael Campalans organized for us at his house on Rosselló street was more constructive. I remember the menu in Latin, and that a soprano from the Orfeó Català sang.
— Well, now Campalans gives its name to the PSC Foundation.
— I would say that he was responsible for pedagogy of the government of the Commonwealth…
— Yes, a socialist like you, in a government of supposed “bourgeois”.
— I believe that the economic anarchy of capitalist society, as it exists today, is the true source of evil.
— Campalans would agree with that. That is why he proposed his egalitarian pedagogical policy.
— Education should develop the individual’s sense of responsibility towards his fellow citizens, rather than the glorification of power and success.
— We were going there… But in that same month of September Primo de Rivera would eliminate the Mancomunitat.
— And the sardana?
— And the sardana. Although she would have danced them, too.
– Can not be.
— Even the “Marieta de l’ull viu”, Mr. Einstein.
— Anyway… But well, I don’t know if you know that I also had to leave Germany later.
– Of course I know. Everything is connected: space, time and fascism.
— No kidding. One day maybe you’ll understand what I’m saying.
— I don’t need to understand: Sagarra, despite not understanding anything from his lectures, would have wanted to take an unerasable blackboard.
— There are indelible memories.
— Or pure fetishism, master.
— He already told you that, as much as it seems now, I’m not a museum piece.
— Things are here and they stop being at the same time, right? You yourself went immediately to Madrid.
It was normal, wasn’t it?
“Of course, master. No Suffer. It is what it has to be a “co-capital”.