A man who had millions of grandchildren has died, since without him ever knowing it, Josep Maria Espinàs was the grandfather of many people. Of me, without a doubt. Of you, probably too. This does not, of course, take away from the fact that for those of my generation, those born in the late eighties, Espinàs was a gentleman who never entered a conversation shared among friends while drinking a Xibeca. Nor was he an author we would ever recommend to our first girlfriend, as he was much less modern and cool than Monzó, Casasses or Marçal. Obviously, he was never a columnist whose daily article we would cut out to pin on our corkboard at home. But strangely enough, one day many of us discovered that we were step-grandchildren of that gentleman with a pipe, for a simple reason: the world we knew, the world we loved and the world on which we stepped had been previously written by him. If Espriu had said that they had lived to salvar-nos els mots - to save our words - then Espinàs had allowed us to remember el nom de cada cosa - the name of each thing.
The children of Olympic-era Barcelona thought that listening to rock groups singing in Catalan such as Els Pets, Lax'n'Busto or Sopa de Cabra on cassette in the car was normal, but we didn't know that this would not have been possible without people like Josep Maria Espinàs and Els Setze Jutges. The children of Club Super3 thought that having a television in our own language was totally natural, but we didn't know that the press in Catalan had existed for only thirty years and that Espinàs was also there, writing from the first issue of L'Avui. The children of Jordi Culé assumed that Barça's goals had always been celebrated in Catalan, but we didn't know that the Cant del Barça, the club's anthem that we knew by heart, like the Lord's Prayer, had been written in 1974 by a certain Espinàs together with Jaume Picas.
In short, we, the children of the children of those children born before the Civil War, could not even imagine that if we were Catalan, spoke Catalan and lived in a country called Catalonia, it was, above all, because we were the grandchildren of those they had not been able to kill. The heirs to those who had not allowed themselves to be assimilated during the forty years of Francoism. The descendants of those who had written, drawn, sung, stood up for and protected the country when the country could not be called a country. Espinàs was one of them, perhaps that's why many of us who are now in our thirties discovered him when we were older, when we already understood that Catalonia was not a normal country but we found Espinàs's yellowing books in second-hand bookshops or we read his articles in El Periódico and realized that in Catalan you could do everything, even dedicate your life to being a professional writer, as happens in normal countries.
Without ever having met him, many of us understood, thanks to him, that it was possible to go on a trip to the Terra Alta and make a book about it that would fit into one's own cultural system. With him, many of us discovered that in the Catalan press you could also read columns about topics that are not covered, that no one is expecting, but that everyone enjoys reading. A conversation with the baker at the fleca down below one's flat. The brownish colour of the tea in a Ciutat Vella cafe. The particular words in an intermediate Catalan dialect used by the farmers in Cornudella de Montsant. The sunset from the train, one evening, returning from Girona. Columns that came from a slow, simple and deeply poetic journalism, almost anachronistic in this twenty-first century of new technologies. Journalism, however, from a normal country, because thanks to Espinàs, some of us still believe that in the digital press there is also space to write about the trail of a perfume in some corner of the Eixample, about the pleasure of getting along with the barber by simply saying "The usual" or about the excitement of finding a very old edition of Rusiñol at the Ancient and Modern Second Hand Book Fair, despite Google and SEO trying to make us believe that newspapers must only publish the news that people are looking for, and not the snippets of life that people would like to live.
In his book El meu ofici - My profession - Josep Maria Espinàs wrote that "in his farewell he should not be given more praise than is necessary", but despite fearing that I am not sticking to the obituary that he wrote with such irony, it is impossible for me not to vindicate the culprit for having made me understand that I am the child of a language with which we can not only go about the world, but which we can use to eat it up, if we believe in it. A language that, thanks to Espinàs, allowed me to listen to Georges Brassens in Catalan. A language that, thanks to Espinàs, allowed me to read my geography with a well-travelled literature of those who've been everywhere, as the group valius sing. A language that, thanks to Espinàs, has allowed the whole world to know that for the best team on the planet, una bandera ens agermana - that is, a flag unites us - as it has been shown that no one will ever be able to buckle us, which the lyric also says. For someone to have said this, after seeing with his own eyes how the Nacionales came down the Diagonal in 1939, and to have said it with such conviction, ignoring him would be an even less noble act than continuing to call 'territory' what he always called 'the country', maybe that's why he founded Nacionalistes d'Esquerres: to make it clear that those of us on the left, despite the fact that neither the CUP nor ERC dare to say it out loud, can also feel a deep love for our nation.
Anyway, I guess that by this point you can already understand the title of this obituary. They say that our old folks never die, but simply become invisible and sleep forever more within us. That is a phrase like a coffee sachet - absurd and accommodating - but in the case of Espinàs it is true, since as long as the landscapes of the Priorat exist, he will be alive. As long as a hundred thousand people sing Blaugrana al vent, un crit valent, he will be alive. As long as the white houses of Cadaqués stand facing the sea, he will be alive, because it is true that we will not see him walking in those meadows, cheering when those goals go in, or bathing on those beaches, but any of us may continue to discover corners of the country, both physical and mental, walking with him. Beside him, listening to his words and observing life through the filter of his glasses, despite the fact that he is no longer there. Despite the fact that he now enjoys the superpower of invisibility. Despite the fact that now he can no longer receive, with the touch that makes us human, this eternal embrace from one of his millions of grandchildren.