MANOLO, ¿RECUERDAS?
MANOLO, DO YOU REMEMBER?
By Manuel Altés
384 pages
Publication date: 2004
ISBN: 978-84-95764-22-5
Retail price: 15,50 € (including VAT)
This moving account of the vicissitudes of a Barcelona working-class family begins with the 1929 World’s Fair and ends with Christmas Eve 1962 when an unusually heavy snowfall turned the city white. These memoirs are very timely today when legions of right-thinking hacks want to convince us that the Civil War was prophylactically necessary to put Spain on the map of Europe and that Franco was the “surgeon of iron” called for by Joaquín Costa and his fellow regenerationists, a benevolent dictator and father of industrialisation, who ushered in the always-adjourned bourgeois revolution.
Altés brings back a vivid working-class culture, the one of boxing matches, the pigeon-fanciers’ societies, the pre-lunch vermouth on Sundays, football matches, bull fights, and the libertarian-nudist-Esperanto-enthusiast publications … all of which was swept away by the winds of war, the wretchedness it brought, and the alienation of the household-appliance culture that came in its wake. In what was once the bedroom of a young girl in calle Cruz Cuberta, a faded portrait of Baudelaire is perhaps still sternly looking down from the wall:
Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà
De ta jeunesse?
Manolo… do you remember?
Manuel Altés was born in 1927 – the year that still resounds with the fame of the “Generation of ’27” poets – near the abattoirs in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Hostafrancs where Catalan Gypsies and non-Gypsies live in neighbourly coexistence. His father was a good-looking CNT-anarchist bricklayer and his mother a dressmaker, the kind of woman who only lived for, and sighed over what was showing at the cinema. Altés’ primary school, named for the Catalan nationalist leader Francesc Macià, played a decisive role in his early life. With the military uprising of July 1936, his father first took to the streets with his anarchist comrades and then went off as a volunteer to the front, leaving his wife and two children to manage as best they could.
Manuel Altés took a job in an insurance company and eventually came to be the boss. However, he also complicated his life in those now-forgotten post-war times of 1947 by coordinating Communist Party workers’ cells. In an intellectual discussion group he met a girl to whom he would become engaged when he was behind bars in the Modelo Prison after having being held and tortured for over two weeks in the infamous Vía Layetana police station. Thanks to an unexpected legal loophole, he was released after thirty-two months of prison experiences that would be etched in his memory for the rest of his days, instead of having to serve the full sentence of eighteen years.