On May 31, 1938, five Italian planes dropped sixty bombs on Granollers, killing two hundred and twenty-six people and injuring a thousand more. The bombs hit a school and the La Porxada market. Among the victims were many women and children. In the years of the Franco regime, it was not talked about, of course. Towards the seventies, testimonies began to be collected, with that feeling of being late to many post-Franco studies, based on oral sources. Albert Forns Canal (Granollers, 1982) explains it in the epilogue of the book. He talks about John Hersey’s report Hiroshima (1946), which was published a year after the atomic bomb, and wonders what And the Sky Fell on Us would have been like if it had been written, I don’t say the 1939, 1950, we put, with many people alive from those who were there.
This is all science fiction, obviously, because Franco won the war and things went as they went. If the Republic had won the war, the story would have been different. There is always a story. 1971, when Franco was still floating, is different than 1977 or 1985. That’s why I find it strange to read, lately, books like Forns’ or Eduard Márquez’s which presuppose that the facts these are the facts and that it is enough to organize a chorus of voices, I’m not saying to try to find out what happened, but – to confine ourselves to what literature is best able to do – to create an emotion. I believe that the context is fundamental. Know who tells you and when they tell you. How many years have passed, how has the life of the person talking to you been.
The objectivity of the witnesses is also debatable. And the sky fell on top of us begins with the description of the war action: the preparations of the Italian airmen, the frivolous life they lead in Mallorca and the run-down way they locate Granollers on the map, go there and download the bombs ahead of time. Is this recorded exactly as we read it? At what time? The only reference is a footnote in the epilogue. He tells us that the recordings that have been the basis of the book come from a project of the Granollers Town Council and the Democratic Memorial and that they can be consulted in the Oral Sources section of the Granollers Municipal Archives website.
In And the sky fell on us there is a lot of love and a lot of work. Forns writes for the community. It recreates the fateful minute from a multiplicity of points of view that convey to us the uncertainty, pain, despair and resignation of men, women and creatures. Over the course of twenty-five reports we see some well-known people parading around: Antoni Jonch, who was director of the Barcelona Zoo, Paco Parellada, the owner of the Europa Inn who was the cook at the Pavilion of the Republic of Paris exhibition, Joan Triadú, who in 1938 was a sixteen-year-old teacher. And also many anonymous characters, faced with absurdity and death: convinced and active republicans, a Mujeres libres militiawoman, a woman who sells fish in the market, a boy who pretends not to go to school, an ambush . Forns raps over the transcribed text of the interviews, the subject touches him, he gets involved in it humanly and sometimes it is not clear whose opinions are. In the case of the dead, like Francesc Abelló Gràcia, who ended up in an extermination camp, it is even more complicated, because even though he is the protagonist, the story is based on an indirect witness.
We have an intense book full of life, feeling, deep, with that point of formal boldness of Forns’ works, which is always appreciated. A book that must be read, to feel the horror of the story, to appreciate the generosity of the author and to discuss his point of view.
Albert Forns Canal And the sky fell on us Editions 62 220 pages 19.90 euros
