I’m writing this column before the elections, not knowing how the Final Four ended yesterday in Barcelona (where Maragall looked like Barça in Kaunas) or if Ribó has revolutionized Valencia enough or who Girona has fallen in love with. I can sense where the shots will go, but the only certainty is that there are cities where the most voted candidates have not slept very well and, on the contrary, some of those who have remained in second or third position are still confident that they will be able to wield the rod of batle like static cheerleaders.
During the last stretch of the very long campaign I read I will be your mirror (Comanegra), with which LluÃs-Anton Baulenas won the first Santa Eulà lia prize. Baulenas bases the plot of the novel on an architect who regrets the setbacks he built during the Franco regime. Now he wants to destroy them by the onerous method of acquiring and demolishing them. The plot, with real estate operations intended to launder money, is darkened by the presence of a few wild characters who seem to be from Desokupa.
The risers are floors added to already existing buildings, a common method of densifying many cities, although according to how in a, ahem, legal way. In the Eixample of Barcelona there are penthouses, over-apartments and other additions of dubious aesthetics that harken back to bygone eras of infamous Porciolista memory. “The comebacks of shame”, calls them one of the people in charge of demolishing them in the novel.
If, driven by Baulenas’s fiction, we are encouraged to make the analogy between a building and a municipal government, it is not difficult to imagine that some of the councilors to whom the candidates who hope to rise above the most voted will have to turn they will be real comebacks from shame.
Soon we will know which will be the new Valls of Catalan municipal politics.
