Professor Manuel Grosso, from Seville, vintage 1953, has breakfast at Bar Manolo in Alfalfa square in the Andalusian capital, where his friend Tete Montoliu, the jazz pianist, who died in 1997, dreamed of retiring to sell coupons for The blind.
He has breakfast, greets and is greeted and smokes a cigar, a pleasure that requires time and spirit. We are, I believe, before “a gentleman from Seville” and from the left, somewhat disenchanted, like so many others. of his generation. Manolo Grosso was a friend of Tete Montoliu and many Catalan artists, such as Jordi Sabatés, Lluis Llach or Raimon, because he managed to get them to perform at the Lope de Vega theater or in university classrooms, in Seville at the beginning of the 70s.
“I have the honor of having organized the first Raimon concert outside Catalonia, here in Seville. With Llach we scheduled two concerts but the second one was prohibited and that I had made friends with the censor but the secret police saw a lot of republican flag and goodbye concert”. Today, he is one of those who do not understand what has happened in Catalonia. “Mania? On the contrary, we drooled over everything Catalan”.
He has stopped teaching Criminal Law at the University of Seville and sees all the bulls from the sidelines, inside and outside the Real Maestranza. of which he is a subscriber. He doesn’t tell jokes but anecdotes, privilege of enlightened people.
-How Andalusia has changed, Manolo!
Spain has changed a lot. Thanks to the European Union, on which we still depend because we will see what happens when the funds for reconstruction run out, the next generation. People are not hungry. Look at Lepe, Huelva, Jaén… they need to bring in labor from abroad for strawberries or olives. Seville, however, is more difficult to change.
Seville has something of an island within another island, Andalusia. The socialist bastion that ceased to be. Grosso does not say so, but he gives fact that the PP will revalidate the presidency of the Board, just as he does not say – although perhaps he thinks so – that I hope they win a lot so as not to depend on Vox.
-A mutual friend, professor of Philosophy, still a member of the PSUC, lamented the other day the disconnection of the left with the rural world, an important vote bank. He said:, saddened ‘we have lost the field!’.
-Well, you’re right. The left has lost the field. The world is simple seen from the countryside and when they see certain attacks on things like hunting, horses or bulls… People from the countryside connect with that and feel attacked, misunderstood, and there is a stupid left about it. And the left should be neither for nor against. I’m afraid, yes, we’ve lost the field.
Professor Grosso, who founded the Seville jazz festival in 2003 and directed it until 2008, is concerned that his own set so many distances from the things and popular manifestations that make up Andalusia, as if they were repudiable or shameful. That desire to be like others, to be like others, not to be Andalusia but something else. And it is said by someone actively opposed to Francoism and hedonistic and cultural customs, alien to Sevillian conservatism.
-How do you judge the cultural policy of the Board?
-It is less or nothing because it is ineffective. Logical: cultural policy, in general, has lost value. Among young people, what rules is tik-tok.
And I ask him to explain to me that fervor that Easter arouses, in an Andalusia that is less and less Catholic. In the end, I make it clear that it deserves to be seen and lived. And that to understand Andalusia there is nothing like this phrase of his, after the morning coffee:
-Here, in Andalusia, the contradictions are assumed all. And this is good.
