Salvador Gispert has spent his life working in the forest. He has uncorked cork oaks, he has cut thin chestnut branches (which before metal straps appeared were used to assemble barrels), he has also opened roads with pick and shovel, he has been a charcoal burner and an expert with the ax and the chainsaw. “Et sap greu si li diem a en Vador que segui amb tu a la taula? ” –the librarian Rosa Andreu told me, one day when I went up to Sant Hilari Sacalm to give a talk–. “Com vols que em sapiga greu? ”We understood each other wonderfully. We writers are idiots. We let ourselves be carried away by sensations and impressions and we spent the day in drool. While the mountain people, without giving up the aesthetic sense of life, provide an executive and economic perspective on the things that interest us. When there is harmony – which means that the writer is not too drone or conceited and that the mountain man has preserved a form of natural refinement under muscular strength and practicality – it is a perfect combination, because the company of the writer brings out the part more lyrical of the man who has spent his life piling up firewood, felling trees and depleting treetops, and the mountaineer pushes the writer to wake up a little.
Last week I went to see Vador in Sant Hilari. When I arrived, his daughter Yolanda gave me a gift: a large cut of cork, a little curved, with a thread so it could be hung. When they worked in the forest they used it as a source for salads. What a simple pleasure, a good salad of lettuce, onion and tomato on a large slice of cork, eaten with a sharp fork or directly with your hands. And then grill a piece of sausage over the coals with a grill that Vador has sophisticated to the point of turning it into a contemporary sculpture. Take one of those sticks with two Greek y-shaped branches. A pair of branches fits between the two arms and more branches fit between the branches and the arms, until forming a wooden racket.
He tells me that in 2003 he participated in the World Log Cutting Championship in Norway. They took the lettuce, tomatoes and onions and a large cut of cork for the salad: they billed it all together with the chainsaws. “Those people don’t have menjat mai and they don’t care about grapats!” While the poetic drool falls on me, he tells me, so that I can touch my feet on the ground: “Ho veus? “It is a first.” I make a shrew face. “Yes home, a first! Hi ha segones, treses i rebuig.” In fact, it is one of those corks that no longer exist: three fingers thick. To finish off, he tells me that he likes the ax more than the chainsaw because it can be cut closer to the ground: “if you have vint kilos of soca, in all the trees of a forest how many ‘tons’ are there?” I get home, take out the kitchen clock that has been out of battery for a long time, and hang Vador’s cork cutting on the same nail.
