A long time ago, just over a century, six thousand workers and a thousand convicts took water from the Pyrenees to a desert in the heart of Lleida, a wild territory between Pons and Montoliu that they called the hole of hell, culminating an ambition that went back to the Middle Ages and was achieved, not only thanks to his sacrifice, but also to the vision of Manuel Girona, a bourgeois and a patron, a man determined to build public works that the state despised, but that a modern country needed, like the railway from Barcelona to Zaragoza or the Urgell canal, one of the great milestones of European engineering in the 19th century.
This undertaking, the construction of a 144 kilometer canal, which was completed in 1861, is memorable because it overcame numerous obstacles, none more imposing than the Montclar mountain range. With pick and shovel, with mules and gunpowder, a five kilometer tunnel was opened for the water to pass through and which for almost a century was the longest in Europe. It is not known how many workers and how many prisoners died from the explosions and landslides; what is known is that the canal was a failure. Water was a curse for those dry lands that lost population for decades and did not fully recover until well into the 20th century.
Vicenç Villatoro learned about this epic a little over four years ago. It was told to him by Carlos Tejedor, pillar of the Amics del Bisbe Deig association, dedicated to promoting good ideas in Pla d’Urgell, and he made it his own when he discovered that the protagonists, upon seeing their great work finished, must have asked themselves if everyone effort had not been in vain. Too late they realized that they did not know how to irrigate with water that was not only brackish, but also spread malaria.
Vicenç Villatoro has brought this story together in a novel published by Proa and titled Urgell. The Water Fever. On Friday afternoon he presented it at L’ Amistat de Mollerussa, a theater filled with the heirs of a channel that has given them life and identity. His ancestors built it thinking that water would end hunger and that without hunger there would be no wars. This utopia, the hope that progress would bring peace, was only half fulfilled because the wars and conflicts, the rivalries between Carlists and liberals, did not disappear. “But in history – as Villatoro highlighted – nothing is written and everything is possible.” It is enough to maintain “the will to move forward.”
The author, who drew a parallel between the process and the initial failure of the channel, assures that he has not written “a depressive novel, but rather a hopeful one.” The protagonist, an ancestor of Villatoro himself, does not live to see the canal completed. In fact, none of the engineers, investors, foremen, workers, prisoners, soldiers, prostitutes and other human fauna who made it possible lived long enough to know that his effort had been worth it.
Villatoro shows them that yes and he does so with realistic prose, with some chapters close to the journalistic chronicle, in a novel that, above all, even the romantic light that illuminates some of its pages, is a social commitment to the people working for a future they will not see.
“This book – as Villatoro said in Mollerussa – is a call to individual responsibility”, to the certainty that failures never stop reason.