As much as Paco Cerdà (Genovés, Valencia, 1985) is a man of prose, he knows that almost everything begins with poetry. That is why on April 14, his last book, he quotes those verses by Wislawa Szymborska that remind us that history rounds up skeletons by the dozen; that a thousand and one are still a thousand, and that that one is as if it did not exist.
A good part of a work that has been defined as an essay and that is more of a literary puzzle, a mosaic whose tiles reconstruct the first hours of the Second Republic, is devoted to giving voice to those who turned out to be the turning point of history. In the manner of John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer, press news, political speeches, photographs and impressions of known or anonymous characters put together the story of a change of political regime to which the author expresses his unequivocal adherence.
For this reason, a fully literary (novelistic) subjectivity skews the chronicle of the experiences of the protagonists of that day. Everything is emotion in the people of the town, workers (the narrative opens and closes with the death of one of them), trade unionists, left-wing journalists, Republican politicians and Catalan nationalists. Of course, the hagiographic portrait of a young Santiago Carrillo can powerfully draw the attention of anyone who knows his later activities in the Madrid Defense Board.
As for Catalan politicians, Cerdà dedicates laudatory paragraphs sprinkled with quotes to Ventura Gassol’s poems and his calls for insurrection and death that can generate a certain astonishment. The same as everything related to Macià and the proclamation of the Catalan Republic (which the rest of the Spanish republicans considered deeply unfair), or to a unanimous feeling for independence that only exists in the author’s imagination.
In a community in which the majority union – the CNT – had a clearly anti-nationalist tendency and the working masses hardly shared the pro-independence theses, Cerdà’s approach was still somewhat voluntarist or, if you like, uchronic. Of course, it must be said in favor of the treatment of the episodes dedicated to Catalonia that the author’s natural use of the Catalan language, incorporating it normally into the text, constitutes an effective literary resource and a plausible decision.
On the other hand, the protagonists on the reactionary side are painted in the darkest tints. If in the republicans there is joy and nobility, in those only the terror of a carnage like the one promoted by the Bolsheviks in Russia or a class-based resentment before the emancipation of their subordinates is detected. The monarchist politicians are either cowards or an obsolescence to be dragged by the torrent of history, and Alfonso XIII little more than a puppet. Only in misfortune, in going into exile, the king is humanized in sadness and is endowed with a somewhat more complex melancholic aura. Franco, for example, appears portrayed as a devious and untrustworthy individual, whose manifestation of loyalty to the Republic can only be understood as a sneaky announcement of his betrayal. It is more than likely that all of this is true, but it could hardly be stated on July 14 with such forcefulness.
In any case, the materials handled are exhaustive and the final section of the book (Sources) gives an account of the documentation effort and the rigor with which the author has undertaken the recreation of that transcendental day in the history of Spain. A day of illusion for a large part of the citizenry, although Cerdà used with some frequency the reference to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, insinuating the innocence of the masses and the proximity of future disappointment and tragedy.
Paco Cerda
April 14th
Asteroid Books. 248 pages. 18 euros
II Asteroid Books Non-Fiction Award
