The Civil War of Catalan writers is a subject with many gaps and we are far from having a global vision. There are the testimonies of those who were at the front – Joan Sales, Pere Calders, Avellí Artís-Gener, Josep Sol – and of some who went over to the Francoist side – Ignasi Agustí – but when it comes to following the ‘itinerary of those who went into exile in 1937 or those who stayed in the auxiliary services or in administrative jobs, the fog is very thick. In general, little has been written and very unclear. That is why the archive of the Palau Foundation, which holds all the documentation of the writer Josep Palau i Fabre and his parents, made up of hundreds of documents, offers an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct the tensions of that moment. This is what I have done in the three central chapters of the biography El jove Palau i Fabre. A family from Barcelona’s Eixample, the dream of Ibiza and the Civil War, which will be published at the beginning of next year by Galàxia Gutenberg.
Palau never hid that, in 1938, when they mobilized his cama, he did not appear at the Recruitment Office, that he lived in ambush for a few months and that this fact marked his subsequent trajectory with great feeling of guilt In his volume of memoirs, El monstre, written between 1984 and 1985, he explains that he was hidden in the house of some French sisters, on Avenida de la República Argentina. That he took the work of Llull and Rimbaud with him and that he began to think about what he would do when the conflict ended, with Franco’s victory, which could be seen coming. I was researching who these French sisters could be. The father, Josep Palau Oller, had a decoration shop at Carrer Diputació 273, and many contacts with wealthy people. The maternal grandfather, Fernand Fabre, was French: they could also be friends or acquaintances of the mother.
I was looking in the Municipal Register of 1930 and 1940, house by house, and I discovered a world that I would give for a novel: some Russian barons, several German families, fleeing from Hitler, surely. Alicia Vacarizo, Palau’s last companion, who knows the archive thoroughly, told me that she did not believe that these French sisters really existed. That Palau took refuge at his aunts’ house, that at the time of writing El monstre he did not want to compromise his memory and invented this fiction. We found some very suspicious photographs of the aunts’ house: a unique building at 90 República Argentina avenue, corner with Bolívar street, opposite where the Súnion School is now. On the facade I could decipher an unmistakable graffiti: “Perecer hasta el último antes de dejar pasar al enemigo”, with a five-pointed star. In this house Palau spent those crucial months of 1938.
In his memoirs, Palau explains that his parents, who had become Francoists, did not want him to come forward, that his mother made him a drama, and that he himself – always dependent on his parents and scared to death, how easy it is to understand –, he let himself be dominated. I suppose that to console himself, and to justify himself, he said that he had done more service with the clandestine activities he promoted in the post-war period than by giving his life at the front. But this is clearly a hindsight. The ambushers were playing it. On a visit to Marià Manent in Viladrau, Palau found the critic Ramon Esquerra, who was hiding there. Esquerra was very afraid, he finally joined and was killed on the Segre front. Palau accepted the pardon of August 1938. First he asked for help from the head of culture of La Humanitat, one of the newspapers where he worked until July 1936. The writer Josep M. Francès gave him a recommendation by Celestí Pinyol and Nicolau Battestini, administrator and director of the Hospital General de Catalunya, respectively.
We don’t know if the recommendation worked, but soon after Palau joined the Health Section of the Ministry of Defense in Plaça Molina. After the Battle of the Ebro, in November 1938, he returned to the barracks. A soldier called Padrós, captain dentist, gave him a choice between Olot and Alp. Palau i Fabre explained to me that he chose Olot for the Fageda d’en Jordà from Joan Maragall’s poem. In Hospital d’Olot he experienced the entry of Franco’s troops. They took him prisoner and sent him to the La Seu de Lleida concentration camp.
The correspondence with the mother, from prison is impressive. The mother greets the winners: “The streets are no longer littered with spats, even the tram toll collectors have manners: what do you think!! Believe me I’m excited. I’m getting too fat again and I couldn’t take it the last few days, and if you had seen the entry! Like a miracle! We will never tire of saying: Long live Franco! That if they hadn’t come to release us so quickly, we might have passed it black!!”
Palau, busy, takes days to answer this letter. The mother guesses what is going on and from that moment the correspondence is limited to the practical question of guarantees to leave the concentration camp, which the parents obtain using their influence.
Josep Palau i Fabre had been left in no man’s land. Defeated, with the bad conscience of not having defended his ideas until the end, depressed and confronted with his parents. It is the starting point of the Poems of the Alchemist.
