First she was the girlfriend of one. Then the other’s wife. Aside from political differences, Miquel Badia and Lluís Companys fell out over a woman: Carme Ballester. The president of the Generalitat married there in October 1936, in a second marriage for both of them. Three years earlier, in the impasse between the end of her first marriage and the acquaintance of Companys, Ballester became intimate with the expeditious separatist Badia. It is unknown how long it lasted and whether the relationship was stable. But just as the courtship with the president raised all kinds of erotic rumors in Barcelona at the time, so did the comings and goings with Badia.
The relationship began around the spring of 1933 when he presided over the main Casal de les Joventuts d’Esquerra Republicana-Estat Català (Jerec) in Barcelona and she directed the women’s section. He made sure that they had been found here and there intimating. What is true, it is not known. The episode that largely started this rumourology, however, has generated a historiographical controversy. La Vanguardia provides details that help to clarify the facts.
In August 1933, Miquel Badia suffered a car accident from which he recovered in the Manresa hospital. In 2004, Enric Ucelay-Da Cal presented a version of the events in the choral work La Guerra Civil a Catalunya, directed by the professor of History at the UB, Josep M. Solé i Sabaté. According to the figures of the time interviewed by the emeritus professor of History at the UPF, in Ballester she was notified of the accident and when she went there and found Badia “one thing led to another, the the situation heated up and Carme played the flute, as it was called at the time, to the three smart ones”. The narration created discomfort and in the subsequent reduced edition, Breu história de la Guerra Civil a Catalunya (2005), the chapter of Ucelay-Da Cal was deleted.
In 2012, Ucelay-Da Cal recovered it in the choral volume Contra Companys, 1936. La frustración nacionalista ante la revolución. The angst and historiographical doubt about Ballester’s intimacies continued. In 2018, Oriol Dueñas, a disciple of Solé and Sabaté, appeared in the passage of Ucelay-Da Cal’s treatment in the biography Carme Ballester: commitment, resistance and solitude. The UB professor defended that the couple “were adults to do what they wanted”.
In August 1933, Miquel Badia, then undersecretary of the Minister of Health and Social Assistance, Josep Dencàs, spent a few days in Cap de Creus with one of the members of his bodyguard, Manuel Masramon de Ventós from Olot. But they interrupted the break to attend a rally of the separatist youth.
On the evening of Saturday 12 August, the young men from Jerec who led Dencàs and Badia arrived at the Calvet forest, about six kilometers from Manresa on the Igualada road. The militant and doctor Lluís Soler, owner of Mas Calvet, made it available. The participants pitched their tents, hung starry flags on the trees and, together with Dencàs, dined al fresco.
After the evening, at one in the morning a Generalitat car driven by driver Domènec Puigdellívol, agent Jacint Martínez and Miquel Xicota, another bodyguard from Badia, picked him and Masramon up. Manresa, Vic, Ripoll, Olot, Cadaqués. Two hundred kilometers. More than two and a half hours of travel.
In the Calvet forest on the following morning, August 13, the Jerec boys held athletic events with races, rope wrestling, jumps, in which Josep Badia, Miquel’s older brother, participated. Lluís Soler offered a lunch, chaired by Dencàs in the presence of the mayor of Manresa, Francesc Marcet. Shortly after two in the afternoon, with the starters at the table, news broke: the accident of a car that was going to the rally with Jerec militants.
The meeting scheduled for the afternoon was suspended and, fearing the worst, Dencàs and Josep Badia rushed out to Manresa. As they entered, upon reaching the Smoked Bridge, they saw a bend without a railing. They poured into it. Eight meters down was a scrapped car on the road.
The Puigdellívol driver, exhausted by the four hundred kilometers round trip, having slept little or nothing and because of the intense heat that day, took the pronounced curve at too high a speed. The car swerved, made a complete turn and was reversed in the direction it was going. A security guard alerted Manresa Nord station and a brigade took the occupants to Sant Andreu de Manresa hospital. By chance – not a call – some militants from the Jerec women’s group on their way to the gathering were the first to help the wounded. Among which, Carme Ballester.
When Dencàs and Josep Badia arrived at the hospital, the doctors were urgently assisting the injured. The record, until now unknown, of paying patients from the Manresa hospital that La Vanguardia has located in the Bages County Historical Archive specifies the days of hospitalization and distribution. Miquel Badia Capell, a native of Torregrossa, 27 years old, single, with a severe chest contusion, and Domènec Puigdellívol Serra, 31 years old, from Castellgalí, married, also with a chest contusion, broken ribs and intubated with a grave prognosis. In the Milagrosa room were Jacint Martínez Subirats, from Barcelona, ??33 years old, married and with a daughter, with a severe bruise on his right forearm, and Manuel Masramon, 25 years old, single, with a concussion in his left eye, a wound in the mouth and a major dislocation in the lumbar region. The fifth casualty, Miquel Xicota Cabré, from Barcelona, ??23 years old, single, occupied a bed in the Sant Vicente ward, with a fracture of the right clavicle and dislocation of the left hip.
The documentation does not indicate who covered the expenses. According to the rates in Sant Andreu located by this newspaper, a day’s stay ranged between 4 and 6 pesetas, an operation and treatments did not reach 70 pesetas and an x-ray, 25. The trauma surgery unit attended to them.
Some family members, such as Anna Badia, and also Carme Ballester, gave more personal attention to the injured. According to the unpublished memoirs of the lawyer and journalist, Josep M. Xicota, brother of the injured Miquel, which has been accessed by La Vanguardia, both “will be the ones who will take their offense more carefully, although Anneta, for for reasons that are easy to understand, devote himself fundamentally to his brother”. Ballester’s constant presence certifies that it was she who informed La Humanitat by telephone of the evolution of the wounded at midnight on August 14.
The details provided by La Vanguardia do not conclude the matter, but they show the severity of the injured and the distribution in rooms with multiple beds in which they were. Badia, who spat blood, was in the same room as the most critical colleague. Puigdellívol died on the 15th. Badia and Ballester could have intimated, therefore, but with remarkable cold blood. Her relationship with other men would have required a trip through the halls with some casuals who didn’t seem like they were there for parties.
On the 15th, Masramon left the hospital to enter the Quinta de Salut L’Aliança clinic in Barcelona. He would be there for ten months. The following day, Miquel Badia left the hospital plastered and bandaged under his suit, needing an orthopedic cane, to accompany Puigdellívol’s coffin to the Manresa cemetery in the afternoon. The president of the Generalitat, Francesc Macià, the Minister of Culture, Ventura Gassol, Josep Dencàs, the commander of the Mossos, Enric Pérez Farrás, among many others, also attended.
Despite the consequences, El Diluvio wondered what it was like for the driver to use a car belonging to the Generalitat for an act that was not “even de partido y luciendo el uniforme y la gorra galloneada”. The republican newspaper also complained about the income that the widow should receive from the government. Jacint Martínez left the hospital on the 18th and the next day Miquel Xicota left, the last one, to enter the Rabassa clinic in Barcelona. Days later, he and Badia fully recovered at the Puigdolena sanatorium, in Sant Quirze de Safaja, according to the memoirs of Josep M. Xicota.
Ninety years ago, Badia survived the fatal accident. Had he died, the influence of separatism within the party that governed the Generalitat, ERC, might have changed. His recovery at the Sant Andreu hospital also contributed to the rumor mill about the relationship with Ballester, which would later cloud the understanding with the future president Companys. The news that this newspaper now brings confirms the seriousness of the accident and makes the stay in the hospital even more intense.
