BarcelonaJordi Pujol enters the room and there is silence. “How fun you are, how handsome you are!” He is the one who breaks the ice at the Ona bookstore, where he presents together with Junts deputy and former councilor Jaume Giró Words from President (2024, Editorial Afers), by Josep Vicenç Mestre Nogué (Òdena, 1990). It is a doctoral thesis, transformed into an informative work, on the analysis of the speeches of presidents Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Macià, but the act becomes a gloss praising Pujol. The first is Giró: “The president will go down in history as an intelligent and charismatic leader who knew how to turn Catalonia’s map of opposing forces into an engine of prosperity, coexistence and national pride.” Adding on pragmatism: “Leadership has to do with ambition, but it also has to do with certain difficult, but not impossible, goals.”
But the ex-president prefers metaphors and based on a fragment of Prat de la Riba’s Catalan Nationality, he does well to ask for “hope”. According to him, it is not that Catalonia is going through a “winter” period, but neither is it experiencing “a radiant summer”. What is needed, he says, is to push for “spring” to arrive. It is the recipe he sends to young and old who listen to him, who he asks for a “service attitude” to the Generalitat and a “constructive” attitude towards Catalonia and Spain. There is no trace in the atmosphere of the ostracism that has brought him to ostracism in the last decade, nor of the trial pending next year in the National Court for the Pujol case. The event becomes a tribute to him and his work.
The presidents
The conversation revolves around three historic presidents – Josep Puig i Cadafalch, Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Macià – but the figure of Pujol is at the center. “Between the three of them, they have been president for eleven years, you 23”, Mestre Nogué lets him go. “They didn’t live long”, answers Pujol with irony. It’s the strategy he adopts for almost an hour and a half to try to put the public in his pocket, he looks for interaction. “Wait, I’m talking now”, “shut up” or “you have to be patient, I’ve been slacking for a couple of days” are just some of the phrases with which Pujol defies formality and makes the audience laugh. To the extent that he dares to strike up a conversation with the author’s grandmother, who sits in the front row: “How old are you? 96? I’m right, I’m 94 […]. But listen, you and I are made of good wood.”
