HE PUBLISHED 18 BOOKS
HE WAS ALSO A PHOTOGRAPHER, PAINTER AND SCULPTOR
THIS DOCUMENTARY IS ABOUT HIS LIFE AND WORK
MY HOME WITH TREES
I arrive in the village of Campos
on a humid and sunny day.
The village is in the south of the island of Mallorca.
This is where Damià Huguet lived,
a poet who is not among
the well-known names
of Catalan literature.
I’ve decided to find out more about him.
He died 25 years ago and,
as a person and an artist,
lived on the fringe of the fringe.
But was that really the way he wanted to live?
Did he want to be on the fringe?
[VOICE OF THE POET] If you open the door
of my home with trees
you’ll find my children
dusting off the tenderness
of the crude writings
of this violent omen
that the hardships of faith
have furrowed in anger.
I enter Damià’s house
and don’t see anything particular
nor anything very defined,
except pictures and books.
Biel, the poet’s son,
has left me his father’s address book
on the table.
I open it and read the names of other artists:
Toni Catany, photographer,
Vicent Andrés Estellés, poet,
Maria del Mar Bonet, singer.
I wonder who was
the man Damià Huguet
who emerged as an artist in
Mallorca of the 1960s,
who at best
was indifferent towards his work and himself,
and at worst, disdainful.
The immense creative potential of Damià Huguet
has a mysterious quality to it.
I, like many others,
deeply admire his poetry.
And I also admire his attempts at
painting, photography and sculpture.
A self-taught, avant-garde poet,
who earned his living as a builder,
an artist who went every day
to the local café,
without ever any need
to talk about his literary work.
Who was this man?
I come across the name of Miquel Adrover
and I feel like someone has told me about him.
I decide to phone him.
My name’s Sebastià Alzamora.
Thank you very much.
The man who greets me is straight out
of an American road movie.
But this man is an architect and a writer.
Talking with him, I found out
that when he was young, he and Damià
were the leading
cultural movers and shakers in the village.
It would still be 10 years
before the arrival of democracy
and they were trying to create
social debate and culture.
There was a lot of censorship
and prohibition and arrests.
Although here they didn’t do anything.
There were Gori Mir, Biel Janer, Blai Bonet,
Antònia Vicens,… and if I’m not mistaken…
intellectuals of the time.
And Damià Huguet.
Yes. He was there too. He helped.
Helped?
Yes, he was still very young.
Damià Huguet came under
a lot of pressure
from inside his family, from an uncle of his
who was a fierce supporter of Franco,
a Spanish nationalist, like they were at my place.
And from time to time, this uncle
would go to Damià’s place, his father had died,
and ask Damià’s mother
to show her her son’s books.
And then he would go through them.
That one out, that one out…
He censored him?
Yes, massively censored.
Do you think the censorship
his uncle subjected him to could have
prompted Damià’s reaction
against it all
and led him to doing
all that he did?
As a writer, as an editor, as a publisher, as an activist…
Yes. I’m convinced that
quite a lot of intellectuals from that time
were reacting
to an oppressive family environment.
Oppressive…
And that was also the case for Damià?
Yes. He was disapproved of by
a lot of people in Campos
who were strong Franco supporters.
Was his use of language
self-taught?
Sí, autodidacta.
¿Was he a learned man?
Extremely so.
He reminded me.
of a Renaissance man.
He was never arrogant, he was very humble.
Damià didn’t make anything up,
he simply verified things.
Reading his books, you see
the Campos of that time …
… which wasn’t very different to today.
I have the feeling that
reacting to the claustrophobia of those years
could have been a possible drive to create,
but not the only one.
I’m not sure about going back to the house
and rummaging through the drawers.
It’s not easy to enter someone else’s intimacy.
And even less so if they are no longer alive.
There’s something almost profane about it.
Luckily, the phone rings.
Biel tells me that Damià’s work van
is restored already.
Like I said, Damià, as well as being a poet, was a builder.
He worked in a factory that made concrete beams.
At the age of 10 he lost his father
and at 16 he stopped studying
to take over the family business.
That’s what he wanted.
I like to imagine Damià Huguet
returning from the café at sunset,
still covered in dust from work,
driving through the streets of the town
before arriving home.
He loved the cinema!
He’d written a great deal on the subject,
writing film reviews
for a newspaper on the island,
the Diario de Mallorca.
In Cannes, San Sebastian and Venice he interviewed
the big directors from that time.
I’m sure Damià could have felt
like a character from those films by
Rossellini or Antonioni that he loved so much.
As a reporter for the Diario de Mallorca
he covered the village football matches.
He took photos of them, which he sent to the paper.
One day, at this very pitch,
he took a photo considered to be unique
and which everyone talked about.
Depending on how you look at it
it might seem a ridiculous story.
But it wasn’t at all for Damià.
Everyone says that this
was the first blow his town dealt him.
It happened on 8 October 1972
This was where the passion erupted.
[VOICE OF THE POET] But in this village of mine,
of bulls and few ferrets,
what ever prevails is the pitilessness
of the scream and the ocean of culture
at which every countryman tirelessly scrapes away.
I imagine Damià taking the photo
and thinking, while he developed it,
that it was simply like a sequence
of neo-realist cinema.
But that famous photo did not go down well at all
among the people in the village.
There were gross exaggerations about it.
They said it had been seen all over the world
and that it portrayed the villagers as savages.
Paris Match magazine
wanted to buy the whole series
but Damià didn’t want to sell it.
Like Godard said
and as quoted by the poet
This is not a just image,
it’s just an image.
In the end I enter his study
and sit where the poet sat.
I look through the objects and the first to catch my eye
is a copy of a photo often used in publications.
The poet with a Toscano cigar in his mouth.
He always used to smoke those Italian cigars,
which are labourers’ cigars because they’re short
and can be smoked while you work.
The beret and his everyday clothes
complete the character.
But… Why do I say character?
What have I seen that I didn’t see before?
Could it be that because I’m
in his book-filled studio,
I see that the pose in the photo
is like a disguise.
In this image he’s smiling.
It’s a self-portrait.
I would say he has a roguish face.
Damià became a powerful intellectual,
but here he’s smiling through the mask of a labourer.
A mask which isn’t really a mask
because he did in fact spend hour upon hour
in the factory making cement.
Damià Huguet was very good at segmenting his activities
and a lot of the locals didn’t even know that he wrote.
He had multiple faces and, as a rule,
he didn’t mix them.
He was like Joan Miró in that respect.
Was it humility?
Was it shyness?
Or was it a way of being one
and many at the same time?
Look! This is a lemon.
I’ve called up my friend Montserrat.
He knew Damià,
He teaches philosophy and likes
to get to the bottom of things.
We talk a lot about the poet and…
…we talk about strangely shaped lemons.
Damià used to say that the cinema was a provocation.
Here’s something
that has really made me think.
Cinema will always be a provocation.
A meditated action
taken to its ultimate consequences
so that the fascination of the images prevails
over the emptiness of what is being said.
Yes, for Damià the image prevailed
over the written language and, even so,
he kept writing.
It’s interesting
and paradoxical at the same time.
A contradiction.
Montserrat is always in a hurry,
aparece de golpe
he appears suddenly and then suddenly vanishes.
[LETTER FROM THE POET] What pushed me to write was always the cinema..
I write because the cinema works for me
and mainly because I don’t dare
to film what I see.
Cinema is everything for me.
Everything is cinema.
There are a great many published scripts
and books on cinema in the house.
Which might seem unusual
in a poet’s library.
Reading a script by Antonioni is no easy task.
No script is
if you’re not a cinephile.
[VERSES OF THE POET] Tomorrow
perhaps we’ll be happy
with a glass of gin
or a cry from Pasolini.
Who also gets you drunk
but doesn’t quench your thirst.
The rest will be literature.
[VERSES OF THE POET] He slowly, very softly,
rubbed his lips,
with a cold heart
and the uncertainty of ignoring the adventure
where he died.
[VERSES OF THE POET] A film is like a man.
One option against a single option.
This book belongs to Guaret,
the publishing house the poet created.
Like the collections
Quaderns Campaners and La Garangola.
A total of 26 books published using his own money.
In a blue folder I find,
a list of the cost of each edition of Guaret.
A total of a million pesetas.
On the three collections
he spent nearly a million and a half.
In the early eighties
the minimum wage was
around thirty thousand pesetas.
Converted into euros,
the poet would have spent
some forty seven thousand euros
on publishing new poetry.
Damià didn’t do things by half.
He made concrete beams
and had three or four employees.
Tomorrow I’m going to see his first printer.
And the factory.
I like this place even before I enter.
Sebastià Roig manages it.
It’s a space that, depending on how you look at it,
is already from another time.
Here is where they made the first Guaret books.
Hi, how are things?
We share a name.
Exactly.
These are the machines, right?
Yes. These are offset,
but basically the books
were made with these,
with typography.
Guaret was made…
Guaret and some Quaderns Campaners.
My father did the first one
with pure typography
and then transferred it to linotype.
It had to be really well corrected
so that the person transferring it…
There couldn’t be any mistakes.
No. There couldn’t be any mistakes.
Damià did the correction.
And other authors…
He must have been a craftsman when it came to publishing…
Damià was a great poet and a great publisher.
When he brought you an original to print,
you really had to do very little to it.
Sure, you had to set up the pages,
but then he wanted to correct it again…
He was very meticulous.
Very meticulous.
For Damià, culture
always had a great importance.
I was much younger
and Damià helped us, a group of youngsters
to set up the Literature Festival in Campos.
He took it upon himself to invite
Maria del Mar Bonet, Lluís Llach, etc.
I think Campos owes a great deal to Damià.
Do you think he received recognition?
Not at the time. No.
And did that bother him?
I don’t think so because his character was like
that of the people round here, like mine,
sometimes we just put things behind us.
I’m really happy
that people are paying attention to Damià, even now.
I’m really happy and I think his family is too.
I’ve always thought that he is a fundamental piece
of our culture today.
His ideas were very clear, very radical,
in the sense of going to the root,
writing poetry, seeking out young authors…
That was very important.
He opened the door to the world of books,
for young authors who were practically unknown
at the time.
He gave them a hand.
I guess, if I’m honest,
this was hard work for him,
because in those days you didn’t sell books
like you do today.
Economically, a venture
like Guaret and Quaderns Campaners,
I imagine it was a disaster.
Yes, yes.
He lived for culture.
I think that at the time he was essential.
He was essential and I’m pleased.
Although I may shoulder part of the responsibility
for not recognising him when I was mayor.
Maybe… but sometimes these things happen without us realising…
Time helps us to give things perspective.
Yes, yes.
I’m left with the idea of the injustice of it all.
But, he persevered.
When Editorial Moll closed down,
the island’s biggest distributor,
there were still copies of Guaret
stored in boxes.
A run of 500 books and forty years later
there are still books left.
Culture, mechanisms,
the artist, tragic fate.
wrote Damià.
Persevere, like the idea of being firmly rooted in a place.
Damià was firmly rooted in Campos,
making beams every day.
At first, in the workshop next door,
and then, at the factory.
Now the factory is run by his son
and 35 people work there.
They make construction materials
using traditional methods
but for contemporary architecture.
Damià made beams. And little else.
Beams, some tiles,
some marble pieces,
but basically beams.
Concrete beams for building houses.
It was his decision.
His mother, a dressmaker,
had put money aside for his studies.
But he didn’t want to study.
He took a radical decision.
I find in a cupboard, the poet’s Betamax tapes.
Things that he filmed himself,
but also the tapes
of an interview with Magdalena, his wife,
after he’d passed away.
Magdalena died three years ago, at 68.
He died at 50.
They met when they were very young.
He would often say…
- I like being dirty.
I used to get angry with him sometimes.
I asked him why he didn’t have a shower.
- Ah, no.
- Why don’t you get changed?
- Ah, no.
He liked being dirty.
He liked that!
I mean, you could tell
he’d been working, with his hands.
He liked that!
But if he ever had to wear a suit…
He liked to have a suit
for when it was needed.
He liked being dirty for work,
to go to the café and meet down-to-earth people,
that he’d talk about real things with.
With real people.
He really liked that kind of person.
The question is why.
Porque disfrutaba.
Por ejemplo,
There was one that worked at home…
Joan Feliu.
He was crazy about him.
This man knew all the herbs
and the trees in the countryside.
He told him things…
He loved all that!
That’s why he liked being dirty,
because he liked work
and getting down to it. Not giving orders!
Damià wrote in a local magazine
for the last 8 years of his life.
In fact,
he was also responsible for starting the magazine.
Antònia, the director, tells me that
still today, the house they use for office
is the Huguet family home.
That was the poet’s decision.
On an island where everyone
thinks about property speculation,
it’s a surprising decision.
Damià was someone who would do everything.
Not just…
… the big pieces.
Exactly. He did the editorials,
he did political articles,
social critiques…,
which he didn’t always put his name to.
I spent a few hours with her
after Damià’s death.
I used to drop in to see her
and was always amazed at how her eyes shone,
at her affable optimism.
There has never been enough
said about Magdalena.
Magdalena was the mainstay of the home.
Damià was creative, he was the artist,
he was someone that could produce
literature in all its facets,
cinema, poetry, photography too…
… everything!
But Magdalena saw things clearly.
Era la sensatez de la casa.
I don’t mean to say that Damià didn’t,
but Magdalena was able to put things in order.
She looked after the factory’s accounts.
She took care of the house, the children,
everything.
I don’t know if Damià could have done
everything he did without Magdalena.
Magdalena was essential.
And she was always very much in love with Damià.
You could see it in everything she did,
in everything she said.
And when Damià faltered a little,
Magdalena was by his side.
Because no matter what happened
she would always be by his side.
I’m happy, of course,
because I think that those 25 years,
we really made the most of them.
We made the most of them and we loved each other very much.
Damià dedicated many poems to Magdalena.
A poem from ‘69 comes to mind
from the book
Home de primera mà. [First-hand Man.]
[VERSES OF THE POET] On the small yellow table
in the Can Corem bar,
I think about you
and drink my gin.
TOMEU from Bar Sinto,
is Damià’s first cousin.
There’s a kindness in his eyes
and in the way he speaks
that reminds me of Damià.
Although
I only saw Damià once.
I interviewed him just before he died.
Do you remember if when he was young
he was already doing things that were
creative, artistic…?
Yes, he loved doing those things.
For example, he would take some plates…
He had a stable…
In those days everyone had
a pigsty.
And he used to play there.
He would make a hook,
put the plate on it
and hang it on the wall.
On the wall of the pigsty?
Exactly, on the wall of the pigsty.
That’s where he kept his collection.
He might find an unusual tile
and he’d fix a hook to that too
and would hang it up there.
How old was he
when he did those things?
He was 10 or 11.
I was younger.
You saw him as your big cousin…
Yes, he was my big cousin.
I always followed him around.
Like children often do,
follow the big kids around…
Yeah, following the big kids...
And later, as an adult, he must
have been a customer.
Yes, a customer and family.
Of course.
We were cousins.
He would drink his coffee…
with the typical liquor, “3 Caires”.
He’d pour it in.
Like we all do.
Then, he’d go off to do his things,
working, reading or writing.
He’d spend all afternoon there,
doing his things.
At Son Pere?
Yes, at Son Pere.
Halfway between
Campos and the neighbouring village,
the estate of Son Pere is like a paradise
in the middle of nowhere.
There are no electric cables
no telephone.
It’s like going back in time.
Stones are everywhere
in Damià’s poetry.
Specifically the word “pebble”.
More insistently the word “land”.
And even more so, the word “callus”,
the hard bits that form on your hands
when you work too much.
“Red callus” is what we call them here,
in this red and dry land.
An image
which appears often in his poems.
It’s all about what’s primitive.
They found the stone
while they were restoring the houses
and Damià wanted to put it here,
like a sculpture.
I’ve found in the house
other unusually shaped stones
which he would collect and add a wooden stand to
turning them into an art object.
Marcel Duchamp’s L’Objet trouvé.
Present in the house are the
textures of Antonioni,
the matterism of Jean Dubuffet
or Antoni Tàpies.
Damià Huguet came to Son Pere to paint,
although he never considered himself a painter.
He also took photos,
although he never considered himself a photographer.
These were worlds that complemented his writing.
Perhaps they were necessary worlds.
Part of his artwork was focused on creating collage.
Like him: a living collage.
[VERSES OF THE POET] This Mediterranean corral
that I have travelled and come to know.
The breath of the trees
and the blue that shines
between the salt and the sun.
It is all one.
"It is all one"
the poet wrote on several occasions.
What did he mean?
It is all one.
It might mean
that nothing can be taken away, just added to.
Or that everything is mixed,
like here, now.
Sketches of a house being restored,
of a doorway or some stairs,
mixed with the Picasso blue
he liked so much.
Some images turn up from some slides
I found in a box in the house.
[VOICE OF THE POET] … with small, earth-coloured eyes,
provocative and untamed, always accepting
of the carnal maggot and absurd tenderness
of this cruel vestige of getting old
perhaps before time.
The eroticism and sex
that are so present in Damià’s work,
understood as subversion,
as truth.
A truth without any possible subterfuge.
What Damià wanted was to leave something behind.
Do something that would remain.
The fact that at that time
he wasn’t recognised,
he didn’t like that, it made him feel bad.
Because deep down
we’re all vain.
He was a very simple man
and not at all showy,
but deep down he recognised that
he was also a little vain.
He thought that at some time or another
the work that he’d done would receive recognition.
He would leave, but he wanted to leave his work behind.
He knew what it was he had to do
and that what he did had to be
good enough
for something to be left behind.
The tapes are full of little findings.
There are also extracts
from when he was on television.
Maybe for the presentation
of a new book.
He comes across as a compelling man.
Both in his words and his gestures.
In my poetry,
especially in my works
from recent years,
I think that is where the
cinematic influence can be most clearly seen.
From directors, creators,
who have left their mark on me, have influenced me
on a very personal level.
And that’s where my obsession comes from,
my deep obsession,
to write a kind of poetry
that is very close to the image.
A poetry that can be read
as if it were a short
film script.
This really is testimony
to a very intense contact
with the world of cinema.
He sheepishly tried, on two occasions,
to write a script that would end up on film.
Attempts that remained in a drawer.
But his poetry
is always playing with cinema.
[VERSES OF THE POET] I go to the cinema barefoot
to remember
that mute wound
of Louis Malle..
But what wound?
Why mute?
Going to the cinema barefoot must mean
going with his eyes wide open,
ready to receive.
Because it would make no sense
that it was an act of penitence.
But what is the mute wound?
Why remember it?
I always had the feeling
that if a meteorite were to fall on Campos
environmentalists would get the blame for it.
You say that because of the protection
of the Es Trenc beach, right?
Here, in Campus,
environmentalism has not had much of a following.
It’s like public enemy number one, right?
Yes.
A lot of people would have wanted
all this to have been transformed
into an Arenal or a Magaluf
on the coast by Campos.
Is that right?
In the years when people fought
against the construction of Es Trenc,
the people from Campus who got involved
were singled out,
and one of them was Damià.
Oh shit!
What a pain in the arse.
Bloody hell!
What a mess.
We’re in a mess now!
We’re really in a mess. What a disaster!
Do you know what I think, Sebastià?
That often while things are happening
we don’t understand them.
And later, over the years,
we understand them even less.
When Damià positioned himself in defence
of Es Trenc as a natural space
and in the fight for its conservation,
a lot of builders and construction companies,
people from his trade,
must have thought that this guy
had lost his mind.
Because it was a chance to make money,
to pull in the cash.
And look, the years have gone by
and now Es Trenc is
“the most iconic, most wonderful beach in Mallorca”,
“Caribbean Water Blue”…
It’s a picture postcard
For attracting tourists.
It’s a paradox!
He must have had a really hard time,
because he had to go and sell his materials
Outside of the town,
Because of all of this.
That was the second blow.
And the first?
The football photo!
And also defending
young poets
and all his publishing project.
Now that’s enthusiasm.
And courage.
A courage born of enthusiasm.
Yes, yes, yes.
Damià’s fascination
for children’s enthusiasm and their innocence
is clearly evident.
There are so many photos and footage,
that Damià himself took of children.
Vigo could have been the origin of that.
Jean Vigo, who was also
a loved and unloved outsider.
[VERSES OF THE POET] Since the cinema has been the world,
since the cinema has been this world,
“Zero for Conduct” will always,
always be,
a song for freedom
for the determined,
of which there are many.
Children as a seed
to regenerate what has decayed.
The children of Vigo,
in the repressive France of 1933,
fly to freedom,
or perhaps to death.
The mute wound of Louis Malle,
must be this:
a wounded childhood.
Maybe growing up is the same as being wounded.
I wouldn’t be surprised if
that was Damià’s experience,
fatherless at such a young age.
Staying quiet and resisting
are two ideas that are very present
in his early work.
The mute wound.
Go on, do the Little Birdies.
No...
Good…
Come on!
Come on?
Yeah.
[VERSES OF THE POET] Don’t try to find an explanation
for the wrongdoing you’ve already suffered.
It was necessary.
Wrongdoing is always in his work.
From its acceptance.
I don’t like to think about the idea
of giving up change.
But a lot of his writing
makes you think about that.
Another large part of his writing
displays a clear desire for subversion
and the avant-garde.
[VERSES OF THE POET] If you open the door
of my home with trees
you’ll find my children
dusting off the tenderness.
… because they didn’t take much notice of him…
I have met with the poets’ children.
Biel, Margalida and Manena.
They tell me that they’ve spoken very little
about their father’s death.
That they experienced it
as something that was highly intimate.
I’ve always thought
that death is very subjective.
I mean,I would deal with it in one way,
Margalida in another,
Biel in another…
At home no one talked about the fact
that my father was sick.
So,
I didn’t really understand
that my father was going to die.
I feel bad about that,
because I feel a bit thoughtless
and I was already 23 years old.
In fact, the day my father died,
I’d been to the cinema in Palma.
When I got back, our house
was full of people.
It was 8 o’clock in the evening.
My father had died.
And I felt a little freed of this feeling
when a girl from Campos
as part of her final degree project
on my father,
4 or 5 years ago,
interviewed my mother.
My mother told her
that they hadn’t spoken about death.
They hadn’t spoken to us
about the seriousness of the illness.
They had tried to carry on
as normal, as if nothing had happened.
I mean, let’s get on with life,
as if none of that was happening.
Sitting around this table
it really reminds me
of what the family was like
when we had lunch or dinner together.
Because, in fact, I sat
right here. This was my place.
I’m sitting where I was supposed to sit.
Biel is also
where he always sat.
Margalida isn’t.
Margalida used to sit here,
between the two of us.
This is where my father sat
and you’re sitting
where my mother sat.
Is it automatic?
More so than for most.
It’s ridiculous…
Making accusations and all that,
I don’t like it, Margarita…
Margarita, don’t touch anything.
Do you hear me?
His own children
seem to struggle to relate
the image of the father
with the image of the artist.
Who really is
the artist Damià Huguet?
Who are the real artists?
They’re masks. They’re not real.
They don’t form part of daily life.
Wait a moment, mum.
Can’t I get water?
No. Wait a minute.
The motor was running.
It’s weird that nothing’s coming out the tap.
Now stay where you are.
Don’t move.
I’ll go and you can do what you want.
But, at least,
let us drink our coffee in peace.
On the shelf where the scripts are
there are many by Bergman.
Bergam made inquiries
for a long period of time
about the mask,
about who we are socially,
about who we are intimately,
about who we are.
Have you ever met anyone merrier than me?
Who?
Me.
[ ----- ]
Margalida, we’ll do something now.
Let’s see if you know how.
Careful!
Stop the camera. Stop it.
When you say you find it difficult to read,
what do you mean?
Is there something specific about it
that bothers you
or that you think it distorts the truth?
It all seems distorted to me.
Of course. For you it doesn’t match
the person you remember.
No. Mmm… I don’t know if I try too much to get
inside my father’s head.
What must he have thought?
Or I try to draw conclusions
and I’ll never come to any anyway.
I don’t know. It’s not something I feel like doing.
Do you wonder…,
why he wrote one thing or another?
I didn’t know my father as an adult.
I was a teenager
and, unlike with my mother,
who I did know as an adult,
and who I saw as a woman,
with my father, that emptiness
of what he was like as a person,
what he was like as a… man,
not as my father,
that’s been hard for me.
How can I get
inside his head
if I don’t know what he was like as an adult?
Maybe we have got to know him
a little more through everything
that we have been told about him.
But my mother also
My mother completely idealised
didn’t she Margalida?
My mother completely idealised
my father.
You would say:
- But didn’t you argue about anything?
- No, never!
Hi, good afternoon Sebastià.
How’s it going?
Good, very good.
Come in!
Thank you very much.
She doesn’t think
it’s a good idea either…
No, no, no…
The attraction was mutual.
You see, he holds onto her
from behind to her arm.
He didn’t want to make any changes.
Not at all. No, no.
She’s really holding on tight to him…
She knows not to let go of a good thing.
of a good thing.
A lot of dancing and a lot of…
You see this stick, the broom?
Yes…
Damià and his girlfriend, at the time…
… ah, no, she was his wife already …
They did this dance that if
you took away someone’s partner, you left them the broomstick.
And as you can see
Damià didn’t want to trade in his wife
for a broomstick.
You wanted to change Magdalena for a broomstick.
Yes, exactly. We all tried
but we weren’t successful.
And I really recognize that place…
It’s where we are right now!
It’s here?
Yes. Although it’s a few years later now.
And that resistance…
when you offered him the broomstick
do you think it was because he was shy, or what…?
More than shy, he was
more formal than us.
He was an older brother.
Stop messing around.
Joan has a few images on paper
that I hadn’t seen.
There’s one of Damià playing football.
Like his idol Pasolini.
These haven’t been seen very much.
Here he’s wearing a football kit.
Yes, he used to play for Campos.
On the wing. Sorry, no, he was a defender.
Was he a good defender?
He defended with all his heart!
What he lacked in technique
he made up for with passion.
He gave it everything he had.
He gave it everything.
He gave it everything he had.
Whatever he did, whether it was football or writing,
or when he was making concrete beams.
Damià gave it his all at every moment.
Wherever he was.
Damià was a one-off.
I’d say he was a real character.
It’s just a shame that we’ve found out
now that he’s no longer with us.
That’s what really gets to me.
Those of us that knew him, we were aware of it,
but a lot of people found out after.
In one of his most famous verses
he wrote:
[VERSES OF THE POET] I have always wanted to be Damià Canova.
The rest is literature.
Canova was the nickname
in the town for his mother’s family.
His verse reaffirms his desire to be
a townsman like all the rest.
But was he?
I think he was a pessimistic person.
He was very sensitive and, of course,
things affected him more than others.
I would often have to push him.
We’d often go
to exhibitions or talks.
But if I didn’t say anything…
- Come one, let’s go, you’ll like it, you’ll be glad you went.
If I didn’t insist,
we wouldn’t have gone to
a lot of the places we went to.
Damià died of throat cancer.
It was one of death’s ironies.
As if the way he died
could be somehow connected
with how he lived.
He had to stay quiet.
I don’t know. Maybe more depressed.
I think he really believed
that things would go better…
I don’t know...
but...
in his last years,
yes, he was more pessimistic.
We would get angry
because I thought
that he had to go to the doctors
and take something, some medicine
to bring him out of himself a little,
because it was like he was depressed, sad.
I think he had a bit of depression.
[VOICE OF THE POET] But in this village of mine,
of bulls and few ferrets,
what ever prevails is the pitilessness
of the scream and the ocean of culture
at which every countryman tirelessly scrapes away.
Magdalena tells me he became
a withdrawn, quiet man.
That brave young man
became quieter over the years.
Sometimes, she says, towards the end,
he didn’t dare greet
people in the street
because he thought
they wouldn’t recognise him.
I realise that he
didn’t choose to be excluded,
but he did seek refuge.
Not as someone defeated
but rather as someone who wanted
to remain on the fringe.
Someone who decides to look towards another place
somewhere more open and fertile.
[VOICE OF THE POET]
If you open the door
of my home with trees
you’ll find my children
dusting off the tenderness
of the crude writings
of this violent omen
that the hardships of faith
have furrowed in anger.
If you want to hurt me
go only to the first page
of a unique photo.
His final work revolves around
the Mediterranean as a space of reconciliation.
It is bright
and looks forward.
He has seven published poetry books.
And seven that are unpublished.
[VERSES OF THE POET] A film is like a man.
An action against a single option.
For each blank space
a single option.
I understand what he is saying. It’s not easy.
If the word is gratuitous for the writer,
then so will it be for the reader.
But what word must he
have written most?
[VERSES OF THE POET] I have always wanted to be Damià Canova.
The rest is literature.
It’s heavy.
Yes. Put it facing this way.
That’s it. Great.
Great.
Fantastic.
By the way, here you have…
Brilliant. Thanks very much.
I’ve sent you the link
to the Berkeley programme.
Fantastic. Thanks a lot.
WORD MAP
Montserrat has found a programme
for literature students created at Berkeley.
A word counter.
I enter the poetry collections by period.
First,
the discursive poetry period.
The top words, of course,
are the articles, the determiners
and prepositions.
But after comes:
Silence, gin,
vice, village,
life.
From his experimental period,
the cinematic poetry:
land, fire,
callus, juice,
pleasure.
From his final period,
his Mediterranean reconciliation:
heart, light,
clarity, silence,
stones.
I notice the word “silence”
is repeated
at the beginning and the end
of his work.
And throughout all his work
the word most written is always
the word “land”.
I leave with the feeling
that I haven’t understood
as much as I would have liked.
But then I remember
a note at the beginning
of one of his unpublished books.
Perhaps these words
are the key to it all.
[VERSES OF THE POET] Poets are the people
who lie more than any other.
The poet has the obligation
to invent,
to create new words.
That is why in poetry
fiction prevails.
Can you see me ok, or out of focus?
I see you fine.
What?
I see you fine.
Is it ok or out of focus?