‘If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when the horse’s neck and head would be already gone.’1
1
That writing and weaving are of the same family is clear from the word ‘text’, which comes from the Latin textus, participle of the verb texo, meaning to weave, plait, interlace. The gesture of writing, like that of weaving, consists of carrying the line to its end before continuing on to the next line. In writing, it is this feature that differentiates the movement of verse from that of prose, the latter having to go to the end of the line while verse breaks this continuity, often leaving a sentence in ‘midair’ only to conclude it in the following line, in what is known as enjambment. In weaving, too, the weft moves to the next line in pursuit of the pattern, the vertical. In Idea of Prose (1987), Giorgio Agamben locates the difference between prose and verse precisely in this particularity and establishes a connection with agricultural lexicon. Versura, in Latin, means the point at which the plough, reaching the end of the furrow, turns back.
I was reminded of this association between writing and weaving when I read Teresa’s texts about the Raval when it was still called the Barrio Chino. I realised that texts are woven too, for as we read them, we follow their ‘weft’...
Cervantes was aware of this too, as can be seen from the comparison he draws towards the end of Don Quixote (part two, chapter LXII) between literary translation and the back of a tapestry: ‘Still it seems to me that translation from one language into another, if it be not from the queens of languages, the Greek and the Latin, is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and the brightness of the right side.’
2
On the gesture of weaving, I remember something Teresa said to Marta González in 2000: ‘Weaving is a hypnotic technique, based on a repetitive movement, the results of which are not immediately apparent. The physical impossibility of seeing the whole piece as it is being woven, since it is rolled up as it progresses, enriches the fragment and gives it autonomy, while at the same time demands one has a global understanding of the composition that must be kept in mind for the time it takes to finish it. It’s a technique that encourages a peculiar and gratifying sort of concentration, although – as with any artistic activity, whatever the medium – nothing alleviates the strong tension and deep apprehension that accompany the creative process.’2
Furthermore, and especially, is the idea that weaving does not allow for any corrections of mistakes or any deviations from the initial compositional plan, which can be elevated to the category of a moral lesson one must not forget: ‘I see working a loom like life itself: what is done is done, and one has to live with it’.
3
Teresa and I first met as students while studying Filosofía y Letras (as it was called then) at the University of Barcelona (La Central). I began my studies in 1967, the year after the Caputxinada, when the Democratic Students’ Union of the University of Barcelona called the first elections. In the spring of my first year, we began to feel the impact of May ’68, after which nothing would ever be the same again. It was at about that time that we met. Chroniclers refer to those times (from 1969 to 1975) as ‘the years of student radicalism’. And so it was, and not just in Europe: in the United States, there were protest movements against the Vietnam War, hippy deserters, and the emergence of the underground culture – the counterculture. The Woodstock Festival took place in August 1969, as did the Harlem Cultural Festival (the subject of Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s recent film The Summer of Soul). At the University of Barcelona, 1969 began with a student assault on the rector’s office in an attempt to remove him. He was replaced by a bust of Franco but that ended up being sent flying through the air. On the same day as that event – 17 January – a student and member of FELIPE (the Popular Liberation Front) called Enrique Ruano was arrested in Madrid, but unlike the rector, he did die, three days later, at the hands of the police’s Political and Social Brigade. A state of emergency was declared throughout Spain soon after. From then on, university activities were regularly suspended, either on the decision of the academic authorities or by government order, because of the prevailing ‘situation of general ungovernability’, which is how our insurrectionary efforts were officially described. In December 1970, street protests (or ‘riots’ as the official reports called them) were sparked by the Burgos trials by military tribunal of sixteen ETA militants, resulting in nine death sentences being handed out (later commuted thanks to international pressure). Needless to say, this led to a new state of emergency being declared, first in the Basque Country and then throughout the rest of Spain. The following year, it started all over again: this time the trigger was the passing of the General Education Law, promoted by the then minister Villar Palasí (a member of Opus Dei). Fury raged for a long time. That was the way things were back then...
I don’t think we got through a full year of studies.
But I know that, as repression mounted, our desire for freedom was unleashed and somehow clandestinity became a way of life.
I also recall how in the early seventies heroin began to make an appearance at the University. ‘It was offered to anyone who was up for it, and practically all of us are at that age’, Teresa writes, adding: ‘The first time my generation looked out onto the world, they saw a poisoned chimera.’3 Take a walk on the wild side, sang Lou Reed in 1972.
4
For Teresa, the music that touched her heart was flamenco: el cante. ‘Flamenco thrilled me, and I learnt there that exception is the rule that makes us possible’, she writes.4 ‘El Tronío, El Camarote, La Macarena, El Patio Andaluz...’ These were all venues of fiesta y cante; of ‘parties, booze-ups, weddings and christenings...’5
‘When you get to know gitanos, live with them and delight in their art... when you discover their car pets, woven on mobile looms, the world becomes a bigger place. Your country is the ground on which you tread, and your home is always where you’re heading and not where you’re from because returning is not a going back but a perpetual moving forward. This is the rhombus. The rhombus isn’t made up of horizontals or verticals but of diagonals forming endless lines. In its reiterative expansion, the rhomboid lattice reveals no coordinates, no centre and no frame, but rather a network of equal parts. Repetition is not an enemy, but a value holding variations and transgressions. The rhombus is a horizon.’6
5
When things began to normalise in this country, following Franco’s death and the promulgation of the Constitution, Teresa and I lost touch and it wasn’t until many years later that we met again. Occasionally, though, and with increasing frequency, I would get news of her or her work. I thought I recognised in some of the things she said in interviews certain gestures, intimations of her personality I knew from our youth. Reading these interviews helped me to understand how to approach her work, to capture its ‘vibrations’ – to borrow a pet word from our student days. I actually think this word is quite fitting to talk about my experience of her work and to express what I feel vibrates in it and how; because whenever I look at a piece of hers the first thing I see, in rhythmic repetition, is that original moment of discovery of the cotton thread, the sudden fascination for the material:7 a love that found artistic expression in traditional handiwork, which shares this love of material and demands it be given adequate form. I see this same vibration when I realise that Teresa does not usually discuss how spellbound she is by tapestries (made in Morocco, for example) without also including the artistic ornamentation of everyday objects. Here, the vibration modulates: referring to the tapestry as a domestic object brings into view the house, and with it the working woman.8 Cue the Barrio Chino and its gitano vibe, where Teresa chose to live when she first started weaving. I remember the answer she gave when asked whether she was happy in those days: ‘Was I happy? I don’t remember now. Happiness wasn’t in my plans... although if I wasn’t happy, it wasn’t because of the biting cold or the sweltering heat or the cramped living quarters or the lack of money! And if I was, it would have had something to do with the flamenco way of life. To live and to be was what I wanted, to live like a gitana and to be – just that, nothing more.’9 Like a vibration in tune with something atavistic, powerful and elemental like cotton thread, which can still make its way through a multitude of labyrinths; a vibration that repeats itself, I think I see – infused by the constant presence of the working woman, by her dignity and her pain, her tragic knowledge of the way things are, her courage and her charm. And once again I recognise the vibration of when we were students that helped us to believe that reason had to come down on the side of the victims. And again when, in El paso del Ebro, she speaks of the girl who ‘wanted to know where her father was – like her fellow pupil who shared her desk, who knew that his father was buried in the ditch that forks on the way to the threshing floor’.10And again in the dedication of that text (a diary she kept of the weekly train journey she made between Alicante and Barcelona from September 2013 to July 2015): ‘To the Italian brigadista who, while awaiting his execution, carved wood... And to my great-aunt Teresina who would tell me these stories’. On 9 January 2014, the entry reads: ‘As the train passes Sagunto, I notice a CNT and IWA office and a red and black flag flapping around a short mast’. A happy sight, which is not repeated (7 February: ‘I couldn’t see the CNT flag on the premises’) until 20 February: ‘This time the CNT office is open, the red and black flag is on the right of the door and the windows are covered with posters’. She ends with a question: ‘How many members are there?’ And all too clearly, I understand – the reader understands – what prompted this question.
Looking at the series of five tapestries that are the premise of this text, I confess I cannot help seeing the railway as it crosses the Ebro River. I have tried, but it’s impossible. I imagine an old steam locomotive puffing out smoke, I hear the rattling and the clinking of the hammer as it knocks the wheels to check for damage whilst stopped at a station. I feel the powerful, swollen vibration of the river... A date comes to mind: 25 July 1938 – people say there was no moon that night.11
6
Between Franco’s death and the promulgation of the Constitution many things happened and with an intensity that has never since been repeated. I returned to Barcelona shortly before Franco’s demise and the following year joined the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, as it was called then, as an assistant lecturer in its new location in Pedralbes. The city was humming with a tension that is characteristic of the creative process, as Teresa mentioned earlier. A profound sense of unease (the attempted coup d’état, known in Spain as the ‘23-F’, was only five years away) was offset by boundless joy: the joy of at last being able to breathe! The area where Teresa lived was now known under its new name, ‘the Raval’ and, without losing any of its distinctive vibrancy, began to feel a little like Manhattan’s Soho, which Pasqual Maragall would propose as a model in 1992. By way of an illustration, I will give just one example which I experienced at close quarters thanks to my friendship with Pepe Rubianes, who had been a class-mate of mine at university. In 1976, the Assemblea d’Actors i Directors de Teatre de Catalunya (AADTC) had designed a theatre festival, considered ground-breaking at the time, called the Teatre Grec, which has gone on to enjoy a very long and distinguished trajectory. A few months later, a splinter group of the AADTC formed the Assemblea de Treballadors de l’Espectacle and, for its first performance, put on several simultaneous performances of Don Juan Tenorio in the Born neighbourhood, which at the time was being claimed as the Ateneu Popular (a few weeks earlier the first libertarian Ateneu had just opened in Sants). And it was precisely this group – some 150 professionals at first – that took over the old Salón Diana cinema, with its 876 seats, on Carrer Sant Pau, and converted it into a place of first-class theatrical and civic experimentation. The Salón Diana opened its doors on Holy Saturday 1977 with The Living Theater (Seven Meditations on Political Sadomasochism), Les Troubadours and Dagoll Dagom (I Won’t Speak in Class) – and that was only as far as theatre was concerned, because the programme also included children’s matinees, late-night rock, zarzuela, dance, circus, cinema... You could just as easily find the clown Jango Edwards skidding across the stage on a powerful motorbike as a group of Yaqui Indians performing the ritual Peyote dance. The Salón Diana soon became a favourite meeting place, so much so that when La torna, for example, by Els Joglars (dedicated to Heinz Chez, the enigmatic Polish petty criminal who was executed on 2 March 1974, the same day as Puig Antich, in a manoeuvre by Franco’s regime to discredit him in public opinion) became a target in the notorious witch-hunt, it was turned into a permanent assembly. For a time, it seemed as if the city had found somewhere to exercise its right to assembly, not to mention all that was going on behind the scenes and in the bar La Piedra across the street. I don’t recall the moments Teresa and I shared in that adventure, or whether we came across each other at what turned out to be the culmination of all that turmoil: the International Libertarian Conference (Jornades Llibertàries del Parc Güell) the following summer. This conference was convened a few days after the CNT had managed to amass some hundred thousand people at the famous Montjuïc rally, from 22 to 25 July: three days and nights of non-stop meetings and debates, music and partying, with no one to answer to but the security guards deployed for the event.12 When I think back to those days, I can’t remember if Teresa and I met up then or not, but I have no doubt she was there.
I leaf through the pages of all the catalogues I have of her exhibitions, pausing here and there as if to double check something I already know and feel: that vibration I am beginning to recognise so well. Just as one can feel vicarious embarrassment, I feel vicarious pride when contemplating Teresa’s work, if only because of how she has sustained over time the gesture of honouring what one owes oneself just for being who one is. There is, furthermore, poetic justice in the fact that this work has been welcomed by the MACBA, that white ship ‘moored’ in the renovated Raval, with the skateboarders practising their moves alongside its flanks. It couldn’t be any other way, I tell myself, that we, friends from so very long ago, should be the first to be congratulated.
Miguel Morey
L’Escala, September 2021
Miguel Morey is a philosopher. His last publication is Monólogos de la bella durmiente: Sobre María Zambrano (2021).