First it was the girlfriend of one. Then the other's wife. Apart from political disagreements, Miquel Badia and Lluís Companys fell out over a woman: Carme Ballester. The President of the Generalitat married in October 1936, the second marriage for both. Three years earlier, in the impasse between the end of her first marriage and the knowledge of Companys, Ballester became intimate with the expeditious separatist Badia. It is unknown how long it lasted and if the relationship was stable. But just as the courtship with the president raised all kinds of erotic rumors in the Barcelona of the time, the comings and goings with Badia, too.
The relationship began around the spring of 1933 when he presided over the main Casal de las Juventuts d' Esquerra Republicana-Estat Català (Jerec) in Barcelona and she directed the women's section. She made sure that they had been found here and there getting intimate. What is true, it is not known. The episode that largely started this rumor mill, however, has generated a historiographical controversy. La Vanguardia provides details that help clarify the facts.
In August 1933, Miquel Badia suffered a car accident from which he recovered at 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 that the emeritus professor of History at UPF interviewed, Ballester was notified of the accident and upon meeting Badia “one thing led to another, the situation heated up and Carme played the flute, as they said then, to the three hustlers”. The narration created discomfort and in the subsequent reduced edition, Breu història de la Guerra Civil a Catalunya (2005), the Ucelay-Da Cal chapter was deleted.
In 2012, Ucelay-Da Cal recovered it in the choral volume Contra Companys, 1936. The nationalist frustration before the revolution. The unease and historiographical doubt about Ballester's intimacies continued. In 2018 Oriol Dueñas, a disciple of Solé i Sabaté, came up against the treatment of Ucelay-Da Cal in the biography Carme Ballester: compromís, resistència i solitude. The UB professor defended that the couple "was an adult 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 separatist youth rally.
On the night of Saturday, August 12, the young men from the Jerecs led by 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 set up the tents, hung star flags on the trees and, together with Dencàs, dined in the cool.
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 the following morning, August 13, the Jerec boys held athletic events with races, rope wrestling, jumping, in which Josep Badia, Miquel's older brother, participated. Lluís Soler offered a meal, chaired by Dencàs in the presence of the mayor of Manresa, Francesc Marcet. Shortly after two in the afternoon, with the starters on the table, a piece of news frightened: the accident of a car that was going to the rally with militants from the Jerec.
The meeting scheduled for the afternoon was canceled and, fearing the worst, Dencàs and Josep Badia left quickly for Manresa. As they entered, upon reaching the Pont Fumat, they saw a curve without a railing. They rushed. Eight meters below there was a scrapped car on the road.
The driver Puigdellívol, exhausted by the four hundred kilometers there and back, having slept little or not at all and due to the intense heat of that day, took the sharp curve too fast. The car fell off, did a complete turn and was inverted in the direction it was going. A switchman notified the Manresa North station and a brigade took the occupants to the Sant Andreu de Manresa hospital. Chance – not any call – wanted some militants from the Jerec women's group on their way to the group to be the first to help the wounded. Among them, Carmen Ballester.
When Dencàs and Josep Badia arrived at the hospital, the doctors were attending urgently to the injured. The record, hitherto unknown, of paying patients from the Manresa hospital that La Vanguardia has located in the Bages Regional Historical Archive specifies the days of hospitalization and distribution. Hospitalized in the Distinguished ward were Miquel Badia Capell, a 27-year-old native of Torregrossa, single, with a severe bruise on his chest, and Domènec Puigdellívol Serra, 31, from Castellgalí, married, also with a bruise on his chest, ribs broken and intubated with a serious prognosis. In the Miraculous room was Jacint Martínez Subirats, a 33-year-old Barcelona native, married with a daughter, with a severe bruise on his right forearm, and Manuel Masramon, 25, single, with concussion in his left eye, a wound in his mouth and a significant dislocation in the lumbar region. The fifth victim of the accident, Miquel Xicota Cabré, from Barcelona, 23 years old, single, occupied a bed in the Sant Vicente ward, with a fractured right clavicle and dislocation of the left haunch.
The documentation does not indicate who paid 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 cures did not reach 70 pesetas and an x-ray, 25. The trauma surgery unit treated them all.
The most personal attention to the wounded was provided by some relatives, such as Anna Badia, and also Carme Ballester. According to the unpublished memoirs of the lawyer and journalist, Josep M. Xicota, brother of the wounded Miquel, to which La Vanguardia has agreed, both "will be the ones that will take their task with the most care, although Anneta, for reasons that are easy to understand, dedicates herself to Mainly his brother." The constant presence of Ballester certifies that it was she at midnight on August 14 who informed La Humanitat by telephone of the evolution of the wounded.
The details provided by La Vanguardia do not conclude the matter, but show the seriousness of the injured and the distribution in rooms with multiple beds in which they were found. Badia, who spat blood, was in the same room as the most critical comrade. Puigdellívol died on the 15th. Badia and Ballester could have become intimate, therefore, but with notable cold blood. Her relationship with other men would have required a tour of the rooms with some injured people who don't seem to be up for those jogs.
On the 15th, Masramon left the hospital to enter the Quinta de Salut L'Aliança clinic in Barcelona. He would be ten months. The following day, Miquel Badia left the hospital in a cast and bandaged under his suit, with an orthopedic cane, to accompany Puigdellívol's coffin to the Manresa cemetery in the afternoon. Also in attendance were 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.
Despite the consequences, El Diluvio wondered how it was possible for the driver to use a Generalitat car for an act that was not "not even party and wearing the uniform and the braided cap." The republican newspaper also complained about the income that the widow in charge of the government would have to receive. Jacint Martínez left the hospital on the 18th and the next day Miquel Xicota, the last, left to enter the Rabassa clinic in Barcelona. Days later, he and Badia fully recovered in the Puigdolena sanatorium, in Sant Quirze de Safaja, according to the memoirs of Josep M. Xicota.
Ninety years ago, Badia survived the spectacular 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 his relationship with Ballester, which would later cloud the understanding with the future president Companys. The news that this newspaper now contributes affirm the seriousness of the accident and spice up the stay in the hospital.
