If they ask us if we know how to locate Els Plans de Sió on a map, how many of us are going to raise our hands? Few, right? If they ask us to say where Guissona falls, there will be many more of us. At least all those who have stopped there to fill up the tank at Andorran prices and put on their boots at the restaurant next to the gas station. For those who have not yet located, we are in the Segarra region.
“Guissona is the only town in Catalonia and Spain that has more immigrant than native population, and there are no conflicts. Now, the effort that everyone makes is literally extraordinary,” I read in La terra dura by Anna Punsoda (Pòrtic). And also: “The monstrous growth of Guissona has greatly unbalanced the region.”
Punsoda was born in Concabella, a town in the municipality of Els Plans de Sió, in La Segarra, and after several years living in Barcelona he felt the need to return home. She is accompanied by her partner, the Barcelona editor Ignasi Moreta, and her children. They settle in Les Pallargues, the capital of Els Plans de Sió, “a town of one hundred inhabitants, with a bar and a school.” In this kind of diary – it was not enough for me – we tour the region with Anna de Cal Cinto: “Fields and more fields of cereals, castles, farms, cabins, stone margins.” And a miserable river, a useless canal – “not having water is the great wound of the Segarenses” –. We visit churches and castles, we go to the market and the main festival in this “terra d’hereus”. That girl who chased cats remembers “the smell of the intestines” in the slaughter of the pig, the tasks in her grandparents' field, the landscape, the Agramunt nougat, that in the town “we were four children in 1985 and two died the nineteen-year-olds returning from the party"... They are personal memories that are linked to the groups, for example, when he visits the interpretation center dedicated to Lluís Companys and is saddened by the similarities between 1934 and October 2017. Authors of the land like Manuel de Pedrolo and Guillem Viladot. And she intertwines it with current events: macro farms, wind turbines, rabbit infestations.
Punsoda has a house in La Segarra. There are so many books that the neighbors call it the Library; They call her partner, so cultured, elegant and a reader of La Vanguardia, the Frenchman. And today it is her children, born in Barcelona, who chase cats around the town.
