If we are asked if we know how to place the Zion Plans on a map, how many of us will raise our finger? Little ones, right? If they ask us to say where Guissona falls, there will be quite a few more. At least not all those who have stopped there to fill up the tank at the price of Andorra and to steal like thieves in 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 immigrants than natives, 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 decompensated the region".
Punsoda was born in Concabella, a town in the Plans de Sió municipality, in La Segarra, and after years of living in Barcelona she felt the need to return home. She is accompanied by her husband, the Barcelona publisher Ignasi Moreta, and the scoundrel. They settled in Pallargues, the capital of Plans de Sió, “a town of one hundred inhabitants, with a bar and a school”. In this kind of diary - it's too short for me - we're walking arm in arm with Anna de Cal Cinto through the region: "Fields and more cereal fields, castles, farms, cabins, stone banks". And a miserable river, an unusable canal - "not having water is the great wound of the reapers" -. We will visit churches and castles, we will go to the market and to a major party in this "land of heirs". That little girl who spat cats remembers "the smell of guts" when slaughtering the pig, the work in the fields of the godfathers, the landscape, the nougats of Agramunt, that in the village "we were four children in 1985 and two died when we were nineteen years coming back to party"... These are personal memories that connect with 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. There are also local authors such as Manuel de Pedrolo and Guillem Viladot. And it all intertwines with current events: macro farms, wind turbines, rabbit plagues, municipal politics.
Today, Punsoda has its home in La Segarra. They have so many books that the neighbors call it the Library; their man, so cultured, elegant and a reader of La Vanguardia, they call him the French. And today it is their children, born in Barcelona, who are chasing cats around town.
