English Texts

We were 18 and we were very anarchist. It was quite
different from what came later. We could already
make a criticism of Marxism… One day we went and
they’d taken away the stone because of some works;
we’d arranged to meet there and now, because of
the town council, nobody knew where to meet… It
was definitely the most important monument in Badia,
the only monument, however much they want to find
Romantic or Romanesque stones now, I’m not quite
sure what they say it is… And as it was in the middle
of the street, nobody said anything and they went and
took it away, with machinery, because the chunk of
cement was big and it was difficult… Where the stone
was they’ve put a supermarket now, a Mercadona,
and it’s strange because people still meet up there.’
The small publication we call The Stone tries to set up
this story and recalls the monument.
The third follows this circumstantial method, perhaps
moving the elements but repeating the argument.
The film we have entitled The Film and which features
the voiceover of seven women – Beatriz Preciado,
Eva Serrats, Marina Garcés, Valeria Bergalli, Marisa
García, Pamela Sepúlveda and Deborah Fernández
– started from the following circular: ‘You’ll see, in
1975, the Badia housing estate – an old subsidised
housing project that the late Franco regime planned
as a hostel for the excess immigrants – was finished,
but through an error in calculation nobody had thought
about the drinking water requirements, and this
delayed its allocation and possibilities of habitation
for two years. At that time José Antonio de la Loma was
looking for locations for his project Perros callejeros,
a film about juvenile delinquents on the outskirts
of the big cities, which development in Spain was
throwing up as a new phenomenon. The film was half
way between opportunism and a certain Pasolinian
sensibility, a project – since in the end it was a whole
series of films – that was the offspring of a certain
Christian paternalism, since the idea was that most
of the actors, El Torete, El Vaquilla, etc., should be real
delinquents. Indeed, in later films the director includes
them in the plot in his desire to regenerate that lost
youth. The film combines a whole load of moralising
about redemption and the exploitation of sensationalist
elements: violence, morbid curiosity, drugs, soft porn,
etc. The fact is that the empty housing estate was the
ideal setting – not the only one, of course, Barcelona
itself, Hospitalet, Castelldefels, Gavà, Sant Adrià del
Besòs or La Mina – for this first film: police chases and
urban desolation found their ideal landscape in this
city without people. When the film was released, from
1976 the Badia estate began to be inhabited. From the
late seventies to the mid eighties, this city near Barberà
del Vallès and close to Terrassa and Sabadell, was
identified in the urban imaginary of Barcelona as a
‘crime city’ and an urban legend identified all the
habitant as ‘Gypsies’, drug dealers and criminals. In
a survey in the book Ciutat Badia-Badia ciudad, a
resident of Badia referred to it: ‘In fact, there’s a film,
Perros callejeros, that was shot in Badia and did
Badia a lot of damage, and it was before people came,
when it was still empty.’ The official synopsis of the film
says: ‘A gang of kids, not sixteen years old, in a suburb
of Barcelona have specialised in car theft. They also
engage in bag-snatching, robbing shops to sell off the
goods cheap, assault on couples in secluded places
to steal everything they have, and abuse of the women.
Sometimes caught out in their misdeeds, they embark
on ferocious chases with the police; they do not care
what they do, driving up onto the pavement, in the
wrong direction or jumping road blocks, and at times
they are seriously injured. They assault an armoury and
feel strong enough to rob a bank. The leader is called
El Torete and among the members of his gang are El
Pijo, El Chungo and El Fitipaldi, all regulars at the juvenile
courts, whose outdated laws cannot put a stop to these
boys’ career of crime. From bad to worse, El Torete
arouses the wrath of El Esquinao, a powerful Gypsy who
controls the district. When he runs away with his niece
and leaves her pregnant, El Esquinao sets a trap for
him and metes out a cruel, exemplary punishment.
Nevertheless, El Torete does not give up and after he
has recovered, putting a tremendous willpower to
the test, he takes one of the most terrible revenges,
which in the end makes everyone aware that the
problem is there and it has to be solved. A problem
that is not restricted to the Catalan city, but is to
be found in any excessively developed modern city.’
Well, the synopsis hides more than it tells, for example,
it is worth pointing out that the ‘cruel, exemplary
punishment’ is no less than castration, which is also
the main instrument of the revenge whereby El Torete,
driving a Citroën DS, castrates and kills El Esquinao,
smashing him over and again into a wall on a piece
of waste ground on the outskirts of the city, splattering
his body and his parts against an abandoned wall, a
canvas covered with graffiti and slogans that were
a faithful reflection of the political concerns of the
community. And indeed, it seems that in all the cases
listed we are talking about castration, emasculation,
the mutilation of a phallic shaped figure, vertical,
of the demolition of a Monument or, put in the affirmative,
the Descoberta da linha orgânica.
I think we need not insist on the metaphor. A high
tower that falls down and a monument that collapses
are evident similes for castration. It has been
repeated ad nauseam about the destruction of the
Twin Towers in New York. However, clinical medicine
can help us with a rather more complex approach
to that architectural functioning of emasculation.
One example: ‘Clarck was in psychotherapy twice
a week for two years more or less, before starting
psychoanalysis of five sessions a week. Through the
work on his psychotherapy and the first part of his
analysis, we managed to reduce his social anxiety
significantly, the moment when his natural talents
and generally pleasant personality took him to major
achievements in his field and a rapid advance in
his work. We analysed his difficulty in standing with
other people and giving presentations as based on
a strong body-phallus equation, in which standing
up was having an erection and therefore being in
danger of it disappearing. The work on the oedipal
implications of that symbolic equation and that fear
led us in many directions andrevealed a rich conscious
and unconscious life fantasy about his body and his
parents’ bodies, about what would be found in the
interior of a vagina, and an intense interest in certain
770 English Texts