I’d been to Barcelona twice I think and my understanding of spoken Catalan and Catalan culture was rudimentary and theoretical at best; at the very least I was respectful if largely ignorant of its finer points. When Marina and Jordi came to over to Lisbon for a long weekend in the spring of 2005 I resolved to take them and Claudia for a two day excursion into the Alentejo and, thanks to Sandra’s usual generosity towards me, we spent a couple of days in one of the corners of Portugal that I have grown to love the most. Tiago was someone more or less “of my age”, so to speak, whom I knew from the area; considerably younger in age than me – the truth be told –  however he radiated maturity well beyond his years leaving me looking like a silly child in comparison. Both his parents are Dutch and he had been brought up in the Alentejo .Everything about him seemed rooted, contemplated, uncomplicated and quite wholesome. Over the recent years I had come to know him and his Catalan girlfriend, Gloria, not intimately but well enough to know I warmed to them both a lot. At times I had suggested they look me up if ever they came to Lisbon but they had both made it clear that they had little intention of going into the city if they could possibly avoid it.

I no longer recall the exact details of how it was they had met but I believe it was in Catalunya when Tiago was either studying sculpture or taking a course to qualify as a farrier. The term for this skill and profession in French is Maréchal Ferrant and I’ve retained it because it once came up in conversation a few years before when we – my family – were there staying at Sandra’s along with Manuel Teixeira and his longtime other half Marianique Patissier. She was looking for the term in French and in fact it was Tiago who reminded her what it was… so, now that I think of it, in all probability he studied being a farrier in France and met Gloria when he was studying sculpture in Catalunya.

Either way, at some point he brought her back to live with him in the Monsaraz area. Gloria is from Girona and I had always been aware that she was Catalan…but I had never really thought about it. One of the many things that Tiago does around Monsaraz is to take people on lazy cruises over the vast expanse of the Alqueva dam in a barge that I seem to remember he had brought over from the Sado estuary. Marina, Jordi, Claudia and I had arranged to take a cruise with them and I arranged with Tiago that we should all meet at the dock. As it turned out, Gloria happened to have relatives over from Girona at that time who were also there at the docks when we arrived and I remember thinking our meeting rather surreal as Jordi, Gloria, her aunt, her younger cousin and Marina nattered away quite happily in Catalan on the banks of the Alqueva, behind them the dust and drying springtime brush and flora of the deepest Alentejo with Monsaraz for a backdrop. That, for me, was the potent first of several eye-opening instances that illustrated the pertinence and vitality of Catalan identity and the language that contributes to define it.

The second potent moment in this sense was ten or so months later – by which stage I was living in Barcelona – during a job interview.  The interview was conducted in Spanish; Montse Trench was interviewing me in perfect Castilian and I was replying to her questions in perfectly correct Spanish, albeit in my particular brand and lilt of Latin American pastiche. What was interesting to me though, throughout that half-hour we faced each other behind closed doors and across a table, was what I believed I perceived. I came to work with Montse for almost two and a half years and I can assure you that there is nothing slow about her in the least – on the contrary –  and I do not want  this to be inferred by the observations I am about to make. However, during the course of the interview, as she formulated her questions to me, there were moments – the slightest hesitancy perhaps measured not even in milliseconds – when I suddenly thought I could see the gears moving at the speed of light in her mind as she searched for a term in Castilian that most likely came naturally to her in Catalan. At some point I think I stopped listening properly to what it was she was asking me and began replying on auto-pilot as my mind exploded with the implications of what I had suddenly seen. Before me a person, like several million others, who’s day to day in all its personal and intimate aspects was handled entirely in a language quite different from the one we were communicating in. A moment of clarity! I said yes to everything, negotiated nothing and walked out of that meeting with the job and in a bit of a daze.

There is nothing shy or retiring about Marina and I believe it was she who first approached him in a crowded bar one night. The story goes that the dialogue went something along these lines:

“ Hi! I’m Marina!” ( a broad engaging smile on her part, as she lent over towards him) “ And who might you be?”

He might well have been propping up the bar for a while, morosely nursing a tepid beer, and turned towards her, still not quite sure if her comment might not have been directed to someone else.

“Me?” he winked back. “I’m Jordi. I’m a lawyer…and I’m on the dole. Are you quite sure you still want to carry on speaking with me?” This can only have been followed by an earnest laugh from Marina and what followed then, between them, was history – as they say – at least for a time… Even after their split-up a few years later they have remained close and tremendous friends, something that I find enviable. In a sense I always thought they complemented each other rather well and I found their break-up a pity.

The ten years and a bit that I have lived here I’ve seen much less of Jordi than I would have liked as there is much about him that I like a lot. Despite an immediate warmth when one sees him, his wicked wit and an endearing sense of outspoken, cheeky humour that suffers no fools, he is guarded beyond the first few paces and I have often felt that to meet him again after six months of not having seen him – for example – is in effect a regression to square one. He never seems to permit you to carry over from the last time with a bit of credit; at least that is how I feel it. But this might also be me… and who am I to judge? Look at me…

When I first moved here a decade ago he was incredibly accommodating, inviting me to join in jam sessions with him and his mates; perhaps having thought that I was more of an accomplished musician than I am, or was, due to the number of guitars and instruments he saw lying around the flat I shared with Mark and Barbs in Lisbon. He, on the other hand, is a gifted guitarist – the blues is his thing – and I’ve seen him play numerous times.

His day job is being a lawyer, I understand he takes it seriously and I do not doubt that he must be good at it. What exactly it involves I could not say…perhaps if I asked him one day. In any case, it is a job-job and he behaves accordingly. Valen, last night, told me a wonderful anecdote. Back when he and Mónica were still together and living in Fontanella, one afternoon after work Jordi rocked up for a beer and to say hello. He came up to the flat still wrapped tight in a dark suit and holding a briefcase in his right hand. He looked like he might have had a tough day in court. In he came and joined in the melee of various others who were there and the first thing he did was drop the  briefcase and take off his jacket. He had a beer and loosened his tie. Once he’d downed that beer he cracked open another one and off came the waistcoat. By the time that can was drained his tie had come off, he was rolling up his sleeves and reaching for another beer. Everyone was laughing and all the banter was good natured; Jordi seemed to be relaxing nicely in amongst a crowd he liked. Then someone asked him what he had been doing all day and what exactly was in his briefcase. He reached over, picked it up and handed it it over to, “Pedro”  – let us call him –  who was inquiring. “Pedro” took the smart black leather case, unzipped it and pulled out the totality of the contents. Nothing but that day’s copy of El Jueves. Rock on!