Bombs and love under the more social aspect of the Sagrada Familia: "Gaudí would see the tourists and imagine Jesus expelling the merchants from the temple."

One year before the centenary of the birth of the genius Antoni Gaudí , the process of beatification for the artist appears to be underway. Shortly before his death, Pope Francis recognized the "heroic virtues" of the "architect of God" for his work on the Sagrada Familia . For now, as Jesús Bastante (Madrid, 1976), author of El aprendiz de Gaudí (The Apprentice of Gaudí) (La esfera de los libros), comments, "on April 14th he was declared venerable, which means he can be prayed to in private." "Gaudí was a man with a very profound mystical and religious life, which he captured in the temple," he adds.

Bastante, who describes himself as a "very frustrated art historian," is a writer and journalist who was responsible for Religious Information at ABC and Público. He is also the co-founder and current editor-in-chief of Religión Digital , a socio-religious information website, and coordinator of this section at elDiario.es .

The Madrid native draws inspiration for his book from 19th-century Barcelona , ​​a city expanding beyond its medieval walls, where the Sagrada Familia was built in the Ensanche district of the Cerdá Plan. It was in this setting that social unrest sparked by the city's labor movement during the Tragic Week, the attack on the Liceu, and the failed attack on General Arsenio Martínez Campos emerged.

Bastante creates a story that mixes fictional characters, such as the story's protagonist (Pau, the foundling ), with real-life figures, including Gaudí himself, his niece Rosa, Eusebio Güell, and the anarchist Paulino Pallás, who attempted to assassinate Martínez Campos.

"It's a plot that had been brewing in my head since 1990, the day of the World Cup final in Italy," he explains. The journalist recalls that in the 1970s and 1980s, the construction work on the Sagrada Familia and Park Güell was completely abandoned: "There were kids who turned the Basilica's San Bernabé tower into their tree house. They went there to smoke, drink, and watch the sunset," he comments. One day, he remembered that story, "although now you wouldn't be able to see the sea from the balcony of San Bernabé," and wondered who might fall in love in a place like that. His memoirs merged with research into Gaudí's life and the work on the Sagrada Familia. The author met his niece Rosetta and imagined the figure of Pau.

Gaudí's Apprentice is a love story set in a historical period, but the journalist explains that "it doesn't just deal with the Barcelona of that time." His work also addresses Gaudí's architecture, "which has a mystical and biblical component." " Gaudí doesn't make a damn straight line in the Sagrada Familia ," the author jokes. And he clarifies: "He seems to me to be the last great genius, the last great architect." We can't forget the movement of modernism, which includes the Catalan, "but he is very different from the modernists and did things that have never been done before."

For Bastante, there is a Barcelona before and after the Sagrada Familia and the Eixample district of the Cerdá Plan. "The reconstruction of the city also involves the reconstruction of the social groups that advanced during that period," the journalist explains. "The bourgeoisie wants to move to the Eixample district to abandon the old town, which they left abandoned, and migration is also heading there. It is becoming a modern city, and as in all changes in large cities, the arts are fundamental."

"Without Güell, Gaudí wouldn't have had the freedom and peace of mind to be himself."

The initial project by Francisco de Paula, the first architect commissioned to build the Sagrada Familia, was for a much smaller neo-Gothic church, "but Gaudí invented the Sagrada Familia upside down," Bastante emphasizes. "There are models in Reus and in the Basilica itself showing how he devised counterweights with small bags of shot to understand how he could create something much more curved, new, elongated; something that hadn't been done before," he continues.

The figure of Eusebio Güell was fundamental in Gaudí's career: "There is a bourgeoisie and patrons like Güell who provide money because they want to make the city grow and make it something completely new, and I think they succeed," Bastante notes. For the writer, Gaudí without Güell would not have had the freedom and peace of mind to be himself: "Güell is Gaudí's Médici. He understands this when the Catalan bourgeoisie saw La Pedrera and thought it was a Gruyère cheese." "Gaudí without Güell would have been something else," he concludes.

Bastante believes the city experienced a new beginning at the end of the 19th century: "The city moved forward with the Eixample towards the mountains, immigration arrived in Barcelona from different parts of Spain, as well as the children of those who returned from the American colonies, whose chances of recovering had already been lost by that time." He also emphasizes that a new church had not been built for centuries, "and that was fascinating."

"There is a moment of rupture with anarchism and socialism," the writer mentions. "Barcelona becomes the city of bombs, a fact that is linked to a country that is changing centuries and its way of understanding itself."

Gaudí's work captures the complicated situation resulting from the labor movement in Barcelona. When the Liceu bombing took place, at the hands of Santiago Salvador Franch, the architect included a complex sculpture on the Nativity Façade: The Temptation of Man. This work depicts a demon handing an Orsini bomb to a worker . "Given what happens in the novel, it's a real treat," Bastante reveals. "It's one of the images I knew I had to capture in the novel before I began writing. The development of the story allows me to place it in a place that I think is interesting."

"With the Sagrada Familia packed with tourists, I suppose Gaudí imagined the episode of Jesus expelling the merchants from the temple."

Construction of the Sagrada Familia began during the reign of Pope Leo XIII, best known for his writing of the first social encyclical, Rerum Novarum , "in which he defended the working conditions of workers." "It's quite likely that Gaudí had read it; he tried to move his workers' homes to a park on the Passion Façade side to provide better living conditions for his workers," Bastante emphasizes.

After Tragic Week, seven days in which Barcelona burned due to protests over the forced recruitment of reservists, Gaudí built the Sagrada Familia schools. "This was because the architect wanted to ensure that the children of the poor received an education that would prevent them from falling into violence and that sense of inequality between rich and poor," the writer explains.

Joaquim Mir painted The Cathedral of the Poor in 1898, and Bastante depicts it as such in his novel: "Gaudí didn't understand it as a place where you can't enter if you don't have an entrance. The poor could have a place of refuge, as is the case today in Bernini's colonnade in St. Peter's in the Vatican," the writer comments. The Sagrada Familia is an expiatory temple where the stones and the labor of the workers "serve to atone for the sins of a society." For Bastante, "Gaudí, in some way, wanted to take on the suffering of those whose only fault was having been born into the situation in which they were born."

Now, the Sagrada Familia is the cathedral of tourism . "It's also true that it's funded thanks to that," the author clarifies. "The Sagrada Familia's board of trustees dedicates a lot of money to social, cultural, and charitable works," he adds, "but the most realistic image is that of a poor person who can't enter the Sagrada Familia."

What would Gaudí think of the Tourists Go Home movement? "He would understand that money would have to be scraped together to finish the work," Bastante opines. "He himself went door to door asking for money. He financed part of the work out of his own pocket because the most important thing was to build the temple." Although the writer has a curious reflection: "He was a brutal reader of the Bible, so I suppose he would imagine the episode of Jesus expelling the merchants from the temple ."