Barcelona Metropolis

Barcelona’s La Model prison closed its doors on 8 June 2017. It would have celebrated the 113^th anniversary of its opening the very next day. The evolution of this prison runs parallel to the history of the city of Barcelona and the political, social and urban evolution of Catalonia. A small but very significant part of what took place within its walls is now revealed in a documentary comic book entitled Històries de la Model [Stories of La Model Prison], published by Barcelona City Council and featuring a script by the journalist Jordi de Miguel and drawings by the illustrator Susanna Martín.

In the journalistic reportage style, this non-fiction comic book combines the prison’s chronology with the experiences of people who knew the facility well and who give the most human and emotional side to the story. The scriptwriter acts as the unifying thread and, notebook in hand, visits the old cells with the historian César Lorenzo. In contrast, he introduces the voices of four men and women who spent time in La Model at different times and who recount the stories referred to in the title.

One of the book’s strengths is the choice of these witnesses, who represent the different types of inmates who ended up in the prison. The lawyer August Gil Matamala became familiar with the prison as a child because he used to visit his father, a Republican imprisoned in 1945. A “staunch anti-Francoism sentiment” budded in little August, which he channelled by secretly joining the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) and later opening a law firm for imprisoned workers. The smell of prison will stay with him forever: “The smell of staleness, sweat and fear”.

Gil Matamala sparks discussion on the subjects of exile, the trade union struggle, the court martials and torture, while historian Anna Sallés recalls the student demonstrations, the protests of the early 1960s and the role played by the Franco regime’s female victims of reprisal. La Model was designed to incarcerate men, but Sallés’ experiences show that this was not always the case. Her stay there, while her partner, the novelist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, was in the men’s wing, allows her to evoke the “striking class differences” that existed depending on the origin of the female prisoners.

For his part, the witness Josep Ferrándiz, a clandestine member of the Communist Party of Spain (International), reveals another part of the story: the merciless torture sessions perpetrated by Franco’s police at the Via Laietana police station. Ironically, for Ferrándiz, leaving this place where they acted with no guarantees of coming out alive and going to La Model was “a paradoxical kind of liberation”, although a climate of “impunity prevailed” in the prison.