Manuel Garriga
Dark routine of a spare parts dispatch, tinged with countless afternoons of loneliness and boredom, similar to that of other businesses that also make a living by managing common goods and selling them to the public. Doors, drawers, notebooks open a thousand times, calls, visits and conversations, endless gestures turned into rituals by force of use, repeated ad nauseam.
A whole universe, small in its natural dimension but infinite in its minimal reality, that breaks one day and becomes extinct. Sometimes it even transcends the purely commercial: it has become something else. In history, perhaps?
History - a piece of it - that is silent. It is the same Time, stopped in infinity of pieces, all equal and different in their uniformity, incoherent in their own multiplicity. It is Life itself, in thousands of customer files filled out by hand with careful calligraphy where the incidents of each GM product that was born in Detroit, crossed the vast ocean and came to live on the shore of a toy sea are detailed step by step .
There hundreds, thousands of vehicles of all kinds formalized their birth certificates: elegant Chevrolet sedans, majestic Cadillac limousines, industrious GMC trucks and hard-working vans, tanned marine engines, even some conceited Corvette, sporting its fiberglass skin as an actor boasts. Hollywood from his umpteenth facial ironing.
All of them have their basic signs of identity in that room, their link with the mother house, the uterus to which they return to replenish those fragments of physiognomy that are losing or wearing out.
Sometimes it is a superficial wound - the broken pilot, a bent lever, some bleeding hose - but it can be more serious: heart attack, the faulty carburetor that needs to be replaced; or major surgery, butt transplant, differential ...
Then the pharmacy-store supplies the workshop-hospital, the patient requests an appointment and is intervened. Everything is duly noted in the corresponding entry, as a formula. “21-9-1949: a set of points for Mr. Soler's Buick; 30-11-1955: left rear wing for Massons Hermanos Chevrolet; 18-3-1963: four springs for the GMC de Vila SA van. " And so on for years, with no more variations in the routine than the strictly essential ones. Until the last day. Until the end.
Now, all these tabs will no longer be consulted by anyone. Neither are these manuals a thousand times tampered with, worn by use, with the edges of the pages illegible. And that repertoire of parts list, an arcane for anyone other than the dependent experts -human appendages of the establishment-, suddenly becomes a pile of useless paper. The computer revolution was on the doorstep, except for a primitive microfiche reader, which took cold sweats to get used to, sleeping in a corner of the worn counter.
Pigs and heroes
There is something funereal about this suddenly frozen activity, so inexplicable that perhaps it makes no sense. The books, the files, the files, the telephone, the cash register… Like glasses piously removed from the corpse next to the coffin. Or the empty and silent stage of a theater before being demolished. Faced with this still life one only manages to wonder why?
There is no answer but another question, where does all this mass of steel, rubber, aluminum, brass, copper and ceramics atomized in a myriad of specific and concrete units go that will never be able to fulfill the function for which they were created? To the garbage. Paradoxical treasure: once coveted, now despised. Nobody takes care of him.
The cost of transportation, storage, extensive sorting work, and other reasons make it impossible. It does not matter that two hundred spark plugs die before they have fired a single spark, that a dozen fenders without any dent in their pristine chrome finish are melted, or that this small block die a virgin in anonymous martyrdom. The sacrosanct laws of the free market are unappealable.
And what will all these mechanical orphans do without their umbilical cord? Most likely, dragging themselves for some time based on tricks and bungling, hoping that chance will put in their way those vital pieces without which it will be impossible for them to continue. Most of them are destined to run, sooner or later, the sad fate of scrapping, to be thrown away in a graveyard of elephants with wheels together with their fellows, serving as carrion for the survivors.
Because this amalgam of metals, fibers and fluids harmoniously and ingeniously coordinated to become the self-propelled entity that we call car It is, in a way, like the pig: everything is used. Especially when it is dead.
The scene happened in Barcelona, but it could have been anywhere in the world: Auckland, Quito, Seattle, Johannesburg or Lyon. The Official History of the Automobile, this one that is written in large characters, takes place in the immense factories, in the elegant salons, on the glittering race tracks and on the glossy pages of illustrated magazines. But your everyday life it depends on other agents who do not receive merits or cups or medals or appear in the newspapers.
They are the anonymous heroes who feed the guts of the system: mechanics, salespeople, transporters, shop assistants, storekeepers ... some of them putting into their task the same passion as if they were official pilots. "I've spent my whole life here. I don't know what I'm going to do now, although I don't care ... " says one of them when lowering, for the last time, the blind while hiding a furtive tear.
When such a place closes its doors for good, we too die a little. The difference is that, in this case, no one will compose a requiem for the salvation of their metallic souls.
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Peninsular General Motors
The North American General Motors corporation settled in Barcelona in 1932 -the year after the proclamation of the Second Republic-, following in the footsteps of its great rival, the Ford Motor Company, and like the latter after having tried its fortune in Andalusia .
The Malaga assembly plant only remained in operation for nine months. After a short-lived visit to Madrid, General Motors Peninsular ended up locating its facilities at 433 Calle Mallorca, next to the Sagrada Familia, where there is currently a shopping center.
Thousands of cars and trucks with 4 and 6-cylinder engines, mounted in the CKD regime, were to leave those ships. (parts imported from the original plants and assembled at the destination by local labor), and especially industrial vehicles, a segment in which it became quite strong. Its 3,4-liter Chevrolet trucks were the most popular on the market in the Republican era, to which must be added the GMC, Bedford and Blitz that it also sold.
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Its intense activity led to the opening of a spare parts dealer and distributor in the city center with competitions for the entire country. As a result of the civil war, its structure disintegrated and GM had to collect candles. With the arrival of peace there was no way to make up for lost time. The first Franco regime was still hostile to the North American presence, and it would not manufacture its products in Spain again until the start-up of the Figueruelas plant in 1982, where the first Opel Corsa came from. The Aguilar stores on Avenida Diagonal, which had remained open even during much of the war, when the manufacture of vehicles had already ceased, were the last vestige of the historical presence of General Motors in our country.
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PS Paradoxically, shortly after writing this text, the material described was recovered at the last minute in extremis thanks to the intense efforts carried out by the American Car Club de Catalunya, which kept all the technical information (files, lists, catalogs, spare parts books, etc.) for its file, while the rest (parts and spare parts) It was acquired by a specialized workshop in Terrassa.
