Spain had the luck of Velázquez, of Zurbarán, of Murillo, of Goya, of Picasso. It is a country of brilliant Christ painters and rijosado bullfighters, of meninas and lap priests, donjuanes and matchmakers, and also of accounting ambitions. Warm land of poets, like Bécquer, the Machado, Cernuda or Hierro, and of wars made to fictionalize the pain of wounded or dead brothers, casual enemies of the same pain that they cause themselves.
Spain, a History that is told like a story, with 27 letters, and that is always lived, in bars and taverns, as if everything had happened yesterday. Galdós attentive, at the foot of the press, to narrate the deeds in his own way. Larra on the street to describe the suicide of every day. Hugh Thomas, with a distant perspective, to explain the Civil War. The Academics updating the dictionary, in case an ingenious neologism escapes.
Cervantes took charge of the crazy feats, with a place without name or stain, one-armed like Ramón María del Valle Inclán, a devastated Carlist grotesque. Quevedo laughed at the dreams and Calderón sang them. Literature for a country of brave people governed by a small military man, a soldier of the generals and Galicians, grown up under a canopy, as the Lord commands, omnipotent, tangled in necklaces and bundled up in skirts. Astute, austere and now absent, by the grace of God and those who seek to renew the Movement from its fallen remains. “To the rotten place, to the rotten place,” some will shout. Spain of stamp, currency and stamp, of aristocratic subscriptions in the form of obols, monarchs with secret pockets, tips unreferenced by the Treasury, resources almost like a circus or a vanity fair, of the lalandas, the manoletes, among impossible quotes from Rafael El Gallo or frogs from Cordobés, tasks in the bullfighting department or in Las Ventas. Almost everything fits on the grill of El Escorial, to be burned, simply because it defines us, like a frank inquisitorial failure.
Everything seems like a bull, or paella, or pasodoble, or under the sun, or almighty lords, chiefs with the right of pernada. Charanga, tambourine and topics. Everything appears to be folk songs or dancers, essential flowers, or dancers, with palms that fly from palms; gentlemen with an onion layer – who cries with Nana for Miguel Hernández -, and a sword – like that of the Cid glossed by another Don Ramón, and Galician, Menéndez and Pidal -.
Spain crazy, fun framed on a blue background, where a carnation is a disheveled rose. Spain verbena by Maruja Mallo, red and modern; red cardinals; red marquises, never red; blood and sand, so that the brave cattle react and run after the red on white attire of the San Fermines, and the cuckolds feel sorry for not being the ones who bully their women’s loved ones in a tomatina, under a bull of Osborne in mourning. Black Spain, crimes of passion for Margarita Landi, to be published in the red-headed El Caso, which no longer exists, nor is the blue shirt of Eugenio Suárez, its editor, preserved.
Beautiful ladies, dark-skinned, with eyes of wisdom, mothers and cigar-making cármenes, flushed. In everything better than the sixties Swedish invaders. Male and olé gentlemen. Fun inbetweens. Imprecise tolerance.
A Lorca Spain, buried from itself, in an eternal ditch, thirty-six, as a victim of a mortal sin, self-absorbed in which lie Seneca, Marcial, Averroes, Maimónides, Viriato, the Great Captain or Blas de Lezo.
Someday we will be free, like in Cádiz, in 1812, or we will discover ourselves in loincloths in Atapuerca, with vestiges of some Genoese absent of money and eager for colonial assets, and we will return to painting in Altamira, to begin to know ourselves as Spanish and humans, and understand that to love Spain you have to taste yourself, know yourself and read the Arabs in Córdoba or Granada with their alphabet, their words. We must do it without fear, as if we were ourselves after eight hundred years of crossed genetics. We have to re-history ourselves so as not to expel the Jews, or to stop others inventing for us what we already knew, to know ourselves as Europeans. Or simply to stop denying ourselves.
San Juan de la Cruz, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Madariaga, Severo Ochoa and many others, perhaps they have left to return one day to reinvent a Spain in which Catalans, Basques, Andalusians, Galicians, Mallorcans, Canarians fit… How many are there? that universal and mestizo culture, Phoenician, Celtic, Roman, Visigothic, gypsy… that slips in Iberian ham oil or praises Nélida Piñón, daughter of emigration as Spanish as exile, in the Princess of Asturias Awards for the best.
Reclamation of freedoms inspired by immature, infertile but intentional laws, aimed at arriving in Switzerland disguised as nuns or alligators. The street belongs to us and to the beer lovers thrown onto our beaches.
Republican kingdom of passionaries and Pasionaria, red from a red woman, from exploits and officials. We are Rosalía de Castro, and we are also the most sexist of the countries consecrated to Mary. We are rosaries of zambranos, a little donkeys by Platero, roses corrected ad nauseam by Juan Ramón Jiménez, zenobias we are of knowledge exalted with Vicente Risco to the stars of Tagore. We are levitatable like Teresa. We are brave enough to defend empires that never belonged to us, perhaps just to try to keep the sun from setting, dizzy as we were from turning around worlds in search of species and adventures with elcanos, exalted by swineherds who announced cultures, worlds and seas. We are Borgias with immense double chins and worldly orgies. Swordsman archaeologists who sowed words that grew inspired to censure their own misdeeds and even their successes.
How much History, big, capitalized like errors, bold, incandescent, usurping, but enormous. How many treasures we conquered for the German and Italian bankers, the English pirates, the French soldiers, the Dutch merchants… As if the natives were not enough to plunder goods and values without going to Flanders to see how they painted guilds. How much culture spread of eñes have we given to the world. Also how much art in stone by Mateo or Gaudí raised to the sky, or framed in royal painting collections with Rembrams and Titians, how many other Quevedo tasks of calderons with boats to navigate inkwells, illuminate incunabula or trace beautiful texts in Alfonso’s School of Translators X The Wise.
How efforts are made to till lands, advance seas, and enjoy cereals and wines and fish to taste. A Spaniard drinks life, celebrates it in food and feeds it with bread, while History drowns in the fumes of the longed-for Havana, in Buenos Aires memoranzas, almost tangible, in intentional or illiterate ignorance, the result of insufficient schools and teachers. bright. Sometimes it’s better not to remember. Intelligence, intuition, mischief, joy, bluffs save us; They redeem our strength, they excuse us from the few recognized wise men and they dress us in the beautiful wrinkles of Zara or Desigual or Domínguez. Blessed Amancio, Ortega of the Spanish court. Bimbas and lolas, showcases of the best and possible Spain.
We are from the lineage of nomadic peoples, we came from the African genetic factory, which we almost kissed with our English Gibraltar, which we want in Melilla and Ceuta, which we protect and which we let go in green, not red, as in an hourglass that an empire was founded. The Pyrenees, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment separate us from the Europe to which we belong. We lost the best of ourselves in exchange for the bad business of wars, and in barter we found clients to sell sol gualda at a bargain price.
We are linked to America by the Atlantic and blood, red sister, the knowledge of the Portuguese seas, the luck of knowing how to shout “Land!” when looking at a kind of prolonged China. We gave them Christianity, language and the martyrdom of conquering those who let themselves be loved in exchange for some mirrors.
On the other side, always, the Phoenician, Greek, and Roman Mediterranean. The Sea of Serrat, an essential part of our cultural and nutritional diet. Waves of relief in the form of tourist income.
Beyond, Plus Ultra, Philippines, forgotten and sad, like the last ones.
Between each other, we submitted to the Roman, we defeated the Turk, we converted indigenous people, the English and the storm defeated us, we expelled the Jews, we defeated the French, we were governed by German kings, monarchs sick with themselves, crazy of love, Napoleons in a bottle, traitors, foreign swarms of Austrians and Bourbons, who turned out to be more Spanish than ourselves, and whom the people fanned with swings of inelegant combs, at the mercy of the interests of barbarian advisors. We are a transition from a forty-year post-war regime and centuries of alternations.
We conquered Greco and Bosch, we gave birth to Miró, we bathed with Sorolla, we tolerated Dalí with his crazy finery and his time melted into Francoism.
We are Romanesque, baroque politically, neoclassical through and through, but above all we are mystical clay sung to the sound of guitars, already disencumbered by inquisitorial fears, we presume to be disbelieving anti-clericals, we truly were in procession and candle before the grays.
Spain, lottery and aquinielada, a country full of soccer, cards and bread. Citizen followers of Santanas, Angelesnieto, Ocañas, Induraíns, Sánchezvicarios, Nadales, Gasoles, Alonsos or Iniestas, individual motorcycles, classist rackets, bicycles and the ball, until it was possible to drink in the World Cup, finally a team, the red one. . He who resists, like Cela, wins the Nobel, Parcheesi and a navy – for oil yachts or indecipherable Russians – we don’t care about winning the South African World Cup, the Mus, or the Tute.
Come children of San Luis, come Moors along the Camino de Santiago. Come windmills or winds, including the Plá tramontanas. Crisis come. New filibusters come. Revenge and distrust. United the dissensions, we will defeat ourselves again; At least in pride we are brave, and now modern, and university students around the world, and daring, and inveterate romantics, Latins in short from one border to the other, with an Espronceda, and with a hundred cannons on each side. Of course there are more bands and more cannons in front.
In Spain, some say, you live in Paradise, at least those some. Tragicomic happiness is ours, of garcías and martínez in mourning, of black taxi and red stripe. Zaragatera but not sad, of blood and sand, of marchionesses and marujas, of Píquer world trunks and cardboard suitcases or the Mexican one of Robert Capa. Reddish Spain, divided into two or seventeen, but sisterly and photogenic. Hatred is classist, mutual and kills without remorse, like television gossip or canapé lunches and remorseless diplomacy, of ballroom dancing to music by Falla or Rodrigo. A country of zarzuela and wonderful voices like Alfredo Kraus, Domingo or Carreras, framed in a big way, Caballé style, Arteta style.
I have said what I have said and if not everything or everyone fits, at least you can sense the flag. Let’s be Spanish and normal, the first thing is of honor. The rest is humor from Mingote or Gila, or Tip, or Berlanga, the kind that helps us live without Guernicas and portrays us in Don Quixote. Olé and Long live Spain! Red or yellow, monarchist or republican, blood and sand. Okay
Alberto Barciela
Journalist
GOOD DAY
