El Prat airport, to bursting. The liquids, the trays, take off your belt, throw away the bottle of water, the prison voice that tries to bring order: “Don’t pile up, go to the back belt.” Low cost and suspicion have crushed the verses of Cavafis, the Greek of Alexandria, about the beauty of the journey, much more delicious, more full of adventures and knowledge than the destination itself, until they became sticky mush. In the boarding queue, a man in his forties talks on his mobile about real estate on the Costa Sol, golf courses, auctions, joint ventures, investment funds… Identical journey with galactically distant destinations.
Chance places us in the same row of seats, separated by his girlfriend or friend, who is reading a yellowish edition of La hive, Cela’s best novel, about post-war squalor in Madrid. Someone should ruthlessly narrate The hive of the last decade in Spain, more or less from the brick to the inflationary post-pandemic, the motley of worker bees, drones and queens. The buzz of confusion.
the effervescent city
Malaga vibrates, but I don’t really know what I’m doing here or who I am in these compressed 24 hours. Another city, another hotel, another pillow, fat as a maritime signaling buoy. Before returning, making a break on the way to the airport, I ask the taxi driver to take me to Playa del Ángel to see it for five minutes, although there is not much to see beyond the docile sea, bathers and a few palm trees. Here, on this same dirty sand, General Torrijos was shot, together with 53 companions, on December 11, 1831, after they undertook the quixotic task of arriving in Malaga by ship from Gibraltar to encourage an insurrection in the south against the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. They fell into the bucket from an ambush (the Prado Museum preserves the painting in which Antonio Gisbert recreates the scene). Torrijos, hero of the war of independence, “a gentleman among the dukes, a heart of fine silver,” was shot in the back and on his knees, like traitors.
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Once again, the liberal dream truncated.
The best book of recent times on that convulsive period has been written by the novelist and historian Alfonso Mateo-Sagasta: Nation (Kingdom of Cordelia). With a revolutionary thesis that is placed in the crossfire: Spain did not exist before 1837. Nothing. Neither big nor small empire. Just a monarchy whose main reason of state was the defense of Catholicism.