It’s also a good idea to imagine people we know – whether in person or from the TV or radio – carrying a Ruger GP-100 or a Glock 17. We’ve all been infuriated by someone, even over dinner, and so from now on, I’m going to thank EU heaven that some of the people I’ve run into weren’t armed. You have only to imagine certain irascible right-wingers being allowed to carry revolvers or, indeed, Aznar, Sarkozy or the infernal Kaczyński twins, to name but four, or should that be three, mean-looking dudes. Brussels forfend.
(2007)
No Narrative Shamefn1
Essentially the man is a bore, to judge by the videos in which he appears accompanied by other people, whether at summit meetings with fellow political leaders or at more frivolous social events. He behaves exactly the same in both situations, except that in the former he always pretends to be the host (even, say, in Canada) and in the latter he probably is the host, at least when the event takes place in Italy, but even when he’s merely a guest, he has to dominate. Whenever he gets together with other heads of state, it’s obvious that, deep down, he feels like an intruder, and it’s precisely his jaunty, carefree manner – as I said, just as if he were the host or the guide wherever he happens to be – that betrays his deep-seated insecurity; it’s as if he feared that at any moment a steward might come up to him and whisper discreetly in his ear that there has been a terrible mistake and he must leave the room, the office, the lunch, the summit, the ball. His unwavering contentment and self-confidence are excessive, like a phrase underlined in red. They may appear to be spontaneous, almost involuntary, but they’re not: he has to make a constant effort (diluted only by habit) and, of course, he is always playing a part. His crazed (because permanent) smile, his jokes, his clowning, the way he embraces people and slaps them on the back, his forwardness, his hyperactivity – as trivial as it is superfluous – are all pure acts of will. It’s as if, at every moment, he were saying (to his political colleagues, to the cameras, to the photographers, to the viewers and above all to himself): ‘See how at ease I am, how well I handle myself, how I intrigue, how easily I fit into this world of global decision-making.’ The man himself doesn’t quite believe it, in fact he doesn’t believe it at all, which is why he has to make it absolutely clear that he is completely in his element.
He thinks that his friendliness (which is how he interprets it) brings him enormous benefits: in his own eyes he is captivating, irresistible, persuasive; he does not dare, however, to think of himself as sexually seductive. He uses friendliness, or so he thinks, as a means of acquiring things and of convincing other people of still more things, even people more powerful than him. And were his powerful colleagues not, in the main, rather dim (they give off very little light, managing to generate at most a faint penumbra), they would realize that this professional warmth is only Berlusconi’s way of asking permission, of asking forgiveness, of craning his neck to ensure that no one obscures his face in the photo. I understand that for a while in his youth he was a crooner, or cantante confidenziale (as they say in Italian), who entertained the rich on cruises, or some such thing. As we know, such artistes, however famous they might be (and he was not), are, in the minds of the rich, much closer to the servant class than they are to the guests, and if my information is correct, he found it a useful training in how to break away and distance himself from the stewards and the waiters (when he’s seen with them now, he may seem the soul of affability, but, deep down, he loathes them and tries to keep them at arm’s length, for fear of contamination) and to mix instead with the more foolish and more gullible tycoons, those most susceptible to flattery. He has no qualms when it comes to flattery, sycophancy, or even obsequiousness. You might say that he has much in common with the old-style caretakers or porters who used to abound in Franco’s Spain and who have still not entirely vanished: the kind who kowtow to the owners and to the wealthier tenants, but treat delivery men and servants like dirt.
This mentality is always a front for resentment. If such a person also has a terrible fear of appearing ridiculous, then the individual in question can prove dangerous, as could this man behind his façade of jokey cordiality and, one might almost say, ‘kindliness’, if kindness – even in caricatured form – were not completely absent from his nature. The fact that he is occasionally moved or touched is irrelevant; such emotions are within the reach of any simpleton, and are not necessarily a sign of either kindness or compassion. It’s incomprehensible really that anyone, far less an entire country, could have been taken in by him; it’s incomprehensible that he should have been elected with an absolute majority, but then the same thing has happened many times before and in many countries. Mysteries. Or is it simply that people don’t notice, don’t pay attention, but look and listen only distractedly, the consequence perhaps of a televisual way of looking and listening? This man is unscrupulous, but in the most real and radical sense of the word: he isn’t like those many other people who know that scruples exist, but choose not to bother with them; he doesn’t know that they exist and so never thinks of them, not even as something to be dismissed as useless, stupid, costly or annoying. He has never rejected them for the simple reason that they are beyond his imagination and have never been a part of his thinking, let alone his values. So alien are they to him that when he notices them in someone else, he takes them as a sign of weakness and judges that person to be feeble or docile and therefore capable of being pushed around.
Most of us are defenceless against such people, because we are ill-equipped to deal with anyone as tiresome and insistent (a bore who cannot be still for a moment, the kind of man to whom one often says ‘Yes’ purely in order to get rid of him, to interrupt his chatter and shut him up), someone apparently so agreeable and even affectionate, and yet who, at the same time, never abides by any rules or regulations. He has no rules to break, no principles to betray. He will never experience the feeling that he has gone too far or exceeded his authority or transgressed, although he might pretend to harbour such feelings, because he has noticed them in other people and learned how to copy them. However, the most difficult thing is this: almost no one is qualified to deal with a man who never feels any kind of shame, either personal, public, political or aesthetic. Nor any kind of narrative shame. He simply doesn’t know the meaning of the term.
(2006)
All in Our Imagination
The dead are everywhere. Some have gravestones on which their names are engraved, others have nothing. Many are buried in cemeteries and churches, many beneath tarmac and in ditches and in fields, or wherever they happened to fall. There is probably no city or inhabited landscape that does not harbour human remains in its depths. Unaware of their presence, we trample them daily and lose no sleep over them. During all wars, communal graves are dug and bodies buried in great haste, just as they are during times of plague and major disasters. The seas, rivers and lakes also all contain corpses, for not every corpse floats to the surface. And now that cremation has become fashionable in our societies, the ashes of those who were once men and women are scattered who knows where. If we really believed that the dead did turn in their graves, every step we took would be sure to disturb someone.
Religions, which believe that the soul alone persists, are very contradictory in their custom of venerating the remains of the dead. Churches in Spain are full of the supposed relics of saints – a tibia, a femur, a skull, an arm untouched by corruption, a complete shrunken mummy – before which, over the centuries, the faithful have prostrated themselves, not knowing, as people are only now discovering, that most of those sacred remains in fact belonged to animals or, at best, to private individuals who lived in a very different age from that known by each martyr or saint. A religion like Catholicism, which believes in the resurrection of the flesh in some unearthly place, should care little about what happens to the bodies they so despise. Non-believers – of that religion or any other – should care even less. When someone dies, he ceases to exist except in memory; he is no longer there nor c
an he hear us, and only the habit of speaking to him and wondering what he would think or feel about this or that – a habit that may persist for a long time or, indeed, never cease – justifies our visiting the place where he was laid and addressing him through the headstone, as many characters in John Ford films do with great feeling. But why bother, why go to a cemetery or visit a grave when we can ‘speak’ to the memory of the dead person in our own home or hear them answer us in dreams from which we wake feeling slightly troubled, half-sad and half-contented.
Attributing to someone’s remains the desire to be in one place or another or to lie beside their loved ones can only be explained as superstition or as a ‘literary reflex’ or as a form of religiosity even in those who claim to have no religious beliefs, but clearly do: it implies a belief that there is something beyond death and, even more disturbing, something that is contained inside the corpse. We all fantasize about such things, even when it comes to inanimate objects. A few years ago, I saw in the side window of an old shop two polychrome wooden figures. I took a fancy to one of them and went in to buy it. It was a kind of Hindu aide-de-camp dressed in a really lovely uniform. I took it home, but spent the whole day thinking about how I had separated him from the far more conventional and rather uninteresting Scottish piper who had kept him company in that narrow shop window for who knows how many years. And while I was engaged in thinking this nonsense, it occurred to me, too, that perhaps this was precisely what they both wanted, to be free of each other, because they were such an ill-matched couple. However, the fear that they might feel lonely got the better of me, and the following morning, I went back to the shop and bought the piper, even though I didn’t want him at all.
The same puerile idea, if you’ll forgive the comparison, lies behind the current obsession in Spain for recovering bones, only the bones of those who died in the Civil War, mind, not those of any other, even though Spain has had its fair share of wars. It’s a perfectly respectable puerile idea and one that I understand – how could I not, when I’ve just confessed to one even more puerile – but if we start personifying those who are no longer persons and attributing desires to skeletons and remains, then one can just as easily imagine that perhaps those same remains have no desire to be disturbed or disinterred or moved, nor to be separated from the other unfortunates who died with them seventy or more years ago. According to these imaginings of ours – because they are ours and not theirs – how can anyone be sure that what remains of the person who was García Lorca wouldn’t prefer to stay alongside those of the teacher and the banderilleros who accompanied him in his final hours and who, perhaps, cheered him and gave him courage? I don’t know. An uncle of mine was murdered by militiamen in Madrid during the Civil War when he was only seventeen or eighteen. A victim of the losing side, his body has never been found and it’s not known where he was buried. As far as I’m aware, neither my mother nor her other siblings went to any great pains to find him, and it wasn’t the fact of not knowing where his body lay that caused them such grief and sorrow, but knowing that he had died in the flower of his youth and without a trial and for no reason. I’ve never spoken to them about it, but they might think it best not to move him or separate him from the young female friend and fellow student who was walking down the street with him when they were arrested and who met the same fate. They died together, comforting each other; may their bones, wherever they may be, continue to lie together.
(2008)
The Weekly Return to Childhood
The Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante loathes football. This could perhaps be explained by Cuba having little tradition of playing the sport, but Cabrera Infante’s more than twenty-five years of living in England rather gives the lie to that. I remember his furious response to the tragedy at the Heysel Stadium. For once taking a different standpoint to Nabokov, who was a goalkeeper during his time at Cambridge University and always enjoyed watching matches on TV, Cabrera Infante did not blame the Liverpool fans, but the sport itself: ‘That dreadful game,’ he said, ‘provokes violence because it is itself violent: it’s played with the feet, and there are few more violent actions than kicking someone.’ On the other hand, football has not prospered in the United States because it’s considered too slow and dull, a lady’s game. Indeed, when I taught for a few months at the all-female Wellesley College, the preferred sport was, to my great surprise, that of Di Stéfano. Of course, that could have been the influence of Nabokov, who passed through there in the 1950s and perhaps started the tradition.
There is no more agonizing sport when the game itself proves agonizing. More than that, in my own particular case, I have to say that it is one of the few things that elicits exactly the same response from me now as it did when I was ten years old and still a mere savage; it’s a genuine weekly return to childhood. I had a real shock about a month ago: having no set-top box on my television, I had to follow the final match of the Spanish league on the radio, as I used to do in the post-Civil War years and even beyond. Perhaps that was what drew me back so powerfully to the wildest days of my childhood, but the fact is that when the match was over, my Barcelona-supporting publisher phoned me up with the Barça anthem playing in the background, all ready to make the kind of playful jokes we exchange by the hundred every month. And I told him in deadly seriousness that not only would I never allow him to publish any more of my books, I also doubted I would ever set foot in Barcelona again (and Barcelona is a city I love and where I have lived), nor, of course, would I ever set foot in Tenerife.fn1 Out came the hooligan that all football fans carry within us.
Luckily, I got over it after a few hours – but that’s how long it took – because there is a curse on football that is also the salvation of players, trainers and fans left downcast by a defeat. It is a game in which it is not enough just to win, you have to win every time, every season, every tournament, every game. A writer, an architect or a musician can rest a little after having written a great novel, designed a marvellous building or made an unforgettable record. They can choose to do nothing for a time or at least do something less important. Among the first group, which is the one I am most familiar with, some have been deemed to be good right up until their death, thanks to one estimable work written fifty years before. In football, on the other hand, there is no resting, no relaxing, because having an amazing track record or having won the title the previous year counts for little. It is never over; footballers are required (and the players require this of themselves too) to win the next match as well, as if they were always starting from zero or nil, as they do at the beginning of every game. Unlike other activities in life, in sport (but especially in football), you don’t accumulate or hoard anything, despite the rooms full of trophies and the ever more important statistics. Having been the best yesterday doesn’t count today, let alone tomorrow. Past joy is as nothing compared to present anxiety, you cannot warm yourself on pleasant memories or on the satisfaction of past achievements, nor, of course, on the gratitude of the fans for the joy you brought them two weeks ago. On the other hand, sadness and indignation are equally short-lived, since this can, from one day to the next, be replaced by euphoria and sainthood. Perhaps that is why football is the sport, as Cabrera used to say, that provokes most violence, not because of all that kicking, but because of the anxiety it arouses. One invaluable aspect, however – which tends not to occur elsewhere in life – is that it also provokes forgetting, which is tantamount to saying that it never provokes rancour, something you learn only when you reach adulthood.
(1992)
Why Almost No One Can be Trusted
When you think about it or look back or remember, you will probably find that you know hardly anyone who does not claim to place some rather impersonal and abstract ideal or entity above his or her relationships with other people. There is a particular form of words that is repeated spontaneously in all kinds of situations, and not only is it accepted, it generally gives rise to expressions of praise and admiration. The person say
ing it is usually greeted with applause and seen as an example of commitment, self-abnegation, altruism and even loyalty. It’s just as likely to be heard, with variations naturally, in the mouths of footballers, politicians and guerrillas, and, of course, in the mouths of nationalists and clerics of any religion, whose raison d’être it is. I, on the other hand, find it a disquieting, not to say aberrant thing to say, and it immediately makes me distrust the person using it in any one of its infinite varieties. The form of words in question always claims that something, usually something that does not exist – or is, at most, ungraspable, intangible, amorphous or invisible – is ‘above’ everything else and, naturally, above other people: God or the Church, Spain, Catalonia or Euskal Herria, the company, the party, ideology, the State, the revolution, communism, fascism, the capitalist system, justice, the law, the language, this or that institution, this school, this newspaper, this bank, the Crown, the Republic, the Army, a name, this or that TV channel, a particular brand, Barcelona football club or Real Madrid, my family, my principles, my country. Anything, from the grandiose to the trivial, can be deemed to be ‘above’ mere people, and those who espouse that belief have no qualms about sacrificing or betraying individuals in the name of what they consider to be ‘sacred’ or ‘the cause’, whether it be an ideal, a chimera or, more likely, a mere disembodied fantasy.
There is almost no difference between what Islamist suicide bombers shout at the moment prior to death (‘God is great’, I think it is) and the first of Christianity’s Ten Commandments (‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’, at least it was when I studied it). The rest are variants or copies of that absolutist affirmation, applied to whatever happens to tickle the fancy of the idiot of the moment, from ‘Everything for the Fatherland’, which may or may not still be found inscribed above the doors of Spanish army barracks, to the ‘Bolivarian Socialist Revolution’, or whatever it is that Hugo Chávez calls his totalitarian project in Venezuela, and every other possible variation in between: ‘the ancestral Basque people’, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Deutschland über alles’, ‘the great Russian fatherland’, or the Treasury Department, The Times, Le Monde, Manchester United, Juventus, the Monarchy, the Constitution, the BBC, the Papacy, the Cultural Revolution, and not forgetting, of course, ‘the sovereign people’, and the name of just about any multinational or local company.