I celebrate with relief that the president of Mexico has crossed the Atlantic to clean a stubborn stain that tried to tarnish the unbreakable multifaceted relationship between Mexico and Spain. Reason has triumphed over unreason, common sense over foolishness, and a Rocinante ponytail over Babieca’s drool. The journey initiates the hygiene demanded by temperance and the cold reality imposed by sanity: apparently, the opportunistic fever of sending a little letter with outdated demands of populist arrogance not only put the postman in a bind (who tried to contact a Habsburg in a Bourbon palace) but also the schizophrenic sender of the missive (now idle in a hammock) who denies his Cantabrian roots by exaggerating the broken language of the tropics.
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The transatlantic journey is also an invaluable stain in the mirror of these grim times. Since the Bishop of Rome has bravely and serenely defined that the threat of Armageddon rests in the hands of lying, pedophile, and putrid tyrants, I celebrate Spain’s initiative to gather those who lean towards democratic relief (with nuances and stumbles) because we know that democracy is a difficult gerund to conjugate, but at least for today it rises as a multicolored banner against the black and ridiculous labarum of murderous imbecility and ignorance. Against grim times, allies. Against the idiot who quotes Tarantino as if it were Gospel and the incurable mythomaniac imbecile who instantly contradicts everything he says, and against the chubby false rabbi who extends his six-fingered claws, thirsty to execute himself the synonymous horrors that scourged his ancestors… against all that limpid Evil, I celebrate the multicolored stain of those who today try to avenge Don Quixote’s lost battle against Sansón Carrasco on the beaches of Barcelona.
For not a few weeks, a thick black oil slick has been poisoning the waters of the Gulf of Mexico (not America), and I celebrate that today the various lies with which the Mexican government tried to deny the slick have been clarified. They officially said it was a sinister spill caused by a ghost ship, with a neoliberal flag and a captain with a peg leg and an eye patch; the unspeakable governor of Veracruz assured that it was only “a few drops” that in reality did not justify the slick, which was attacked by heroic citizens who tried to clean the slick that in any case permeates public administration: the cyclical, daily, and incurable stain of lies.
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For a long time, I have lived convinced that La Mancha, written by Cervantes as a dreamlike region where there was a place whose name he did not wish to remember, is probably the geographical La Mancha where I have dreamed in Consuegra and cried in El Toboso, where the heat of Puerto Lápice chilled me and my children mistook me for a giant there in the cradle of a cabaret singer… but for many annual readings of that, the best story ever told, I live and read convinced that Cervantes did no more than a supreme play on words, for he also refers to “the typographical mark” that ancient printers and modern editorial design programs call “the Box”.
Sancho and Quixote, on their donkey and Rocinante, step out of the palpable geography of La Mancha, but also out of the typographical mark. They are characters who know they are printed… Centuries before virtual reality and The Purple Rose of Cairo! Centuries before Seinfeld and electronic games! Our heroes and models step off the page to be read as mirrors, and in doing so, even at the risk of inexplicable madness, they strive to improve us, for they fight against all Evil, seek to help the needy, turn all deserving muses into queens and empresses, and in righting wrongs and breaking a lance for the Good of all, they leave us an invaluable breath in the saliva of will: to read… to read is to dream… to dream in writing and in silent verb before the ungrateful nebula of those who cannot read a single cloud, nor a single child’s smile, nor the slightest stain of hope that exalts the white cloth of Good.