Celeste, the tax inspector written by screenwriter Diego San José and played by actress Carmen Machi, said it: everyone’s expenses, their invoices, explain your life better than any psychologist. In fact, expenses on a psychologist also explain it: we don’t need to know what’s happening if you spend half your salary on them.
Life is complicated. Outside the Supreme Court, many days of the trial, a man is shouting next to a mural full of clippings and photos. The images show everyone from the president of the chamber, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, to politicians like Francina Armengol, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, or Gabriel Rufián. Several diffuse messages denounce a dark maneuver against him that is not clear, and he claims his rights while saying: “The lawyers annul me and they wipe their ass with the oath.” He shouts and shouts for hours, and his voices filter through the windows of the Supreme Court without anyone understanding what he says, like when Fraga spoke. I have a theory regarding these dislocated people who have been hit by the street, a blow of poor mental health, or a system failure (sometimes all three together and consequences of each other): people prefer not to listen to them in case they are right.
On the second floor, however, everyone is dying to hear the former PSOE manager Mariano Moreno (who hasn’t been on the verge of cantinflear for two letters). Moreno manages money, and this is very interesting. He will bring the complex judicial process closer to a more street-level, grassroots view. The popular prosecution asks Moreno if he remembers any exaggerated expenses by Ábalos, an invoice that caught his attention: Has Ábalos gone overboard, has he overstepped? When these things are discussed, I remember the story of the literati sent to China to cover I don’t know what, and he returned with an expense sheet of many hundreds of euros, claiming he talked a lot on the phone with his wife (there was no Wi-Fi and he didn’t work for this newspaper, stop guessing: he probably didn’t even have a wife).
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Moreno recalls and says he remembers an invoice that caught his attention because it was so large: just over 700 euros for a pre-election campaign meal in Galicia. Man, José Luis, if we were in campaign, you’d buy the restaurant. But no: the meal was for 14 people. That’s 50 euros per person: they didn’t order shrimp and barnacles. Galicia has good prices, but coming to the Supreme Court to say that bill is exaggerated makes no sense, it’s almost an insult. I can tell you with my eyes closed even the tapas and wine they ordered. But, beware, there were 14 of them. Let’s not rule out that the boss arrived at the place, took a look, and shouted: “Everything paid for!”. And Mariano Moreno with the calculator in Ferraz, “what is he doing now”.
The party, says Moreno, keeps all settlements and expense tickets. That’s where the trial gets bogged down because Koldo’s defense, which spends half its time defending its accused and the other half defending itself from the president of the chamber, who has her in his sights, insists on an issue that could be very beneficial to Koldo García. So, she comes to ask Mariano Moreno to remember the invoice for that pack of chewing gum someone bought at five in the afternoon one day in 2021. Moreno is about to go down to the park and start shouting with several banners. Perhaps the good man who sometimes comes to shout also started that way. There is a Spain unhinged and another, increasingly smaller, yet to be unhinged.
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