The viewer could detect at least three Borja Sémper during his visit to El hormiguero. There was the one who told about his journey through that disease called cancer. “I get a little emotional,” he said after assuring that “at this moment,” and after the last check-up, he is free of the disease. And if he had gotten a little emotional, it would have been even better.
He calmly recounted how it went, after a check-up he underwent encouraged by his wife, the actress Bárbara Goenaga. He smoked, coughed a little at night, and he does not forget the doctor’s pale face telling him that the lung was clean, but that a spot was dirtying his pancreas. Then came acceptance, internalizing it, fear and sorrow at the possibility of dying. Sometimes he thought the sick person was someone else, but not him.
“Health is the silence of the body,” he said, although he recalled that he read the phrase somewhere during the months of chemotherapy. Sémper is a likable guy, who has read many more books than average, constructs literary phrases to talk about almost anything. He handled the passage of time badly and not so much anymore. Maybe he also did not know, before the diagnosis, how much his loved ones and others care about him.
Then came the second Sémper. The one Pablo Motos introduced when he mentioned it was time to talk about life, but also about politics. Then he pulled out the arguments, the pinches and bites, saying it very quickly and continuously, lest he forget something to say. Minister tweeters, ministers hiring prostitutes (missing was “paid with public money,” which Feijóo likes a lot, as if doing it with private money were wonderful), dipping into the party’s funds, “Spaniards deserve to speak” and that is why it is worth calling elections. How bad Pedro Sánchez is, how disconnected from society, how little they like him, what a desire for protagonism and power at any cost. All this happened in barely six or seven minutes and undoubtedly surprised any viewer for being unexpected. “I don’t want to be demagogic,” said the second Sémper, who knows that phrase guarantees that what came before and what comes after will be nothing but that, demagogy.
Feijóo is a normal guy, he emphasized, because he did not want to talk about Sánchez. And again, the same old thing about minister tweeters, cowardly on the ropes. Motos asked about pacts with Vox and the Operación Kitchen trial, and there Sémper — I no longer know if it was the second or maybe a third who showed up — acted like a true politician, said well, okay, but everything is a very complex matter, that is an argument that when the melon, if it opens, it will not be on his part. And that justice is a very important thing and infinite respect for institutions, and no fascosphere and such. Long live Machiavelli and the separation of powers.
The time when ETA almost killed him on three occasions he has told many times, but it is a story we must never give up, because it is there, recent, in everyone’s memory. Sémper does that very useful thing of resorting to wit to lighten the pain of the time, how difficult it was to flirt with bodyguards. And he bertineó a little, when talking about his wife he said they argue a lot, but she is always right. He recalled that people in cinema are much more than actors and directors. There are screenwriters and focus pullers and many more professions like that. Then came the ants and the usual stuff.
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Sémper is a normal guy who is free of cancer. Let’s just stick with that.