There is a day in 1992 that nobody remembers anymore. It’s weird that it’s like that. That no one remembers because it has a lot to do with everything. The day existed, although we don’t know what it was. For the first three quarters of the year, whatever happened was welcomed. The daily verbena or the assault of a future of glittering futility. The first three parts of the year, with stops in the seasons of spring, summer and autumn, he devoted himself to triumphalist readings of the press without a regime, to trips on the fastest trains in Europe or to checking how, with each passing week, it was more difficult for him to distinguish between fiction and reality.<\/p>
Over the years he would discover that this defect, which he believed to be temporary, was systemic and he no longer trusted the printed word or sliced bread. He distrusted smiles to the point that his friends gradually withdrew their greetings and he went into a tailspin (or maybe it was a spiral if it was for the best) with a conspiracy about how lucidity distances friends. But all this would happen some years after that unquoted day in 1992.<\/p>
It’s dangerous to skip the timeline of events. Some writers have made this leap a mark of identity and when they read with the same chronology of time, they feel disappointed. But history doesn\u2019t. History prefers a continuous timeline because the craft of its deception lies elsewhere. History knows its lies and doesn’t want to get tangled up, it fixes everything as a great continuous line of causes and effects that evade responsibility for each other. History proves that a simple lie is more credible than a complicated truth. But this is not history\u2019s fault, it is our fault because we know we are limited, but we don’t want to admit how limited. We want to ignore it as we ignore the damage caused by love, as we ignore the damage caused by ignorance.<\/p>
But in 1992 all that seemed far away. The Americans were wearing blue and the Germans were wearing green-grey, although in different wars. Poetry confuses everything because it is almost never from this world. The Andalusians lisped, the Catalans designed and the Galicians had been left, once again, with the importance of tradition. And tradition explains that Galicians are always left with nothing. Or with almost nothing, which is not the same thing, but it is the same from the viewpoint of history.<\/p>
History changed one day in 1992. But that year was full of historic days. It is difficult to say which one responds best to the adjective. If you add together the Olympics, the World Expo and high-speed trains in one country, what you get is an uncontrolled flow of money, the excessive ambition of the builders and the undisguised and unjustifiable optimism of the ruling political class. In the chronicle of the year of all the historic days, the most important day was left without a headline.<\/p>
There is a logic to everything, even if it is not always reasonable. Friends look for friends of the same condition. Just as the rich look for rich people of the same level to relate to. Lucidity also has its own. Even linked to friendship. When someone begins to exercise lucidity, their circle of friends begins to make the sign of the cross behind their back. But this movement is greatly accentuated when the demonstrations of lucidity are aimed at showing that friends are not so much as it is deduced from the low price of the objects given as gifts or from how little they insist on the value of your friendship. The logic of friendship says that it should not be mixed with interest, but can you be friends with someone who doesn\u2019t return for you the interest you put in him? In general, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t answer. But in 1992 he did know. Although accounting didn’t have the tools it has today, the man couldn’t do the math and always calculated that he put more in his friends than his friends put in him. That’s why they started to run away. That’s why he didn’t have a girlfriend either. In 1992 and without a girlfriend. Maybe he was ahead of the curve, but he didn’t know it either.<\/p>
In 1992 mortgages were in fashion. Like men’s jackets with shoulder pads or the remains of beautiful wrinkles. In 1992, elegance wasn’t the thing. Mortgages were in. They were worn under the dandruff of pastel-coloured blazers. With the advantage of time, that colour kept its logic in relation to the world that was cooking around it.<\/p>
History was also pastel in 1992 and that is why it forgot to mention the most important day of that year in which, despite all the commemorative events, the empire did not become topical again. It was replaced by a kind of Spain brand that already indicated we would all be travelling in the same direction: through the tunnel of time towards the stale state of history. But if history repeats itself, when you travel through the tunnel of time, don’t you spend the whole time going round and round?<\/p>
Maybe that’s why, because even though you’re not always in the exact same place, you’re always travelling in the same direction without direction, the most important day of 1992 was left without a headline. It was that day orphaned of celebrations. That day, the day after all the festivities, when a president of the government came out to say with all the coolness that his sense of humour allowed him that the good times were over and we were in a crisis. That day when the speed of history accelerated to such an extent that, in less than an hour, this country that boasts the \u00d1 went from being the first in Europe to being the second or third in Africa. Another lesson in the geopolitical importance of the Peninsula. It was like those 950-page novels that by the time they reach 375 pages are out of breath and need a change and go from being a novel of manners to a science fiction novel with no plot justification. They’re right, aliens don’t have to justify their abductions. But by the time they get to page 750 they’re on the same page and there’s still 6 centimetres to go before the size fills the shelf in the airport bookstore. Then it changes again and goes from the inhabitants of the Milky Way to the warcivilism with the same freshness of lack of coherence.<\/p>
The president did the same. He endured the buler\u00edas until, when the first echo died down, he wanted to discover that there was no more left. That there wasn’t even a hangover left. Just the emptiness. But the clappers did their job and the applause silenced the course of history.History does not dwell on details. Its thing is the general lines. But neither the press, nor the specialists in bullfighting, nor the most valued seers of the international scene cared that the suicide rate increased by one more head stuck in a gas oven (yes, it is advisable that they are electric to avoid temptations). Friends didn’t care so much either. He had withdrawn his greetings months ago and in recent years he had been strange, sceptical, lonely. Insulting, even. It had to end that way. And nothing surprises less than deaths rightly announced.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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