A nostalgic trip
I wanted to visit my childhood school again, even though it no longer exists. Four decades ago it was demolished to make way for the construction of numerous apartments. But I didn’t lose much. That unpleasant chapel with the figure of the Immaculate Conception (or perhaps it was that of Lourdes) that caused me so much fear (or perhaps respect). The priests, most of them smelly and ill-tempered, who terrified us with the flames of hell for the slightest last-minute sinful thought.
Refuge in war
My escape was war, always the same (to avoid confusion): Vietnam, another example of how war has sufficiently colonized us. Jane Fonda in her heyday, among other actors and actresses. A suggestive and subliminal soundtrack. The Rolling Stones could not be absent, and Neil Young continued performing with his group, Bufalo, against his will. When he left the cinema, he still had hope. ‘It’s misleading rubbish,’ Mikel told me. ‘Very sexist,’ said Pilar. Of course, everything fell apart. Afterwards, or perhaps before, I took it out on Bertolucci’s ‘The Moon’. The origin of my suffering was in a tortuous film club session after tolerating ‘Prima della revoluzione’, one of his first films. On that exit from the cinema on Paseo de Gracia, next to the drugstore savior of so many chaotic nights, I had not yet experienced ‘Last Tango in Paris’ or ‘Soñadores’, two of his masterpieces. But it didn’t matter: ‘The Moon’ seemed pretentious and boring to me.
The fruitless search
When I returned to Bonanova, I didn’t find your home either, or maybe I didn’t know how to find it. I will write to you through traditional means so that you respond to me in a month, it is more exciting, although contemporaries care little. That desperate Italian still lives in my memory entering the bar in the same square (what was it called? ‘the yacht’? ‘the avenue’?) exclaiming ‘My machine has been stolen’. I remembered ‘Totó’, Antonio Vicenzo Stefano Clemente, it even seemed like he was acting in ‘Guards and Thieves’ by the Monicelli, but in 1979 he had already died. My classmates from that time did not return: one became a philosophy professor, as could not be otherwise, and the other became a successful filmmaker in New York, where he still resides.
The eternal search
We never took a trip together, except to Blanes. Perhaps that is why we spend our lives returning to that place that no longer exists, in search of chapels, gardens and cinemas while the majority immerses themselves in hatred. If Vietnam was our imposed and colonizing war, Ukraine and Gaza seem to be heading towards a similar destiny, does no one perceive it? It is not moving forward: political leaders on all sides proclaim the apocalypse as if it were a simple carnival. What an urgent need they have for a moment to repent. But asking for peace is no longer fashionable, fighting is what is expected, it would be a military contradiction to abstain with a lit pipe to share it. It is written: where is our Bertrand Russell? The mayor of Madrid celebrated his wedding in the same church where Admiral Carrero Blanco received his last communion: the US embassy was a witness. Does this have any meaning? No. Only that some buildings remain and the school where you studied no longer, it is absurd.
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