hangovers. Along with the goatish military music, George Brassens and Paco Ibáñez inevitably play today, who stay in bed anyway with the national holiday. Above all, Marc Granell shines, our best poet since Estellés, the one who has best defined the flags: They are small silk taüts onejant imperceptible to the wind the history of crime and cobdíciasays. Inflame all the cors, esclafen the cervellshe finishes. These are the symbolic contours of the homeland. Whatever.
The homeland – another homeland, of course – vibrated a few days ago at the last concert by music in Valencian, which planted the trench in the face of contempt for language and one’s own culture, or simply by language and culture. Yesterday, today: homes obscurs of tenebrous lyrics. And Xavi Sarrià returned to say goodbye. Gray-haired, with thinning hair and that worn-out voice that 47-odd nights of dreaming utopias have left him. Once again the fists in the wind, the stone on the barricade, popular power, the future to begin, the combatants of the last front. Guillem Agulló again and that cry already fossilized into a chant, dangerously empty, thirty-one years later. Again this week the memory of Miquel Grau, another boy-symbol of the homeland and the anti-homeland forty-seven years later. And Xavi Sarrià sang. And we all, of course, sang with him. But nothing, deep down, seemed the same. Because nothing was the same anymore. The passage of time. The hangovers from so much fighting. Disenchantment without the Paneros. The children of the fans watching their parents sing in the numbered stalls, no longer in the street; watching them sing orderly in the afternoon, no longer in the bohemia of the early morning. How far away the first songs, the first emotions. How far away is the innocence on the face and the dreams in the lungs. How far away the empty backpacks.
The sticker. The Palleter: mythical symbol of a homeland orphaned by myths. Palletera attitude: stand up, get fed up and act. The Palleter is back. For fair financing? Pasapalabra He’s back for something more symbolic. Dani Cuesta has become Singapore’s Palleter. The Valencia CF fan has been detained with his wife for a week for posting a sticker against Peter Lim on one of the Singapore buildings owned by the tycoon who controls Valencia CF. It’s funny how a sticker can cause more problems for someone than a stadium to be finished, a club emotionally broken and a social mass with the feeling of fraud and outrage. It is curious to see the Penal Code categories that The Singapore Palleter could face depending on whether his act was considered vandalism, mischief or foolishness. It is a brilliant definition of what is expected of Valencian patriotism: vandalism, mischief, nonsense. The problem of never representing a problem. Not having fearsome trenches. The bad thing about patriot abdication. The good, too.
The others. She, the girl, must be eleven or twelve years old. Your mother will have eleven or twelve problems to solve that day. She, the girl, tells her mother that she doesn’t want to be insulted in class. His mother, walking down the street, asks him to answer them. But she, the girl, tells him that that is not what she wants. What does he want not to say or be told?
Ella, the South American immigrant, looks on with a veil of shame as she walks arm in arm with the local elderly woman.
She, the monitor, accompanies this group of young people with disabilities to the sheltered apartment they share.
She, the foreign cashier, charges the black boy for the package of eggs, so invisible black.
She, the pregnant girl, looks as always at the homeless person who, as always, is on the same bench.
The homeland and its real trenches.
