As elsewhere in the world, education
is a political football here in Spain. The last 15 years have
produced at least 3 new comprehensive laws, each with its own
acronym. I forget the latest one. And now - coincidentally just ahead
of the very imminent elections - the PP government has announced it'll
be improving the teacher-pupil ratio, increasing grants to those
entitled to them and upping the education budget by 11%. The
Opposition says it's pure electioneering. Which is quite possibly
true.
Meanwhile, looming on the September horizon is a
book which threatens to blow the gaffe on the financial
shenanigans of the PP party over the last couple of decades. And which
might just impact on (tribal) voting intentions. See here for more,
if your Spanish is up to it. The Google translation is the worst
I've yet seen. So, forget that.
Even today, Galicia is a land which
oozes legend and magic[Oh, yes?], and over 2,000 years ago, this was
even more the case. In the modern-day[meaning?] province of Ourense,
the River Limia was believed by the Celtic [yet again] inhabitants to
contain special magical qualities, causing anyone who crossed it to
lose their memory. Or their brains, in the case of this nonsense.
On a
ranking of clean Spanish hotels, our neighbouring urban competitor,
Vigo, came in a close third, with a score of 89%. So, at least it's
got something going for it. As well as being an embarkation point for
the lovely Atlantic Islands. Which score 100%. Or would, if there were a hotel on them.
Here's an
amusing (but worrying) commentary on a meeting of British alternative medicine
practitioners, from the ever-useful site, The Quackometer.
My
daughter has an old friend visiting from Oporto. On the drive from
the station to the house, she told us that, when she'd last been in
the UK, she'd been asked by friends if she wanted to go with them to
the spa. Leaping at the chance, she (un)dressed accordingly and then re-met her friends. Looking at her in amazement, they said they'd
meant the Spar grocery store. How they laughed!
Talking of
amusement . . . This has been adjudged the best joke of the current
Edinburgh Festival - Aren't all cars people carriers? Funny people. A
12 year old submitted: They keep telling me to live my dreams
but I don't want to be naked in an exam room. Big future, I
predict.
Just
wondering - Why do people with gashed jeans not tear holes in their
shirts as well?
Finally
. . . For those with the staying power, here's a single sentence from The Autumn of the Patriarch, by
Gabriel García Márquez. Obviously didn't have his grammar check on.
Truth to tell, it reminded me of Alfie Mittington's stuff. Boom! Boom!
All her
life Bendición Alvarado would remember those surprises of power and
the other more ancient and bitter ones of poverty, but she never
brought them back with so much grief as after the death farce when he
was wallowing in the fen of prosperity while she went on lamenting to
anyone who wanted to listen to her that it was no good being the
president’s mama with nothing else in the world but this sad sewing
machine, she lamented, looking at him there with his gold-braided
hearse, my poor son didn’t have a hole in the ground to fall dead
into after all those years of serving his country, lord, it’s not
fair, and she did not go on complaining out of habit or
disillusionment but because he no longer made her a participant in
his shake-ups nor did he hurry over as before to share the best
secrets of power with her, and he had changed so much since the times
of the marines that to Bendición Alvarado he seemed to be older than
she, to have left her behind in time, she heard him stumble over
words, his concept of reality became entangled, sometimes he drooled,
and she was struck with the compassion that was not a mother’s but
a daughter’s when she saw him arrive at the suburban mansion loaded
down with packages and desperate to open them all at the same time,
he cut the twine with his teeth, broke his fingernails on the hoops
before she could get the scissors from her sewing basket, dug
everything out from the underbrush of debris with flailing hands as
he drowned in his high-flying anxiety, look at all this wonderful
stuff, mother, he said, a live mermaid in a fishbowl, a lifesize
wind-up angel who flew about the room striking the hour with its
bell, a gigantic shell in which the listener didn’t hear the sound
of the waves and the sea wind but the strains of the national anthem,
what fancy stuff, mother, now you can see how nice it is not to be
poor, he said, but she couldn’t feed his enthusiasm and began
chewing on the brushes used to paint orioles so her son would not
notice that her heart was crumbling with pity thinking back on a past
that no one knew as well as she, remembering how hard it had been for
him to stay in the chair he was sitting in, but not these days, lord,
not these easy times when power was a tangible and unique matter, a
little glass ball in the palm of the hand, as he said, but when he
was a fugitive shad swimming around without god or law in a
neighborhood palace pursued by the voracious swarm of the surviving
leaders of the federalist war who had helped overthrow the
general-poet Lautaro Muñoz, an enlightened despot whom God keep in
His holy glory with his Suetonius missals in Lathi and his forty-two
pedigreed horses, and in exchange for their armed help they had taken
over the ranches and livestock of the outlawed former owners and had
divided the country up into autonomous provinces with the
unanswerable argument that this is federalism general, this is what
we have shed the blood of our veins for, and they were absolute
monarchs in their territories, with their own laws, their personal
patriotic holidays, their paper money which they signed themselves,
their dress uniforms with sabers encrusted with precious stones and
hussar jackets with gold frogs and three-cornered hats with
peacock-tail plumes copied from ancient prints of viceroys of the
country before them, and they were wild and sentimental, lord, they
would come into the presidential palace through the main door, with
no one’s permission since the nation belongs to all general, that’s
why we’ve sacrified our lives for it, they camped out in the
ballroom with their respective harems and the farm animals which they
demanded as tribute for peace as they went along everywhere so that
they would always have something to eat, they brought along personal
escorts of barbarian mercenaries who instead of boots used rags to
clothe their feet and who could barely express themselves in
Christian tongue but were wise in tricks of dice and ferocious and
skilled in the manipulation of weapons of war, so that the house of
power was like a gypsy encampment, lord, it had the thick smell of a
river at floodtide, the officers of the general staff had taken the
furniture of the republic to their ranches, they played dominoes
gambling away the privileges of government indifferent to the
entreaties of his mother Bendición Alvarado who did not have a
moment’s rest trying to sweep up so much fairground garbage, trying
to put just one little bit of order into that shipwreck, for she was
the only one who had made any attempt to resist the irredeemable
debasement of the liberal crusade, only she had tried to drive them
out with her broom when she saw the house perverted by those
evil-living reprobates who fought over the large chairs of the high
command with playing-card altercations, she watched them do sodomite
business behind the piano, she watched them shit in the alabaster
amphoras even though she told them not to, lord, they weren’t
portable toilets they were amphoras recovered from the seas of
Pantelleria, but they insisted that they were rich men’s pisspots,
lord, it was humanly impossible to stop General Adriano Guzman from
attending the diplomatic party celebrating the tenth year of my rise
to power, although no one could have imagined what awaited us when he
appeared in the ballroom wearing an austere linen uniform chosen
especially for the occasion, he came without weapons, just as he had
promised me on his word as a soldier, with his escort of escaped
French prisoners in civilian clothes and loaded down with goodies
from Cayenne which General Adriano Guzman distributed one by one to
the wives of ambassadors and ministers after asking permission from
their husbands with a bow, for that was what his mercenaries had told
him was considered proper in Versailles and so he went through it
with the rare genius of a gentleman, and then he sat in a corner of
the ballroom with his attention on the dance and nodding his head in
approval, very good, he said, these stuck-ups from Europeland dance
good, he said, to each his own, he said, so forgotten in his easy
chair that only I noticed that one of his aides was filling his glass
with champagne after each sip, and as the hours passed he was
becoming more tense and flushed than he normally was, he opened a
button on his sweat-soaked tunic every time the pressure of a
repressed belch came all the way up to eye level, he was moaning with
drowsiness, mother, and all of a sudden he got up with difficulty
during a pause in the dancing and finally unbuttoned his tunic
completely and then his fly and he stood there wide open and staling
away on the perfumed décolletages of the ladies of the ambassadors
and ministers with his musty old hose of a buzzard’s tool, with his
sour war-drunkard’s urine he soaked the muslin laps, the gold
brocade bosoms, the ostrich-feather fans, singing impassively in the
midst of the panic I’m the gallant swain who waters the roses of
your bower, oh lovely rose in bloom, he sang on, with no one daring
to control him, not even he, because I knew I had more power than any
one of them but much less than two of them plotting together, still
unaware that he saw the others just as they were while the others
were never able to glimpse the hidden thoughts of the granite old man
whose serenity was matched only by his smooth-sailing prudence and
his immense disposition for waiting, we saw only his lugubrious eyes,
his thin lips, the chaste maiden’s hand which did not even tremble
on the hilt of his saber that noon of horror when they came to him
with the news general sir that General Narciso Lopez high on green
pot and anisette had hauled a cadet of the presidential guard into a
toilet and warmed him up as he saw fit with the resources of a wild
woman and then obliged him put it all into me, God damn it, that’s
an order, everything, my love, even your golden little balls, weeping
with pain, weeping with rage, until he found himself vomiting with
humiliation on all fours with his head stuck in the fetid vapours of
the toilet bowl, and then he lifted the Adonic cadet up into the air
and impaled him with a plainsman’s lance onto the springtime
tapestry of the audience room like a butterfly and no one dared take
him down for three days, poor man, because all he did was keep an eye
on his former comrades in arms so that they would not hatch plots but
without getting enmeshed in their lives, convinced that they
themselves would exterminate each other among themselves before they
came to him with the news general sir that members of General
Jesucristo Sanchez’s escort had been forced to beat him to death
with chairs when he had an attack of rabies that he got from a cat
bite, poor man, he scarcely looked up from his domino game when they
whispered in his ear the news general sir that General Lotario Sereno
had been drowned when his horse had suddenly died under him as he was
fording a river, poor man, he barely blinked when they came to him
with the news general sir that General Narciso Lopez had shoved a
dynamite stick up his ass and blown his guts out over the shame of
his unconquerable pederasty, and he said poor man as if he had had
nothing to do with those infamous deaths and he issued the same
decree of posthumous honours for all, proclaiming them martyrs who
had fallen in acts of service and he had them entombed in the
national pantheon with magnificent pomp and all on the same level
because a nation without heroes is a house without doors, he said,
and when there were only six combat generals left in all the land he
invited them to celebrate his birthday with a carousal of comrades in
the presidential palace, all of them together, lord, even General
Jacinto Algarabía who was the darkest and shrewdest, who prided
himself on having a son by his own mother and only drank wood alcohol
with gunpowder in it, with no one else in the banquet hall like the
good old days general, all without weapons like blood brothers but
with the men of their escorts crowded into the next room, all loaded
down with magnificent gifts for the only one of us who has been able
to understand us all, they said, meaning that he was the only one who
had learned how to manage them, the only one who had succeeded in
getting out of the bowels of his remote lair on the highland plains
the legendary General Saturno Santos, a full-blooded Indian, unsure,
who always went around like the whore mother that gave me birth with
his foot on the ground general sir because we roughnecks can’t
breathe unless we feel the earth, he had arrived wrapped in a cape
with bright-colored prints of strange animals on it, he came alone,
as he always went about, without an escort, preceded by a gloomy
aura, with no arms except a cane machete which he refused to take off
his belt because it wasn’t a weapon of war but one for work, and as
a gift he brought me an eagle trained to fight in men’s wars, and
he brought his harp, mother, that sacred instrument whose notes could
conjure up storms and hasten the cycles of harvest time and which
General Saturno Santos plucked with a skill from his heart that awoke
in all of us the nostalgia for the nights of horror of the war,
mother, it aroused in us the dog-mange smell of war, it spun around
in our souls the war song of the golden boat that will lead us on,
they sang it in a chorus with all their heart, mother, I sent myself
back from the bridge bathed in tears, they sang, while they ate a
turkey stuffed with plums and half a suckling pig and each one drank
from his personal bottle, each one his own alcohol, all except him
and General Saturno Santos who had never tasted a drop of liquor in
all their lives, nor smoked, nor eaten more than what was
indispensable for life, in my honour they sang in a chorus the
serenade King David sang, with tears they wailed out all the birthday
songs that had been sung before Consul Hanemann came to us with the
novelty general sir of that phonograph with a horn speaker and its
cylinder of happy birthday in English, they sang half-asleep,
half-dead from drink, not worrying any more about the taciturn old
man who at the stroke of twelve took down the lamp and went to
inspect the house before retiring in accordance with his
barracis-bred custom and he saw for the last time as he returned on
bis way through the banquet hall-the six generals piled together on
the floor, he saw them in embrace, inert and placid, under the
protection of the five escort groups who kept watch among themselves,
because even in sleep and in embrace they were afraid of each other
almost as much as each one of them was afraid of him and as he was
afraid of two of them in cahoots, and he put the lamp back on the
mantel and closed the three locks, the three bolts, the three bars of
his bedroom, and lay down on the floor face down, his right arm
serving as a pillow at the instant that the foundations of the
building shook with the compact explosion of all the escorts’
weapons going off at the same time, one single time, by God, with no
intermediate sound, no moan, and again, by God, and that was that,
the mess was over, all that was left was a lingering smell of
gunpowder in the silence of the world, only he remained safe forever
from the anxieties of power as in the first mallow-soft rays of the
new day he saw the orderlies on duty sloshing through the swamp of
blood in the banquet hall, he saw his mother Bendición Alvarado
seized by a dizzy spell of horror as she discovered that the walls
oozed blood no matter how hard she scrubbed them with lye and ash,
lord, that the rugs kept on giving off blood no matter how much she
wrung them out, and all the more blood poured in torrents through
corridors and offices the more they worked desperately to wash it out
in order to hide the extent of the massacre of the last heirs of our
war who according to the official statement had been assassinated by
their own maddened escorts and their bodies wrapped in the national
flag filled the pantheon of patriots with a funeral worthy of a
bishop, for not one single man of the escort had escaped alive from
the bloody roundup, not one general, except General Saturno Santos
who was armoured by his strings of scapulars and who knew Indian
secrets of how to change his form at will, curse him, he could turn
into an armadillo or a pond general, he could become thunder, and he
knew it was true because his most astute trackers had lost the trail
ever since last Christmas, the best-trained jaguar hounds looked for
him in the opposite direction, he had seen him in the flesh in the
king of spades in his sibyls’ cards, and he was alive, sleeping by
day and traveling by night off the beaten track on land and water,
but he kept leaving a trail of prayers that confused his pursuers’
judgment and tired out the will of his enemies, but he never gave up
the search for one instant day and night for years and years until
many years later when he saw through the window of the presidential
train a crowd of men and women with their children and animals and
cooking utensils as he had seen so many times behind the troops in
wartime, he saw them parading in the rain carrying their sick in
hammocks strung to poles behind a very pale man in a burlap tunic who
says he’s a divine messenger general sir, and he slapped his
forehead and said to himself there he is, God damn it, and there was
General Saturno Santos begging off the charity of the pilgrims with
the charms of his unstrung harp, he was miserable and gloomy, with a
beat-up felt hat and a poncho in tatters, but even in that pitiful
state he was not as easy to kill as he thought for he had decapitated
three of his best men with his machete, he had stood up to the
fiercest of them with such valor and ability that he ordered the
train to stop opposite the cemetery on the plain where the messenger
was preaching, and everybody drew apart in a stampede when the men of
the presidential guard jumped out of the coach painted with the
colours of the flag with their weapons at the ready, no one remained
in sight except General Saturno Santos beside his mythical harp with
his hand tight on the hilt of his machete, and he seemed fascinated
by the sight of the mortal enemy who appeared on the platform of the
coach in his denim suit with no insignia, without weapons, older and
more remote as if it had been a hundred years since we saw each other
general, he looked tired and lonely to me, his skin yellow from liver
trouble and his eyes tending toward teariness, but he had the pale
glow of a person who was not only master of his power but also the
power won from his dead, so I made ready to die without resisting
because it seemed useless to him to go against an old man who had
come from so far off with no more motives or merits than his
barbarous appetite for command, but he showed him the manta-ray palm
of his hand and said God bless you, stud, the country deserves you,
because it has always known that against an invincible man there is
no weapon but friendship, and General Saturno Santos kissed the
ground he had trod and asked him the favour of letting me serve you
in any way you command general sir while I have the ability in these
hands to make my machete sing, and he accepted, agreed, he made him
his back-up man but only on the condition that you never get behind
me, he made him his accomplice in dominoes and between the two of
them they gave a four-handed skinning to many despots in misfortune,
he would have him get barefoot into the presidential coach and take
him to diplomatic receptions with that jaguar breath that aroused
dogs and made ambassadors’ wives dizzy, he had him sleep across the
doorsill of his bedroom so as to relieve himself of the fear of
sleeping when life became so harsh that he trembled at the idea of
finding himself alone among the people of his dreams, he kept him
close to his confidence at a distance of ten hands for many years
until uric acid squeezed off his skill of making his machete sing and
he asked the favour that you kill me yourself general sir so as not
to leave someone else the pleasure of killing me when he has no right
to, but he ordered him off to die on a good retirement pension and
with a medal of gratitude on the byways of the plains where he had
been born and he could not repress his tears when General Saturno
Santos put aside his shame to tell him choking and weeping so you see
general the time comes for the roughest of us studs to turn into
fairies, what a damned thing.
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