Bagpipes and sofa

Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at the meeting held on April 6 in Ankara (Turkey) .EUROPEAN UNION / Reuters

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• The setback in Ankara puts Michel on the ropes

The music filled the empty space of the most beautiful English Gothic, St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and in addition to Bach and

Britten's

(a choir commissioned in its day by the late Duke from the composer), it was moving, in the impeccable BBC filming served by Channel 24 hours, seeing the older piper getting lost in the gallery after a bagpipe lament that said more about death than the rigorous mourning of the royal family.

Sometimes what seems trivial creeps into big events, and I don't know by what association of ideas I rewound the memory of what happened a few days earlier in Ankara. From that scene we have seen the detached gesture of Ursula von der Leyen's arms, the arrogant poise of Erdogan, the silly air of Charles Michel, as if the affront did not affect him. At the end of the long meeting came the small arms: Draghi's accurate stab at the dictator, the Turk's tantrum and his commercial threats, the belated excuse of the misogynist Michel. And what about the sofa?

Someone suggested that leaving the European president an ottoman to herself was an honor.

I present here for your consideration my

reading

.

This immortal work by Zorrilla has a climactic moment that is usually located on a sofa;

the libertine, who loves the novice Doña Inés but has kidnapped her and taken her to the "secluded shore" where "she breathes better", seduces her with his words, and she, already predisposed, alienates herself, literally hallucinates, and gives in .

Giving a woman the seat of the sofa is, or so my heated mind sees it, a hint of the most hateful machismo.

The men parley from you to you in their individual seats, while the lady remains quiet on her secluded edge of the triplet: the Turkish bed.