Win a prize that you have not been given

I guess you hear what you want to hear.

The phrase “you are suspended, come back in September”, can be interpreted without much effort as “you are approved, you do not need to study in the summer”.

It is easy to change a few words to the sentence “I am not going out with you to dinner, I have told you a thousand times” and turn it into “I am delighted to go with you, you have finally asked me”.

Psychologists have extensively studied a phenomenon of mixing desire and reality in the subconscious, and I suppose this was the case.

It happens to me many times.

I had just arrived in Ukraine from Mexico, where I regularly cover current events in Mexico and Central America in the newsroom of EL PAÍS, when a call from the bosses made the phone ring at almost nine o'clock at night.

In general, no call from the bosses augurs well, but in a newspaper at that time, the devil kills them.

It was not the case.

Lucía Abellán, the head of International, told me excited that she had passed the cut and was among the three selected for the Cirilo Rodríguez award, which is awarded each year by a large jury of journalists from different media outlets to a Spanish correspondent or special envoy abroad.

Regardless of the result, I already felt like a winner, but I never imagined that 20 days later I would come out of a war to get into a blushing conflict on a stage in Segovia.

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The winner's speech;

by Manuel Jabois

The organization of the Prize is not to blame.

Actually, no one except me is to blame.

It had been clearly explained to me before the act began.

It is true that the pauses do not help and that Cirilo Rodríguez is not the Oscars or the Champions League, but for me it is more than both things combined and if the presenter of the event says: "The jury wanted to recognize this year as the first finalist ….”, because one only hears “first”, then the name;

then the blood no longer flows, my mother applauds and the mess is already mounted.

I had the intention of releasing my speech for the civil or the military.

In the Parador auditorium or at the bar with his elbow resting on the bar.

I do not leave the front of Mikolaiv in the south of the Ukraine and I take a 36-hour beating that includes two cars, two planes and two trains to keep quiet and thank the city of Segovia.

I knew from the moment I left the hotel that I wanted to dedicate the award to the brave journalists from Mexico and Central America who are experiencing the worst wave of repression suffered by the press in recent decades, to the editorial office of this newspaper in America and also to my parents, who for For the first time they had not been summoned by the authorities to look for a new school.

Since I already felt like a winner, now I aspired to immortality: I wanted to enter the chat room of my mother's friends and her tobacconist's conversations.

Because that's why Armstrong came to the moon, so his mother would find out.

I have never felt more frustrated than when I worked at the Associated Press agency in Colombia and after some report on the FARC guerrillas a senator from Kentucky called me to ask for my opinion in the face of a millionaire disbursement for a development plan that was pending of approval in the chamber.

“Give him the millions”, I thought, “what does it matter to you”, unable to make a more elaborate speech, when, in reality, what I wanted was for my mother to call me to tell me “I didn't like the article very much ” or “that topic is a bit of a bummer”.

I knew then that my approach had been wrong, even though Kentucky insisted on asking for my opinion.

But I was nervous and the format didn't help either.

I never thought that a journalism award would be resolved by first announcing who came second, then who came third and finally the winner.

My inexperience was noticeable because I didn't know anything and, indeed, I released my speech while ignoring the gestures they made to me from the stalls.

Until I got off that stage turned into a scaffold I did not realize that something was wrong.

I remember, with a silly face, Ramón Lobo's hand touching my shoulder to tell me “you didn't win, but I'm sure you'll do it another year”, which was something like the “he didn't touch you, keep playing”, of yogurts.

But I thought it was a joke of yours.

Only when I saw Griselda Pastor collect her award did I understand the dynamic and I began to get smaller and smaller while she mentally reviewed each sentence to know in how many of them she had made a fool of herself.

No topic was missing: this award is also yours, I had not prepared anything, this time it was my turn... Like Gregorio Samsa, in a matter of a few minutes I went from being a journalist to a cockroach without needing 100 pages of a book.

Of course, when the winner, Placid Garcia-Planas,

went up to collect the award I applauded like the most because he had rehearsed that.

Obviously, his crystal balls made by the Royal Crystal Factory of Segovia, the winner's trophy, were much larger than mine, although at this stage of the ruling, even that I can doubt.

Since then I have never been congratulated so much for losing.

It was like Chanel but without glitter and with Cándido suckling pig.

As I said, Cirilo Rodríguez is not an Oscar, but for a correspondent it is as if he were.

When I left there I felt like that Colombian model that Steve Harvey proclaimed Miss Universe only to correct three minutes later and announce that the crown was actually for the Philippines.

Yes, it's true, my brother told me later.

But there, Jacobo, the error was the organization, here the shit has been completely yours.

So as not to disappoint him, I understood that he had won and that I should go celebrate.

It happens to me many times.

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