The other night I watched a few old James Bond movies.
It was an unsettling experience.
Not because of the puerile machismo, so exaggerated that from a contemporary perspective it can be taken almost as satire, but because of the quality of the villains: some poor unfortunates, some middling tycoons bent on crappy blackmail.
None of them could compete with the supposed great men of today's world.
Those old Bond villains couldn't even dream of knowing everything about the whole world and trading with that information (as Google does now), or of accumulating as much money, technology and financial manipulation capacity as Elon Musk.
I'm not saying Musk is a supervillain.
I say that, if it were, something not entirely ruled out, it would leave Goldfinger and Doctor No in their diapers. Better not to think about it too much: James Bond would today be an employee of Boris Johnson, which gives an idea of the panorama.
We live in a dark and high-risk time.
The pandemic is not over (see Shanghai);
the invasion of Ukraine, aside from the horror that any war entails, has aggravated some problems (inflation, energy crisis, refugees) and has opened up the possibility of even worse ones appearing (expansion of the conflict, use of nuclear weapons);
On the nearest horizon there are already famines and a sudden slowdown in the economy.
It's hard to face the news without almost immediately concluding that this is a disaster.
In fact, the only consolation is provided by the small miseries to which we are already accustomed: the little things of Aguirre and Cospedal, the little things of Sánchez, the Bourbon soap opera, the traditional corruption of football.
In short, that which has been accompanying our lives and whose absence we would surely miss.
In this context, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that our daily existence is dissociated from reality.
Because in the meantime, water continues to come out of the tap and our days go by more or less peacefully.
The press and crime novels, dedicated to pointing out what is going wrong (as far as public and private authorities allow it), have always had difficulty reminding the public that evil and incompetence coexist with the opposite, goodness and efficiency. .
It is very difficult to reflect with a reasonable balance what happens in a society.
Some people, few, have a special talent and get it.
This was the case of Francisco García Pavón, who through his character Manuel González, called
Plinio,
head of the Municipal Police of Tomelloso, showed human pettiness (and the reality of late Francoism, which was what it was) without ceasing to reflect the small virtues of a La Mancha community.
He accumulated large doses of that virtue, that of balance, that of paying attention to the everyday, to what we take for granted, the recently deceased Domingo Villar.
Somewhere I said that I would like to live in a novel by Domingo Villar.
He is gone, but his novels are.
And they continue to offer shelter.
They continue to appeal to our best part, which is very rare in police stories, as in the press and in life in general.
But that part exists.
Despite everything that is and what is to come, there are always things that are going well.
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