October 12: the day I feel like a foreigner

Today, October 12, in addition to being a national holiday, it is a major holiday in my town, Zaragoza.

Thousands of neighbors dress in folk costumes and parade to the Plaza del Pilar, where they give a bouquet of flowers to the Virgin.

These are days of exaltation and feeling, of proclaiming oneself very Zaragoza, very Aragonese and very Spanish (sometimes, all three things at the same time; others, separately and in opposition to each other, as any Spaniard from any region and town well knows) , but it is also a day to remember that demonyms do not like augmentative adverbs, not even those of quantity, such as the one used by Mariano Rajoy in his "very Spanish and very Spanish".

Spanish is or is not.

You cannot be more Spanish than the others.

To the chagrin of both, Santiago Abascal and Carles Puigdemont are Spanish in the same range and with the same intensity,

I have written some books about Spain, its gaps, its borders, its González and other things.

Even the most clueless reader will know that I am worried about understanding this piece of European land and the coexistence between those of us who populate it.

They have even accused me of ninety-year-oldism, which is a serious intellectual insult.

And yet, October 12 does not challenge me.

Not even as a neighbor of my town.

Few days I feel so foreign (so foreign, so foreign?) as the exaltation of my country and my city.

It happens to me like Book Day, perhaps the only time of the year when I don't buy any.

Or Valentine's Day, whose night is the one I least want to celebrate love.

They can take me for a snob who hides so as not to rub against the crowd, but my estrangement does not go there.

For those of us who believe that the only patriotism that is worthwhile is the constitutional one, we do not like folk costumes or uniforms.

If we defend that a homeland is a shared landscape where everyone can live in freedom being what they want, we are hardly going to applaud or mark the step in the parade.

We will spend the day at home, foreigners until the festivities are over, and we will go out again tomorrow, when the homeland is once again that mundane territory made of errands, cafes, children leaving school and spontaneous words that no one has put in a discourse and are said for the mere pleasure of conversing.

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber