every Christmas Eve

2022-12-21T11:12:37.116Z

The difference between one Christmas and another, the difference between being 10 years old and 20, the difference between truly believing and believing because there is no other choice, which is the difference between things that are going to happen at any moment and those that are happening now

Luca orders first course sweetbreads, second course ribeye, and a Coke in an Argentine restaurant, because Argentina won a World Cup yesterday and he has an Italian last name from Buenos Aires, if that's possible, and in the middle of the meal he takes out his cell phone and shows a photo, which is a photo of the same meal a year ago in a German restaurant.

So he starts this column.

Because Luca, who is 13, a year ago was only a child.

He not a year ago, but a few months ago.

Maybe him a few days ago.

But there was a very violent moment that perhaps he was not aware of when Luca woke up and he was already a teenager, and I want to tell him that this is what life is about: when we stopped being children, how at first we tried to return at all costs, to keep believing in the things we believed in,

and we spent a few sad and confused years until we gave up and gave up on jumping happily over puddles.

Being an adult is already stepping on them accidentally, and getting upset.

I eat with Jacobo and several other friends the next day (Jacobo prepares rice with thrushes and squabs, which I cut into perfect slices and hence the success of the rice), and Eva is next to the table for me.

Eva, mother of four children (three girls and one boy), has a theory: girls keep their heads and bodies in tune better when they grow up, boys don't.

Children suddenly find themselves one morning with big hands, long legs, adult noses and ears, perhaps a mustache, and their head is still that of a child: they handle their bodies like a guy drives a sports car without having to the license, they collide with the door frames, they look ridiculous buying jelly beans and playing hide-and-seek with the body of a man.

“Her adolescence of hers”, sums up Eva with humor that is too sharp in my opinion, “lasts from the age of 12 to 31;

I think of my son, who is 10 and is in the chapel.

“I also have my rights,” he told his mother when she threatened to punish him without taking a trip.

That child who suspects that he has his rights, but still can't figure out what they are, is on the eve of ceasing to be a child.

He has probably already heard something about the Three Wise Men, perhaps he is voluntarily extending the state of naivety, the one that adults hardly want to establish for themselves so as not to take responsibility for something.

But his intelligence has not counted on his body, which is beginning to stretch in such a way that sometimes, as Threshold of his son said, you can hear him grow.

And even if he doesn't know it, we do.

And we see him every day, every hour, definitively abandoning something that he still doesn't know how valuable it is, and that he will pursue for the rest of his life:

the moment when you are not woken up by the alarm or by your boss, but by your grandparents.

The moment you stop dreaming not because the sun has risen, but because it is going to rise.

The difference between one Christmas and another, the difference between being 10 years old and 20, the difference between truly believing and believing because there is no other choice, which is the same difference between things that are going to happen at any moment and things that are happening now.

That's why growing up is a betrayal, that's why I like to think that giving birth comes from childbirth, which is leaving, and that's why there is no better dream than dreaming in your mother's arms.