I’ve already bought the newspaper and I’m going to buy the bread. From her balcony in Plaza de la Mata, on the corner of Calle Vulcano, Débora tells me a story about the Casa de las Sirenas, the old palace in which, according to Chaves Nogales, Juan Belmonte fell while playing cowboys. I approach the Copy Workshop. Rifirrafe between two drivers of vans due to a collision of rear-view mirrors, those contraptions from which everything can be seen except the area of uncertainty, according to the Highway Code. In the copy shop is the employee of El Corte Inglés who tried on my best man suit at Ramón Sanjurjo at my daughter’s wedding. We both look weird in shorts and flip flops. I return through Guadiana street. Carlos Yáñez, who was mayor of Coria del Río, brother of Luis Yáñez, comes out of breakfast at the Quilombo bar. Next to him two Sisters of the Cross pass with the light step that these nuns always carry. They go down Peris Mencheta street, honors to the journalist who directed The Sevillian Newscastthe great competitor of The Liberal directed by José Laguillo. At the brotherhood house of the Javieres, where there is a niche with an image of the saint who evangelized Japan, the sisters come across my neighbor Carmina, who looks like a character from Dickens when she begins to distribute breadcrumbs to the pigeons. The nuns, active cooperators, missionaries of the city, enter an interior street, Pasaje González de Quijano 1879, which connects Peris Mencheta with Relator, precisely with the house where Paco García Chaparro lived, the artist from Villaverde del Río who filled with ceramic elements all around. That street is closed at night to protect it from what so many other streets suffer from: becoming a public urinal to the detriment of the neighborhood. The sisters call one of the doormen at number 11. They endorse Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s sentence: “Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk to them.” It is true. Today you are nobody if you don’t talk about the vulnerable, which is a refined and euphemistic way of referring to the poor. It doesn’t matter if you’re a minister or opposition politician, environmentalist or banker, talk show host or professor, anti-system or tycoon, but if you don’t end up talking about the vulnerable in the chair or in the Council of Ministers, in the proclamation or in the interview with Ana Pastor you can already consider yourself out of the loop. The Sisters of the Cross prefer direct contact with the poor, and to do so anonymously, without light or stenographers, aware that no one is richer than the one who gives his time, his smile and a minimum support to those who need it. Recently, the 25th anniversary of the death of Teresa of Calcutta, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1979, just a century after the date that appears in the González de Quijano Passage 1879. The Albanian nun died just a week after the tragic end of her good friend Diana of Wales, who was already separated from Prince Charles but who in the future will be remembered as the mother and grandmother of the next kings of England.
It is fashionable to talk about the poor. And the rich, of course. How sharp Feijóo, the Galician priest: “Gold is the idol of the rich and the rich are the idols of the poor.” The sisters of the Cross are only due to the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, because being the son of God he took on a human aspect and became the most insignificant of the slaves to have death on the cross. Without strutting about it. As the book of Proverbs says: “Practice law and justice the Lord prefers to sacrifices.” The sisters of the Cross do not need googlemaps to enter the most remote streets, the routes of the Tussam lines are known better than anyone, because one cannot imagine them taking a Cabify or an Uber. It was not the imprint of Ángela Guerrero, the founder, nor of her successor, Madre María de la Purísima, born in the same block of Madrid where the Sevillian poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer died, who would see in this presence of the sisters of the Cross by the streets of Seville a legend like those of Rayo de Luna or Maese Pérez el Organista. What happened to González de Quijano in 1879?
The owner of that street was born in Guetaria, like the Elcano of the Tour of the World
A second-hand dealer lives on this street, a job that Cela portrayed in his Trip to the Alcarria. Something big had to happen in Seville in 1879. Nine years before Bécquer had died and the Machado brothers were four and five year olds. It is known that González de Quijano, holder of the ticket, was a native of Guetaria, the Gipuzkoan town where Juan Sebastián Elcano, the sailor who completed the first Around the World trip in 1522, was born, and it is also known that he died as civil governor of Alicante fighting an outbreak of cholera morbo, an end similar to that of the mayor of Seville García de Vinuesa.
What happened in 1879? It begins with the death of Espartero and ends with the second attack against Alfonso XII. Through it, an archaeologist discovers the caves of Altamira, Pablo Iglesias founds the PSOE and the king himself, a widower a year before María de las Mercedes, marries María Cristina, the one who wants to govern us.
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