Cela’s ass

I had always heard that behind a great man there is a great woman, but if that were true, which it is not, it would also have to be said that behind a great woman there is a great man, which it is not. I had also been led to believe that within a good writer there was a “good” writer in the good sense of the word good, but that is not true either. And I am going to refer in a few examples – without anger or fondness – to a highly renowned hero, Don Camilo, Nobel Prize Winner for Literature.

go ahead than I neither remove nor set a king over the quality of the work of any writer, because turns out iimpossible to introduce universal suffrage in literature, and that not even prizes serve as ineffable criteria for me. Here the literary quality is not the object of my reflection, but the spirit of refinement, as Blas Pascal would say, of the Galician writer.

To whet your appetite, our laureate hero comes up with grotesque statements from time to time such as that “religious, moral, social, and political ideas are nothing but manifestations of an imbalance in the nervous system.” But man, Don Camillo, a lyrical poet doesn’t feel bad about a little religion! In addition, given his paradoxical spirit, he would not have been embarrassed to coincide with Joaquín Onesimo, that character from The family of Leon Roch, by Pérez Galdós, who says so pancho: “I am not one of those who call themselves Catholic and admit theories contrary to Catholicism; I am Catholic, Catholic”. The same jokes.

In case it really helps, I remind you of the article about the saint, by José Ortega y Gasset: “I will never forget that one day, in a corridor of the Ateneo, a naive member of the Ateneo confessed to me that he had been born without religious prejudice, and he told me this, more or less, with the tone and gesture that I could have declared myself: I, you know?, I was born without the rudiment of the third eyelid, Such a way of considering religion is deeply tacky, I do not conceive that any man, who aspires to fill his spirit indefinitely, can renounce without pain to the religious world; At least for me, it causes me enormous regret to feel excluded from participating in that world. Because there is a religious sense, just as there is an aesthetic sense and a sense of smell, of touch, of vision. Because it is true that by sublimating everything to its ultimate determination, there comes a moment when science ends without finishing the thing; this core transscientific of the thing is his religiosity”. When Deputy Ortega took the podium to give one of his brainy speeches, the voice of Indalecio Prieto was heard in the chamber: “Attention, the encephalic mass speaks.”

What comes next they have not told me, I have seen it or experienced it in person. It turns out that the fateful demiurge, who is not elusive of great gifts, according to what Borges said, wanted the Indian Don Camilo and I to give a conference on the same day and at the same time in the secluded Galician city of Orense, and that the local press published with big headlines the next morning: “Camilo José de Cela, replacement”. The long-suffering public had had to put on semicolons, as is, the same conference the previous year, because Cela, without zeal, did not remember. Never more than this joke in the case of Don Camilo: -“And why have you gone? – To give a conference. -And what are you going to talk about, the usual?

I can also tell this other anecdote on my own. That time we both coincided on a flight to I don’t remember where and, in the seat in front of mine, both in economy class, a thick neck protruded that turned out to be neither more nor less than Don Camilo’s, despite the amount of necks of the world that could have touched me. The smiling stewardess arrives and I hear her say: “Don Camilo, congratulations on behalf of the entire crew, because we know that today is his birthday”. To which the congratulated person, sulking, responds with a bad mood: “How rude to remind someone that they have a birthday!” It made me want to jump on his neck and scratch it. As he himself did with that Mariñas, hero of the tabloids, to whom, for having commented something about him, he gave him a cate with such success that he found the aforementioned in the pool. Beware of Don Camilo, who could say something as fine as “I’m going to kick you in the balls and I’m going to rip your head off.” Very yours.

This noble brute, an expert in swimming and keeping clothes, directly chosen by Juan Carlos I as royal senator in the first democratic legislature, is the same one who had officiated with the Generalissimo as red pencil of his censorship cabinet; for a man with so many swallows, hairs to the sea: after all, Franco’s first manifesto, defining the “uprising” of July 17, 1936, concluded with the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity”. For me, art is what makes me cry, and in this sense I must admit that the hero managed to make my veins a source.

In short, the most glorious thing was that on television asking for a basin full of water to soak up her behind. If they let her, she would have urinated next to Niagara Falls hoping to surpass her flow. George Orwell was part of the foreign militias that fought alongside the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. One morning, inside a trench on the outskirts of Huesca, in front of him, an enemy began to run half-naked, clutching his pants with both hands, across a barren field. Despite being an easy target, Orwell refrained from shooting: “I had traveled there – he says – to shoot at the fascists, but a man who holds his pants is not a fascist, but a fellow man, a fellow man.”