I recently listened to an interview with Don Arturo Perez Reverte addressing the issue of nationalities, the feeling of belonging, flags and those who cover themselves with them. The sense of being Spanish is today intoxicated by perceptions, ideologies, complexes and a long shadow of suspicion about identity that serves as the cause of the constant controversy around what it means to be Spanish. Labels and Manichaeism weigh down any notion of what is Spanish, in favor of all those who conspire against the mere fact of being, filling it with guilt, approaching it from the interested prism of the moment that recovers dark pasts to take advantage of it. The hard-working notion that Spain is now the same as when it was occupied and patrimonialized by a faction, supposes an absolute recognition that everything is lost, that those who transformed it under the single prism keep it for themselves in front of those who loved it as something. more plural and diverse. A disservice to a national identity that, like any other, had and has its lights and shadows and that, in the end, should not be of any ideology but of those who inhabit that strange and crowded national bosom.
That is why it never hurts to pay attention to a fundamental chronicler of our days. A writer who deals without fuss about the cause of identity from the anecdotal to the essential. Because this kind of compilation of thoughts dot very different temporal spaces of the Iberian panorama in which rogues, scoundrels, liars, conjurers of the verb and indoctrinators without their own doctrine thrived and thrived, from both sides of the pseudo-ideological range.
And I say "pseudo" putting it before ideology because really, on many occasions it is about that, to undress the lie, to exhibit falsehood, to write with Pérez Reverte's most hurtful stiletto to end up marking each one with their miseries.
The pride of being Spanish or Portuguese or French resides in the brilliance of people still free from the stigma of this behaviorism towards lies. To confront a supposed nationalism, the new offended Spaniards wear the opposite flag, the one that for them does dress truth and purity, the one that never sheltered miscreants when not criminals. As if the bad guys could only be on one side, as if thinking differently from them were plunging into that supposedly black Spain that if it exists is precisely because of the fierce brow in which some only look with yesterday's eyes, and others, as hurtful answer, they are entrusted to the old spirits.
Because it is not the same to repeat the just restoration of rights and honor of the defeated in any war than to try to submerge everything else in ignominy, until the end of days and for everything that moves at the same pace.
La Historia para Pérez Reverte is a space on which to speak freely, without the language constrained by the politically correct, without debts with its possible supporters, without acquired commitments and without intention of writing a new history. History is opinion too, as long as this is not that widespread self-serving falsehood.
Everything is subjective. And that is well known by a writer who necessarily makes empathy a tool of trade. And so we find this book that talks about cruelty when cruelty was law and that opens up to conflict when the clash of ideologies led to the storm.
Spain, sum of nationalities according to who sees it, project by simple territorial connection, homeland by the shared hodgepodge from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. All to one in the general mess, participating in glorious moments or dark pages, depending on how they want to read.
Pérez Reverte is an expert voice in that of the identities on the hot cloths that are the flags, a story of what this Spain can be in which the best thing, simply, is to consider others as equals and enjoy their things when we travel with that curious camaraderie of a remote raised rag. Little or nothing else is Spain, not even a threatening letter for the anthem. A Royal March that even its origins are lost in a heterogeneous creative imputation.
You can now buy the book A history of Spain, by Arturo Pérez Reverte, here: