It happened in the last year of the 20th century, during a book signing. Fernando Fernán Gómez, a pathologically shy person extraordinarily reticent in public baths who was then about to turn 80, lost patience with an admirer who asked him to sign another book, an earlier one that was not the subject of the event.
The devoted man, who had queued for his award, became angry when the actor, director, playwright and novelist refused to stamp his name on a copy that was not the reason for that public exhibition He protested offended, reproached the genius for his bad manners and made a half-turn gesture emphasizing how misplaced his admiration was.
Fernán Gómez got up angrily from the table where he was signing, went towards him, trembling, and with his deafening voice of a thousand storms shouted: “If you think I have a bad temper, I have a lot of it! Unfortunately, I am a rude person. leave me alone You go to hell. To shit!”.
I remembered it this Saturday, when Xavier Trias, after an institutional and polite speech in which he accused Jaume Collboni, Ada Colau and Daniel Sirera of conspiring against him and subverting the right of the winner, he, to be mayor, let go: “If I’m not mayor, let them all bomb!”.
Trias is not the first politician of his age to decide to dispense with the corretjams of good manners and patience in order to confuse – as María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop wrote a few days ago in El País – “the truth with venting”. It was very famous, because it was nice, the time when, with all that Aragonese swagger he had, José Antonio Labordeta sent the PP group to hell from the Congress rostrum.
Among the commonplaces that we apply to almost everything without any empirical contrast, the one that makes the case is the view of the elderly as calmer and more tolerant than average humans. But it’s just the opposite.
You only have to see the frequent anxiety they show in front of the queues, the great fondness they have of skipping the queue to get on the bus, order tomatoes or pay at the supermarket, with funny tricks – including pretending to be bados or deaf – which all of us who have served at a delicatessen counter know well.
Yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the death of the genius José Saramago. We witnessed his rudeness as an impatient old man at the Casa d’América in Madrid during the presentation of the film adaptation of Essay on Blindness, to the astonishment and discomfort of filmmaker Fernando Meirelles.
Someone wrote 23 years ago that the reason for Fernando Fernán Gómez’s intemperance was simple: “This luxury can be afforded”. At the time, I didn’t get to understand what that meant, but as we have gone on for years and the mountain we descended is farther away than the ocean that awaits us, one has already learned that the requirement of patience it is not having good character. It’s having time.
