It happened in the last year of the 20th century, during a book signing. Fernando Fernán Gómez, a pathologically shy person extraordinarily averse to crowd bathing who was about to turn 80 at the time, lost patience with an admirer who asked him to sign another book, an earlier one that was not the subject of the event.
The devout man, who had waited in line to get his prize, was 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, ugly manners to the genius and made as if to turn around emphasizing the wrongness of his admiration.
Fernán Gómez got up angrily from the table where he was signing and feinted towards him, trembling, and with his deafening voice of a thousand storms he shouted: “If you think I have a bad character, I have it, and a lot! Unfortunately, I am a rude person. Leave me alone. Go to hell. Fuck it!”
I remembered it this Saturday, when Xavier Trias, after an institutional and educated 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, said: “If not I’m going to be mayor, give them to everyone!”
Trias is not the first politician in years to decide to dispense with the restraints of good manners and patience to confuse –as María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop wrote a few days ago in El País– “the truth with the relief”. Very famous, because it was nice, was the time when, with all that cachaza mania that adorned him, José Antonio Labordeta sent the PP bench to hell from the rostrum of Congress.
Among the commonplaces that we apply to almost everything without the slightest empirical contrast, the one that is relevant is the consideration of older people as calmer and more tolerant humans than average. But it is just the opposite. One only has to look at the frequent anxiety they show in front of the queues, their great fondness for skipping time to get on the bus, ordering tomatoes or paying at the supermarket, with funny tricks –including pretending to be stupid or deaf– that all of us who know well we have dispatched at a delicatessen counter.
Yesterday marked the 13th anniversary of the death of the genius José Saramago, whose surliness as an impatient old man we attended at the Casa de América in Madrid during the presentation of the film adaptation of Essay on blindness, to the astonishment and discomfort of the filmmaker Fernando Meirelles .
Someone wrote 23 years ago that the reason for Fernando Fernán Gómez’s intemperance was simple: “He can afford the luxury.” At the time, I did not understand what that meant, but since we are celebrating our birthday and the mountain we descended is farther away than the ocean that awaits us, one has already learned that the requirement of patience is not having a good character . It’s having time.
