I am fascinated by searching among the greguerÃas of Ramón Gómez de la Serna for phrases that are accurate darts that have survived the passage of time. Listening these days to José MarÃa Aznar and Isabel DÃaz Ayuso, who link their complaints as if they were the Pimpinela duo, I have found a greguerÃa that should be put on a magnet on their fridges. It is the one that says: “He had such a bad memory that he forgot that he had a bad memory and he remembered everything.”
Although the fashionable couple of the Spanish right seems not to remember the repeated pacts with the PNV, I am convinced that they are very present in their memory. In a few hours apart, Aznar has called them “bounty seekers who want a consultation in the Basque Country and a general release of terrorists.” For his part, Ayuso has declared that there are racist behaviors in the PNV, which were already present in its foundations.
If there is a party that does not deceive anyone, it is the formation chaired by Andoni Ortúzar. Aitor Esteban formulated it publicly in Congress: “The PNV is not a party with a vocation for government in Spain, our political responsibility is in the Basque Country.” Aznar knows this perfectly, and after Majestic’s pact with CiU, he also sought the support of the PNV. The PP won the elections in 1996, but remained in 156 seats, far from an absolute majority and needed the votes of the Catalan and Basque nationalists, who passed the cymbal.
Pujol and Arzalluz had been severely attacked by the right in the campaign, but the day after they found all the graces. The phrase from Arzalluz is: “We have taken more things from Aznar in 14 days than from the PSOE in 13 years.” His loot was impressive: improvements in the quota, the transfer of excise taxes (alcohol, tobacco and hydrocarbons) or the return of the historical heritage of the nationalists.
But the PNV also approved Mariano Rajoy’s taxes in 2017 with the hope of finishing the legislature, when Ayuso was already walking through the corridors of Genoa with aspirations. Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez explained it very well: memory eliminates bad memories and magnifies good ones, thanks to this artifice we manage to cope with the past.
