Winston Churchill said that the defunct Soviet Union was a riddle wrapped in a mystery within an enigma, and the same can be said a couple of months ago of the British royal family. Just like matrushkas, those hollow Russian dolls that come out of each other, something similar happens with the Windsors, only instead of figurines what appear are questions, secrets and surprises. Many, perhaps too many.
Under enormous pressure to clarify the reason for her prolonged absence, the Palace yesterday published a video of Catherine (filmed on Wednesday by the BBC) in which she explains, looking good and reading a text, that she suffers from cancer (she does not say what. type) and is undergoing “preventive chemotherapy.”
Behind the logical wave of sympathy generated by the announcement of the disease – and even more so in the case of a princess whom the British press treats with difficulty – numerous and delicate questions arise. The main one is why, expressly or tacitly, Kensington Palace has maintained throughout this time (nine weeks) that Catherine’s problem was not cancerous, when in the end it turns out that it was.
Trying to square the circle, the wife of the heir to the throne presented in the video a chronology in which a surgical intervention is scheduled for a serious intestinal problem that is not suspected to have anything to do with cancer, she undergoes it in London Clinic on January 17, and subsequent tests suggest that there is, unexpectedly, a cancer problem.
Undoubtedly, today more is known than yesterday about what is happening to Catalina, and part of the enigma has been revealed, but the questions remain numerous: what was the original intervention about? Why did she already tell herself, before knowing that she had cancer, that she would be away from public life at least until after Easter? Why, every time it was asked about her health, did the Palace refer to the original statement that stated that her problem was not cancer-causing? Have there been lies, or has the truth been broken in some way by making her see something that she was not?
The parallel is striking between the case of King Charles III, who went to the hospital to solve a benign prostate problem and ended up with an unspecified cancer, and that of Catherine, who went to the same clinic for an abdominal procedure and also left with a cancer about which nothing is explained and that has been hidden all this time from the subjects, in the midst of the controversy over the famous doctored photo and William’s last-minute absence from a mass in Windsor for King Constantine of Greece.
The Princess of Wales explains in the video – perhaps too late – the trauma that the diagnosis has meant for her and her family, the time it took to accept the news and explain it to her children Jorge, Carlota and Luis, to “ focus on the things that really matter” and take the first steps in search of your physical and mental well-being. At the same time, she thanks all the expressions of affection received, asks for time, space and understanding for not giving more details, and shows her solidarity with all those who suffer from the disease. “You are not alone, do not lose faith and hope.”
Catalina, in an attempt to get closer to the people after so much opacity, pointed out that the last two months have been very hard, but it is as if she turned the page after accepting the problem and changed the shock for a positive spirit of recovery (“I feel good and stronger with each passing day, waiting for the moment to return to a job that I like. The Palace indicated for its part that “it is confident in his full recovery.”
Yesterday, King Charles III applauded the “bravery” of his daughter-in-law, whose return to public functions has been further delayed following the publication of the video. Now she is no longer expected to appear in public at the Easter Sunday mass, nor is she expected to return to activity immediately after Easter. After delaying the announcement that he had cancer until it was unsustainable, now the Prince of Wales’s plan B is to have no pressure to return to the fore, and to put an end to rumors of William’s affair and a marital crisis.
For this they have – and surely will have – the sympathy of their subjects. But questions, riddles, mysteries and enigmas continue to come out of the Windsor dolls, like Russian matrushkas.