This story starts in reverse and ends the same way. Yes, some things have changed in the lives of women in the last half century, and they seem so obvious, so normal now, that we have once again lost the thread of history. Which began more or less like this: “When I knew all the truth, señora, it was too late to go back, señora”. RocÃo Jurado spits out the troubles of being “the other”, the lover, the meuca, the bandarra, the one who has nurtured books and films and, what’s worse, real life, of tragic characters.
The one that, Concha Piquer sang, “I have no right to anything, because I don’t wear a ring, with a date inside”. Women immolated on the altar of masculinity, despised and vilified, object of abuse, trapped in a relationship that we would now say, rather than toxic, of domination. Known and accepted by all as long as the forms were maintained, the bottoms who were going to care, it was just a woman, “the other”, that was all said and done. “The other”, the one that had no value, alas, because “as long as you live peacefully, what does it matter that I die”. Without a complaint or a word, ouch.
But in this story that begins in reverse, it was not the lover who discovered, too late, that his man was not free, but the wife, and by then the napkins were already embroidered with his name. When the Princess of Wales died at the Alma bridge, I commented that everything was over for Charles and Camilla, that no one would forgive them for being together after that marriage of three. My colleague José Martà Gómez replied that it was just the opposite. He was right.
Yesterday I read in a British tabloid (I confess, I like the subject) that with the coronation of Camilla the country had definitively overcome the trauma of Lady Di’s disappearance. The crown was put on by the stepmother, but also by the lover. At Mitterrand’s funeral, we admired the presence next to the wife of “the other”. A French thing, some said, that could not happen anywhere else. They were also wrong. The next step is for “the other” to disappear definitively from our vocabulary.
