Any Sunday it snows and the blessed social networks are filled with white and dull images. Suddenly, the usual hen house of stadiums and VAR discussions – room II of the Supreme Court of football – are dampened. Their half-digested pellets and their long sideburns do not reach the surface waters of Sunday afternoon, which are the meeting point of lodges and small game, the fishing line with which men once ran a country and today too.
It doesn’t snow in Madrid and it’s a relief. First of all, because of the well-known bad track record of the local authorities for having fun with the water, the ice, the heat, the calima or any meteor of those who sanction a station and which in the capital of the kingdom generate inconveniences of natural catastrophe and the adventures of a fantasy by Roland Emmerich. And secondly, because if they fall back to the federal district, even if it doesn’t catch and the miracle dies as soon as it hits the ground, it would be overshadowed by anything else that happened in this country, formerly called Spain and which court journalism has converted into The Outskirts But it doesn’t snow here but in the mountains and valleys of the north. The ill-fated winter, knowing how close it is to its definitive extinction and how important it is to leave always leaving a good taste in the mouth, gives one last annual feast to the ski resorts, which so much these months have passed and almost all of them are doomed to die of malnutrition before the end of this decade.
It’s so much so that you’ve been raised high up in the mountains that drooling in front of the white cover doesn’t create a habit. The mountaineer is reconciled to the provisional condition of all ill-humor when volves fall, as happens to the coast with the fierce swell. And there is no tiktoker or Instagrammer – in generational terms, children and parents – who can resist capturing and spreading a video of the peaceful white death to which James Joyce gave his best subordinates. From a quarter left of the kingdom’s capital, it’s a drowsy pleasure to watch Slovenian flyer Peter Prevc reunite with the wind on the springboard of Lahti in faraway Finland, barely a month before he stops flying, while in the smartphone the friends of the coal lands of León marvel once again at the effect of whiteness on the light of the still short afternoons.
Megapixels have learned to do justice to lightning, twilight and heavy snow with the precision of the Inuit vocabulary, but they still miss the spectacle of snow: the void of sound. The snow robs the voice and the subjects of the surrounds, the harmonics and the reverberations. The world expresses itself with the confused muteness of a strange dream that is not reached by the noise and fury of goals or rallies. An ephemeral peace that, as Joyce suspected, descends towards its final sunset. The time will change soon.
