On any given Sunday it snows and the blessed social networks are filled with white and deaf images. Suddenly, the usual chicken coop of stadiums and VAR discussions – room II of the Supreme Court of football – are muffled. Their half-digested pellets and their long whiskers do not reach the shallow waters of Sunday afternoon, which are the meeting point of the boxes and the small game, the thread with which men once ran a country and also today.
It doesn’t snow in Madrid and it is a relief. Firstly, due to the well-known bad tricks of the local authorities to deal with water, ice, heat, haze or any meteor that sanctions a season and that in the capital of the kingdom generates problems of natural catastrophe and the adventures of a fantasy by Roland Emmerich. And secondly, because if it mops in the federal district, even if it doesn’t work and the miracle dies as soon as it hits the ground, anything else that happens in that country, once called Spain and which courtly journalism has converted into Las Vegas, would be eclipsed. Outskirts. But it doesn’t snow here but in the mountains and valleys of the north. The badly wounded winter, knowing the proximity of its definitive extinction and how important it is to always leave a good taste in your mouth, gives a last annual feast to the ski resorts, which have been so hungry these months and which are almost all condemned to die of malnutrition before the end of this decade.
It doesn’t matter how high up in the mountains one grew up, the enchantment of the blanket does not create a habit. The mountaineer reconciles himself with the provisional condition of all bad humor when rags fall, as happens to coastal people when faced with rough waves. And there is no tiktoker or instagramer – in generational terms, children and parents – who can resist capturing and disseminating a video of the peaceful white death to which James Joyce gave his best subordinates. From a left room in the kingdom’s capital, it is a sleepy pleasure to see the Slovenian flyer Peter Prevc reconnect with the wind on the Lahti trampoline, in the very distant Finland, just a month before he stopped flying, while his friends on his smartphone from 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 the great snowfall with the precision of the Inuit vocabulary, but they still miss the tremendous thing about snowfall: the emptiness of sound. The snow robs the voice and the subjects of their envelopes, harmonics and reverberations. The world expresses itself with the confused silence of a strange dream that is not reached by the sound and fury of goals or rallies. An ephemeral peace that, as Joyce suspected, descends towards its final twilight. The time will soon change.
