You reach an age accompanied by various situations, where no one gives you a book and you hand out roses for an endearing ritual. You curse your mobile and you no longer even thank those who, in a fit of appreciation, personalize their watsaps to sincerely congratulate you on your saint’s day. To those who don’t personalize, neither do I. It is the day of the year that you would prefer to call yourself Filomeno, despite my regret, as Torrente Ballester wrote. I receive dozens of congratulatory emails with 50% discounts if I’m going to buy clothes or peaches between today, which by the way their stores are closed, and tomorrow, when my schedule is full.
That loneliness or independence turns Sant Jordi into an internal battle that is corrected when you go out into the street and see the neighborhood florist, despite Pepe’s death, who sold orchids like no one else, happy with the queue that is being organized, with transversal and transgenerational people, in front of their small kiosk.
It is early in the morning and people love, and on days like today they try to show it, be it with a rose that may not smell like anything and will end up withering, or with a book that, like most, will be banished on a shelf.
But this irreverent thought, perhaps real, perhaps hyperbolic, is liquidated when you get into the swarms of miraculous happiness that are in every corner, of intertwined hands, of stitched tribes envying the civilized world, of the collective pride that clings to a rose and a book pretending for one day to be something better.
Dedication hunters launch themselves to capture the author, others look for the bookseller who recommends one that sells little but is well liked. So I walk through the center where roses are sold in garbage cans with water, while I would pay to hug the author who has not sold a single one. And I would bet that it is the one who, in a bookstore that also sells washing machines, with all the faces of Bélmez moving next to him with long dedications inversely proportional to their queues of readers, stands still with his self-help book hanging from a solitary frame like he.
Smile people squeezing, loving each other, spending and of course it’s a wonderful day. A sweet feigned happiness that it would be advisable to continue today.
