Finding out about the feat instantly from my friend Paco March, I went straight to the newsroom’s website and, excited, sang the happy news:
–Morante has cut off a tail in Seville!
The writing of La Vanguardia is formidable, diverse and plural, but it has a shortcoming: I am the only one who likes bullfights. There is more support for RCD Espanyol – I have located two and a half parrots – and even for non-profit mountaineering than for bullfighting, hence the need to add something that would add dimension to the news.
–It had been 50 years since anyone cut off a tail in Seville!
Suddenly, behind a computer, I noticed that a young colleague was breaking the box. Come on, she was hiding her laughter.
I took it, too, jokingly and without getting into the rag. In worse places we have dealt!
Now, is this the society we want? Young people who have not been taught that docking a tail in Seville is not an event and consists of opening the door of the Prince, being carried on the shoulders through the streets to a hotel, while the anti-bullfighting drivers snipe at the matador and the tourists take out photos, convinced that in Spain we go for a walk in the evenings with some big men dressed in lights with appendages in their hands.
The fault, of course, lies with the Government –whoever it is– for not including bullfighting language workshops in the classrooms. If so, young people would know that “God distributes luck” is not a Treasury campaign and “there is no bad fifth” refers to the hope of stopping yawning on the power line and not to the difficulties in finding a partner after four punctures . Or that “after the bull” is what the advantagers in the arena and the commentators on the radio do after every election.
Nonsense aside, bulls lack social prestige, not languages, and there remains Morante’s peak afternoon and the validity of “he did a job with two ears and a tail”, applicable to a good job.
Thanks to the generation of ’27, the bullfighting language, so popular, was legalized by the Royal Academy and there it continues, like Don Tancredo. And what cannot be, cannot be, and it is also impossible.
