The day after election night, La 2 had the good idea to broadcast La fiera de mi niña (1938), directed by Howard Hawks, with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The main couple (a paleontologist who has lost a dinosaur bone and a wealthy heiress who has a pet leopard) don’t get along, so they have this conversation, which is started by Grant:
-Let’s play a game?
I love it, which one?
–You see, I cover my eyes with my hand and you disappear.
The film is in black and white, as some stale would like it to be Spain again. And its diversity is a value, although sometimes its management is complex. Some would love to play Gary Grant’s game and make the plural composition of Spain disappear, which has its most accentuated expression in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who is Galician and works as such, made one of his first speeches as leader of the PP in the Cercle d’Economia, where he valued plural Spain and recognized Catalonia as a nationality, on the other hand something that appears in the Constitution. But the satisfaction of the Catalan audience turned into disgust the day after in the Madrid loudspeakers and they had to take a step back. As Antoni Puigverd wrote yesterday, plurality has been denied a thousand times in the last thirty years since Aznar’s absolute majority.
In his first institutional speech after the elections, Pedro Sánchez presented Spain to the King and Queen as a country proud of its plurality and diversity. The will is clear, another thing is the resistance of the State that is recognized more in its centrality than in decentralization. And it closes itself like a snail in its shell at every opportunity to affectively conquer the periphery.
In My Girl’s Beast, Grant says that when you’re fighting a leopard in the middle of a pond, you can’t run away. That is why it is better to convince the leopard by all means that it is in the interest of both of them to succeed in the extreme situation that lies ahead. I don’t know if Junts have the aggressiveness of the feline, but in his demands to the PSOE he runs the risk of drowning in the pond.
