“Only a man who has felt the utmost despair is capable of feeling the greatest happiness. It is necessary to have wanted to die to know how good it is to live”. It is Edmond Dantès who utters this phrase in that immense work that is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, but it could also be part of the thoughts of Jorge Rodríguez, the man who has in his hands conditioning part of the future of the Valencian PSPV. Rodríguez, former president of the Valencia Provincial Council, was arrested and tried, together with his team, for some crimes of which they were acquitted. In the investigation he was removed from the PSPV, and he He set up his own party, Ens Uneix, which governs Ontinyent for the second legislature. Now, its provincial deputy can decide who will control the only great institution that the socialists could support with Compromís, or end up in the hands of the PP and Vox. Jorge Rodríguez left the PSPV as Edmond Dantès and returns as the Count of Monte Cristo.
Dumas’s work is more than a novel. It is a psychology treatise on the great human weaknesses and the power of emotions: betrayal, love, ambition or revenge, pervade a text that, in my case, I must have read twenty times throughout my life. . All these feelings are part of the harsh story of Jorge Rodríguez, whose mother committed suicide shortly after the case against him began (Edmundo Dantès’s father died in absolute misery and desperate for the fate of his son). When political logic is insufficient to explain the conduct, we must return to the literature, because only then can we understand why the mayor of Ontinyent is willing to carry out a decision that would leave the PSPV without the Valencia Provincial Council, questions the authority of Ximo Puig , it would block the ability of the main rival of the still Valencian president to project his notoriety in the party, and it would give the PP absolute institutional hegemony in the Valencian Community.
In the novel the traitors are well defined; The worst is Fernando Mondego, Count of Morcerf, who, in addition to conspiring against him, snatches his beloved Mercedes from him: Who is the Valencian Mondego? But my favorite character, apart from the protagonist, is the one who gives meaning to the story, Abbe Faria, the Italian priest and scholar that Edmundo meets in the If prison. This man is a formidable metaphor for hope in the face of doom; Abbe Faria will educate Dantès, make him a stronger man with a greater ability to understand the world, and will help him resolve many doubts about the events that led him to that terrible prison. In addition, he will give her the hint of a treasure, the treasure that will allow her to return to Paris rich and powerful to fulfill his revenge.
In this Valencian story, an abbé Faria is missing, because the wise old man explains to Edmundo Dantè the difference between justice and revenge. “What I offer you is knowledge,” he tells the young prisoner. We have already said it in this newspaper, the PSPV was unfair to Jorge Rodríguez, very unfair, and that is the material of which the desire of the mayor of Ontinyent is made, like the Count of Monte Cristo, to take revenge on those who gave him the back when he needed help the most. It is not a unique case, politics, and Valencian politics, is written with a large number of politicians abandoned by their own parties, as also happened to Rita Barberá with the PP.
Jorge Rodríguez has set a price for his revenge, and so far that price has not been paid. The PSPV and the Valencian PP are eager to win the favor of the mayor of Ontinyent, because they know that for some it could be the beginning of the end and for others the end of the beginning. He knows it, and in his heart he harbors, like Edmund Dantès, an answer that no longer belongs to politics. The man who has the PSPV in check must have read The Count of Monte Cristo when at a certain moment he says: “Every evil has two remedies: time and silence.”
