For almost three years now, from Monday to Friday, I have been awakened by the metallic roars of the work in front of me. When they finished building the house at Christmas, we naive neighbors breathed a sigh of relief: we thought they would remove the rabid green crane – its arm, at night, looks like a monster’s tentacle – that emits an exhausting disagreement. But, after a few days of celebration, the operators returned with long faces. “We’re depressed”, the foreman told me: “After building and dismantling half the house, the owner is now asking to change the bathrooms, because he doesn’t like them. And he added sarcastically: “Then it’s time to do the lawn, which is what they call the porch and the garden.”
Six ostentatious columns went up next to the house, perverting that piece of urban landscape and encroaching on the rest of the discreet constructions. “As if Nero came to live here”, exclaimed a neighbor one evening when she took the dog out. “It must be Nero, the rich man”, answered another. To me, on the other hand, it seems a very Mar-a-Lago style, stubborn to represent a great life, as if the splendor of the houses stuck to their inhabitants.
I look again and again at the photos of Trump’s bathroom, full of filing cabinets with state secrets. The rock crystal lamps, the veins of the black Marquina marble and the out-of-service toilet that must smell like sewage make for a decadent and murky picture. This is the bathroom in the Lake Room, once a guest suite.
You can’t appreciate Miró’s paintings like the one that hung in the bathroom of that Malay Juan Antonio Roca (the boss of the urban tripijocs of the Marbella de Gil), who wanted to defecate with art. There are also no cinema screens, that blessed aspiration of some capricious people to have a cinephile bath, which they end up giving up after fifteen minutes with the tension on the floor.
Trump’s toilet reproduces his sense of taste, minus the minimalism. He probably ended up imposing on the decorator that mixture of charmless historicism and pomposity, in the style of my fateful neighbor.
Confidential White House papers are also piled on the stage of what was a ballroom, and I think of the provisional state of life of a Trump increasingly cornered by justice. The rooms of his house, which have ended up being turned into a clandestine warehouse, confirm the collapse of its inhabitant. The information about nuclear weapons or Guantámano piled up next to a hanger with their suits in plastic sleeves exudes a demoralizing ugliness.
To the true aesthetes, the trumps of our world, as well as to the very rich in the neighborhood, cause grief in addition to horror. I re-read a book published by Quintero and Gala, Trece noches (Planeta), where El Loco asks the writer what he feels about big names, about myths. And he replies: “I feel compassion. I am convinced that the stars are extraordinarily lonely. I know that when the brightness of the spotlight is removed, they are left without light, absolutely dead, and must continue to respect and live by what they precisely despise, which is the opinion of others”. Gala also claimed that wanting to be the best means fighting in a ring, until someone knocks you down. “A terrible thing”, he concludes.
The election campaign will soon begin, and the leaders of all parties want us to believe that they are the best: that they have the biggest house, with the ballroom and toilets for everyone. But the only thing we should care about is what they hide.
