It doesn't happen to me all the time, but there are moments in our longing collective life that make me yearn for the malicious and often lucid pen of Llorenç Villalonga. The author of the Disruptions, of the myth of Bearn and the dystopia of touristified Mallorca refuted as Turclub in Andrea Víctrix He was also a broad-stroke caricaturist, loaded with bias and ideology, yes, but a caricaturist, nonetheless. He knew how to observe Mallorcan society with the cunning of the cats he liked so much (he had one, for example, that he called Moix), and then he portrayed it with the perfidy of a distorted mirror. Thus, the poet Aina Cohen was an alter ego of Maria Antònia Salvà, one of the best writers this island has ever produced, and a good part of the Mallorcan nobility of the time was scandalized to find themselves (or not to find themselves!) portrayed among the few dozen pages of Death of a LadyHis novels were often parades of characters who moved between the grotesque and the ambivalent, between sarcasm and the nevertheless.
And I've missed him. I've missed him these last few days, following the annual reception of the Spanish monarchs at Marivent. Because... can there be anything more provincial than being one of the six hundred guests at this comedy? Can there be anything more provincial than being one of the five or ten or twenty who publicly reject the invitation, and who show it on social media to make it clear that they won't be going, but that the guests were there? I have to confess that I wasn't one of those or the other, but if by some sudden misfortune I had ended up attending, I wouldn't have been surprised to find myself with the Marquis of Collera (or Levante), Obdúlia Montcada's wife, very much in love with no one from Betría to Bebé, nor with the very measured woman from Mormolás, but who would have started from the soiree before the hors d'oeuvres were served so that no one would say that in Béarn ("Béarn, fish and meat") people go hungry.
And that, more or less, is what some six hundred souls went to do in the occupied Marivent palace. On one side were the members of the Monarchist Party, or perhaps we should call it the PP and Vox, dressed in guava trees in homage to King Felipe; the green tie must have been hot for them, in the middle of August. On the other side were the members of the Republican Party, that is, the Socialist Party, which by statute defends the end of the monarchy and which, for canapés, goes wherever necessary and applauds. The liberals, in turn, were discussing whether to fight again or create yet another party, and the Catalanists and the leftists were outside, in the manifestation. Then there was the press, eager to capture some news that, of course, would pass in front of any event localThe rest seems to have been sweaty faces, eloquent castrations, half-stolen selfies, and a homogeneous patina and shelf of neo-vassalage. Suits of clothing made of tongues and hyaluronic acid. Pages and servants. Whoever said it, that the Disruptions Were Villalonga's works only a 20th century thing?
