"Few people are capable of being happy if they don't hate another person, nation or faith." Bertrand Russell.
A couple of weeks ago I was in a place in Andalusia having drinks with a businessman and a lawyer. They questioned me about the Catalan issue. I told them that the polls confirmed what I was hearing on the street: that the pro-independence fervor is not what it was in the feverish year of 2017 when what people insist on calling “the referendum” was held.
I added the opinion that if a real referendum were held today the Unionists would win. My interlocutors were disappointed. No, don't be scared. They did not belong to a hitherto unknown species: Andalusian Catalan indepes. Quite the contrary. "Yeah," one of them told me, "but don't tell me that those who would vote to stay in Spain feel like real 'Spanish' Spaniards...".
Over the course of many years traveling around the Peninsula, I have been struck by the obsession that people have for Catalans in general and independence supporters in particular. The manias are part of the identity of people. In the case of political manias, they help us escape from our loneliness and define who we are in front of the world. That's why it's so hard for us to let them go. The idea that the whole of Catalonia is not a hotbed of anti-Spanish sentiment is hard to recognize for those accustomed to expressing that very pleasant sensation, indignation, through anti-Catalan sentiment. The plan screwed them up.
Just as Gerard Piqué's decision to leave football and, as an inevitable consequence, move away from the public stage, bothers him. With the possible exceptions of Carles Puigdemont and Pep Guardiola, no individual has fulfilled the role of “Catalan we love to hate” better than Piqué. And that, unlike Puigdemont and Guardiola, has not been defined in favor of independence.
Why is Piqué so itchy? Partly because it has a provocative point that some of us find amusing. Nobody has celebrated the great victories of his Barça against Real Madrid with more mocking impudence. And unlike 99.9 percent of professional athletes, he doesn't hold back when asked for his political views. He has not hesitated to pronounce himself in favor of a legal referendum on Catalan independence and dialogue between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, something that, as we have seen, ruins the party for a good part of the Catalan and Spanish population.
But there is a deeper reason to understand why when he played for the Spanish team the fans of Madrid, Alicante, Seville or León whistled at him every time he touched the ball. He conforms, more than any other public figure, to the stereotype that many Spaniards have had of the Catalans for a hundred years or more: that they consider themselves superior – more “cosmopolitan” than the others – and that they are peseteros.
Piqué is left over, he is cosmopolitan and earns a lot of money. He has charisma, a quality that comes from an enormous confidence in yourself. And with some reason. He has been a great footballer who left his soul not only for his club but also for the Spanish team that he helped win the World Cup in 2010, something that many ungrateful people prefer to forget. He is also an intelligent guy, comfortable in his skin anywhere in the world, who speaks excellent English. Of Spanish complexes, nothing.
To make matters worse, or to make those who need to hate him more happy, he is a successful businessman who "likes it," he is tall and handsome and had a couple of children with one of the richest and most desired women in the world.
Am I passing? Maybe yes. Not because we are friends (I spoke to Pique only once) or because I think he is going to pass on a small part of his fortune to me (I am not cool enough for his business style) but because I will always be grateful to him. It may be the reason why I was lucky enough to leave El País. The last article I wrote for the then rabidly anti-Catalan Madrid newspaper, in October 2017, proposed that Piqué was “three towns away from any Spanish politician” and concluded with the words “Piqué president”. No. Not from Barca. From Spain. Two days later I received the dismissal letter. I still celebrate him not only because he allowed me to switch to La Vanguardia but because of the opportunity I had, for a glorious day, to bite like Piqué.
