You reach an age accompanied by various situations, where no one gives you a book and you give roses for an endearing ritual. You curse your cell phone and you don't even thank those who, in an outpouring of love, customize their WhatsApp messages to sincerely congratulate you on your saint. To those who don't customize, me neither. It is the day of the year that you would prefer to be called Filomeno, unfortunately, as Torrente Ballester wrote. I have received dozens of e-mails of congratulations with 50% discounts if I go to buy clothes or peaches between today, which by the way their stores are closed, and tomorrow, which I have a full schedule.
That loneliness or independence turns Sant Jordi into an internal battle that is corrected when you go out into the street and see the neighborhood florist, despite the death of Pepe, who sold orchids like no one else, happy with the queue that is organized, with transversal people and transgenerational, in front of his small kiosk.
It's early in the morning and people love and on days like today they try to prove it either with a rose that doesn't smell of anything and will end up hanging or with a book that, like most, will be banished to a shelf.
But this irreverent thought, maybe real, maybe hyperbolic, is liquidated when you get into the swarms of miraculous happiness that are in every corner, of intertwined hands, of stitched tribes making the civilized world jealous, of the collective pride that she grabs a rose and a book pretending to be a little better one day.
Dedication hunters set out to capture the author, others look for the bookseller who recommends one that sells little but is well liked. Then I walk through the center where they sell roses put in garbage buckets with water while I would pay to hug the author who hasn't sold a single one. And I'd bet it's him who, in a bookstore that also sells washing machines, with all the faces of Bélmez moving around him with long dedications inversely proportional to their queues of readers, is standing still with his self-help book hanging from a lonely frame like him.
People smile, huddling together, loving each other, spending time and of course it's a wonderful day. A sweet imposed happiness that it would be advisable to continue today.
