I say goodbye to the year with intimate satisfaction: my presidential term in the community of neighbors ends. A turbulent year. The elevator has broken down, in front of the building there is a voyeur who records at night – I have not been able to do anything there, the option of an economic hitman has been rejected – and we started in January with a robbery – in my house, the presidential headquarters – and we have finished the year with another.
On Saturday the doorbell rang at seven in the afternoon. Would it be Laura Dern dressed as a lawyer passing through Barcelona (one of my nonsense for 2024)? I open it and see two Mossos kneeling, looking at the bottom of the door, as if they were looking at Cuenca, but no: they are conducting investigations. I have escaped robbery by sleeping at home every night, unlike the victims (an Anglo-Argentine couple with two children). Everyone assumes that the authorship corresponds to a foreign band.
And speaking of Camus. The elderly in the neighborhood like to walk with Latina caregivers. The picture is tender, but it saddens me: I can't imagine Laura Dern in the role, things as they are.
Saturday night, boxing. Three of the four amateur bouts are won by Moroccans. Since Ben Ali, the Rooster of Melilla, he had not seen so many settled North Africans box well. If there is a noble sport with a “culture of effort” it is sixteen strings.
On Sunday the 31st, shortly before dinner, I realize that Vichy is missing. I cannot conceive life or a New Year's Eve without Vichy, that drink that everyone ignores before dinner and to which everyone swears afterward. I cross the street and, as always, the shopkeeper from Pakistan – at first he pretended to be Indian – is there, glued to his cell phone, from which come some voices from a movie in which a guy with a mustache hooks up with an orphan girl from the school. charity for marriage purposes.
He doesn't even watch me: there is trust. In the end, the "friend" thing will be true, the treatment that street flower vendors also give me, capable of giving me a rose even when I have dinner with my son. Although some steal and a few rob, without immigrants this thing about Spain would be something else, duller. I am one of those who sign the deal.
