Twitter can be a very cruel site. And very funny. And often both at the same time. When good material arrives, it is dissected and squeezed until not even the skin remains. It is what comedians have always done with current affairs, but for a few years there have not been just a couple of comedians on TV, but we have met thousands of people devising and sharing thousands of jokes on networks about the penultimate mistake of any more or less well-known character.
This week it was Marina Castaño’s turn. The reason: He has written a letter to Camilo José Cela 20 years after his death. Anyone would expect a more or less emotional and more or less nostalgic text. But it is not that, or it is not only that: in this letter published in vanity, Castaño comes to tell Cela that it’s a good thing he didn’t have to suffer the disaster that Spain has become in these two decades.
There is no bad paragraph or sentence that has not been highlighted in a tweet: he calls Cela’s son a “close relative”, complains about the inclusive language, speaks of the king emeritus to say that “his situation has been overshadowed”, as if Juan Carlos I would have been the victim of a plot, and he gives José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez slaps to the point that, as @SrJimVill tweets, only a “sanxe dog” and a “enjoy the voted” are missing. Castaño ends up telling Cela that he has rebuilt his life with a vascular surgeon, which ends with a “you see, from the intelligentsia to science”, as if implying that the good Nobel Prize is that of Literature and those of science are like the technical Oscars.
Some tweeters have tried to summarize the text: “The jihadists, with the help of feminists and a certain Rodríguez Zapatero, have left me without picasso. He loves you Marina.” wrote @calcosares. Others chose their favorite fragment and not even the photo captions were spared. My favorite moment is this: “Threshold, two months after your departure, he released a piece of garbage titled Cela, an exquisite corpse. Despicable. He died, by the way.” I like to imagine Castaño adding a “it was well used, very unpleasant” to erase it later, in the style of Hemingway: less is more. By the way, Francisco Umbral wrote for EL PAÍS between 1976 and 1988, and his columns can be found on the web. In 1984 he interviewed Cela, and that text is wonderful (really): “The waiter asks for half a dozen oysters. I order a dozen.
My plan at night is to speak to my wife only with phrases from Marina Castaño’s letter. I’m telling you. Keep in touch.
— Lidia García 🌈the queer caní bot💃 (@thequeercanibot) January 18, 2022
But I digress. Continuing with Castaño’s letter, there were tweeters who related it to other current issues: “What my body asks of me is a good letter from Marina Castaño to Djokovic”, wrote the journalist José Luis Sastre. Others pointed out that the lyrics of Rosalía’s last song, the theme of the previous day, it was almost boring by comparison, despite those verses that said “the second thing is to screw you, the first thing is God”.
Precisely, one of the conclusions of Rosalía’s mini-controversy was that some of us did not understand the lyrics because it was not for us. Rosalía does not write for people like me, who am of an age to yell at a cloud in the purest style of Abe Simpson. And perhaps the same thing will happen with this letter: it is not written for me, a liberal with the beard of an official from the Caja Postal de Ahorros, to recover an expression from Umbral’s interview with Cela. There will be those who read Castaño and think: “Well, yes, at least the Nobel Prize winner has not had the displeasure of facing the children”. You sure have your audience. But he certainly wasn’t on Twitter this week.
#died