Are they born or made? Do they work hard or are they given it? Do they get labeled by others or do they fall on them like a raindrop? The classic and modern posh people are an unequivocal social segment, identifiable, instantly distinguishable, but impossible to define with rational tools because in their very designations —cayetanos, pollooperas, fachalecos or the posh people of a lifetime— there is an emotional and subjective connotation that avoids the fixed pattern, such as the measuring tape, the world time or the temperature at which water boils. They boil water with their own time, they measure time at their own pace and the distances are not like those of others, because they do not go by subway, bus or coach, and even traveling by public transport is very badly frowned upon. The most they can do is ride a bicycle, but not a multi-purpose card bike, but rather a Brompton, which, hey, takes up hardly any space at home when you fold them up if the house is more than one or two hundred metres.
Perhaps there are not so many that Raquel Peláez, deputy director of the EL PAÍS magazine S Fashionidentifies with demagogic bite “strata of the enjoying classes”, even though they exist, and the nose tends to suspect that the most showy and visible ones – I don’t know, from Tamara Falcó’s network neighborhoods to María Pombo’s – are grotesque caricatures of what truly interests the author, and incidentally the potential reader: how class relations, surname affinities, musketeer complicities and idle routines are woven so that the existence of that social segment is unequivocal, even though it is impossible to define them in a compact way, but rather diachronically and somewhat impressionistic, volatile and literary, which is the author’s best resource.
The aspirational drive, that desire to reach the next step on an imaginary social scale, which the author of I want to and I can’t. A story of the posh people of Spain As an argument, it may not be exactly that of the posh people – because they are already aspirated – but rather that of the segment that seeks integration into a social space that fascinates them and nourishes their own lives with meaning, without having to go to the extremes of Patrick Bateman’s American Psycho. In short: cash in hand or seized in huge estates, but money, money, money, even though almost always each of them reacts perplexed as a person “completely unaware of his position at the top of the world,” says the journalist.
Raquel Peláez has entered this inscrutable labyrinth with grace of style, direct and indirect confessions, malice moderated by professional empathy and good written and oral documentation. I don’t know if it was commissioned by Blackie Books, but if it wasn’t, and the book comes naturally to her, it has been a wild boar to confront such a nest of caricatures, deformations and ancestral daguerreotypes. But she shoots with a bullet when she points out the socially corrosive effect of “patrimonial capitalism” and the sacred notion of inheritance as a “legitimate transmission instrument that should not be regulated”… in order to happily perpetuate and multiply the gallop of inequality from which they live.
The rejonazos go left and right, from Marta Ortega to Taburete as a prototypical example of the ‘antiwoke’ program
Everything turns out better as the book approaches the present, and then the perspicacity and finesse grow, as if the journalist who spent 10 years in the editorial office of Vanity Fair (“I was, deep down, a snob who went to a private school run by priests,” although she is the granddaughter of a rebel in Asturias in 1934 and lives on rent, as she recalls at least twice) was nourished by the person, and both (the journalist and the person) enriched the writer to get the best out of her own experience. She has seen them and visited them, old and young, some cultured and others just rich, without coming from the slums herself and without belonging to a family of glossy paper or paper money. The intuitive sumptuousness of the descriptions of settings and clothing, of domestic environments and verbal gestures (with the fashion designer Givenchy or Romanones or the pro-socialist Elena Benarroch) unfolds with a grace in which the reader already knows he is at home: in the soft gauze of true poshness, vegetatively conservative, intravenously contemptuous of other tribes (the rest of the planet), jealous of an impeccable image according to its standards and proudly entrenched in class sentiment.
This last is the ingredient that Peláez emphasizes the most in relation to recent times and the growing wave of ultra-Spanish snobbery for ultra-Madrid that is felt in its habitat biting the dog-sanchism and other forms of WokeismThe nostalgia that he detects for the Restoration on the part of the Cayetanos is induced, of course, but it fits in with the “Spanish posh, bon vivant“who loves the Fair and the bulls, yearns for the tacky, old-fashioned elegance and, according to her, looks back to Alfonso XIII and his flight into exile as a “touchstone for canonical poshness.”
I would say that the vast majority of potential readers are not going to be cayetanos, nor fachalecos nor pollooperas, so almost none of them will feel their own experience or that of their surroundings reflected in the disguised testimonies included at the end of the book. They are real people, but with their names and identification data erased to avoid the pack of social media, and that is right, but it is a shame. It would be great to have the list of names, lineages, professions and relationships, and it would have been great to tell in more detail the cool subspecies of the posh that is the reticent or self-denying progressive posh (like me), or caviar left, that is, “the black beast that the far right calls posh whenever it can”, and so often with reason.
The rejonazos often go left and right, from Marta Ortega to Taburete as a prototypical example of Cayetano as a programmatic antiwoke which was invented by Carolina Durante and her singer, Diego Ibáñez, in 2018 (just as in the eighties, Hombres G were the official propagators of the pijo nomenclature). Since Vanity Fair Peláez lived the conversion of the hipsters In Cayetanos, already riding on Instagram, they normalized “the exhibitionism of privilege” (or the unprejudiced affirmation of their own opulence) and turned it into a business of influencers of a new star system with an integrative vocation of various aesthetics made into a baroque stump of neo-Spanish syncretism converted into an aspirational horizon for those who want and cannot: “Neoliberalism had legitimized them to be enormously proud of their position, patrimonial capitalism to want to perpetuate it and the industries that supported social networks to exhibit it.” A round business: the apotheosis of poshness.
I want to and I can’t. A story of the posh people of Spain
Raquel Pelaez
Blackie Books, 2024
336 pages, 21.90 euros
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