Many things have been said about Qatar. It has been said that the country has fabulous gas deposits and that, thanks to these deposits, its emirs tie camels with sausages and are able to sign checks whose figures, portentously full of zeros, defy traditional algebra and are illegible to the common man. of mortals. It has also been said that they force women to wear a veil and adopt a subordinate position, that they severely punish gay couples, that they impose, in short, a suffocating moral dictatorship that assumes the principles of Wahhabism, one of the most rigorous and frowns of the Islamic religion. All this has been said, and it is true. Yet when you land at the airport in the capital, Doha, gleaming as if the cotton butler had just passed, he doesn’t get all these impressions at once. You have to sharpen your eyes, understand the hidden subtleties and not fall into the temptation, so frequent in occasional travelers, to affirm emphatically “this is how it is”. When Doha grows up, it wants to be Las Vegas. They have built a promenade next to the Persian Gulf which they pompously call ‘La Corniche’, which sounds like croissants, a white martini and the French Riviera. Is it a nice place? It is difficult to define it that way, at least if we look at the Dictionary of the Royal Academy, which requires “a certain proportion and beauty”. Proportion does not exist here: everything is excess. There is a sea, and that always helps, but this new city has an impostor and childish air, like the drawing of a feverish child. At one end of the promenade stand some formidable and very tall buildings, with whimsical architecture, many of which are still under construction. There are cranes everywhere and some workers (brown complexion, shaggy beard, tired expression) are busy without much enthusiasm putting the finishing touches on the pavement. They won’t make it in time for the World Cup, but they have an excuse: it’s two in the afternoon and it’s oppressively hot. The thermometer reads 32 degrees, but it’s a very self-convincing 90 degrees, flaming and drenched in moisture. In the most imposing towers they have placed gigantic posters with the soccer figures that are going to run around the Qatari stadiums. One is walking through the streets, hot and inhospitable, and suddenly comes across a Cyclopean version of Bale or Luis Suárez. If we look at the posters, there is no doubt that the star of Spain is Pedri. The photograph of him hangs on a slightly hidden but good-sized building. He is accompanied by a legend in Spanish: “Precision”. Doha can never be Las Vegas because it lacks sin and that ends up being very boring. There are no casinos on La Corniche, no bars, hardly any restaurants, forget about quirky guys and carnal temptations. To the side of the promenade is the Fan Zone and things are likely to get a bit out of hand there when the World Cup mambo starts, but, at two in the afternoon, this place, whose skyscrapers appear on all Qatari postcards, is an arid desert barely relieved by heroic little plants that sprout from the ground with enormous suffering. At this moment there are nine workers who look in amazement at a garden whose herbs do enough not to evaporate. No one is seen on the street. There are no fans, neither fake nor real, except for two or three clueless people who emerge from a subway entrance wearing white-blue shirts and who make the gesture of those who have been irretrievably lost. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly to the Qatari ministers, the most interesting thing about La Corniche is the pearling ships that are still anchored in the cove. Before Qatar discovered that it lies on a very soft mattress of gas, the few inhabitants of this tiny desert territory were dedicated to camel herding, fishing or searching for sea pearls. Fragile and unstable, the wooden skiffs, beautiful in their modesty, serve as a counterpoint to the overwhelming architectural excesses and add a touch of honesty amidst so much fantasy. They have also placed on La Corniche a titanic fish with a brilliant complexion that seems to have been made out of balloons. It is a chubby dugong gliding on a seabed. It bears the signature of Jeff Koons, the author of the Guggenheim’s Puppy. Since the sculptor is a famous and sought-after guy, it’s foolhardy to mess with him, but this fish stranded here is strange and bizarre, absurd as a sticker. Perhaps Koons intended to send some kind of environmental message, which is decidedly contradictory to this city and the entire country. Related news standard No Qatar 2022 guide: everything you need to know about the World Cup Javier Torres Santodomingo Who has won the tournament? What are the top scorers? How many stadiums are ready? Find the answer to these and other questions The Doha metro is also a futuristic lightning bolt. It opened in 2019 and only has three lines – red, yellow and green – but its stations look like hospital operating rooms. In some carriages one can sit comfortably in wing chairs. A poster attached to the wall announces, in English and Arabic, that from November 11 to December 22, all carriages will be standard class to increase the capacity of the trains. As usual, there are also two other types: the ‘gold’, which goes like a shot, and the ‘family’, in which only women, their children and their husbands can travel. A man from the age of 12 cannot get into that wagon. Perhaps he will be positively surprised by the emir knowing that, despite having opened his hand with this morally dangerous matter, the Doha metro has not turned into an evil Sodom. On the contrary, the people of the place, as this chronicler has been able to verify, continue to sit in their places with their heads bowed and looking at their mobile phones, without rushing into an abyss of eroticism and debauchery. And that these days many more women are seen on the streets of Doha with their hair down than hidden by the hijab or any other type of veil. Nobody bothers them and not all of them look like foreigners who have come to watch the World Cup. One contemplates the Mexican journalists, with their beautiful and abundant manes of black hair, and cannot help but think of the Swedish bikini-clad women who arrived in Benidorm in the sixties. To check to what extent this opening is a truce or a seed of freedom, we will have to wait for the ball to stop bouncing. This is still a first impression, surely a lie. Countries, even very small ones, are not discovered in a few hours and even less so when the World Cup imposes an alternative, almost phantasmagorical reality. After all, Qatar has paid a lot of money to enjoy a prodigious and artificial metaverse that will disappear in a month. We’ll see what happens then.
