I feel guilty. I can’t help it, there’s a part of me that needs to know what’s going on with Luis Rubiales’ mom. His hunger strike, that church in Motril, the statements of relatives. It’s morbid, but I also find it comical. It looks like the script of a Berlanga film. At the same time, however, when I see the images of the woman my heart breaks into small pieces. The situation, which seems like a comedy to me, revolves around a woman for whom I feel sorry. A poor suffering woman, overcome by the situation. I feel guilty. The woman makes me feel very sorry. But at the same time, many things surrounding the case make me laugh.
That’s how morbidness works, and tabloid programs live off of it. The world is full of people who pretend to be morally perfect, men and women of great ethics and values, who claim to be above all that, always ready to give lessons. Well no, everyone, absolutely everyone, has weaknesses. Achilles heels in which we cannot avoid doing laundry, in which we need to know details of rough cases, in which morbidity defeats us, even though we know that there is a certain cruelty hidden behind it.
It happens to me with the Rubiales case. It would be very easy to write always defending some values, with a serious attitude, but I would be lying. Every time there is news about the events of Motril, I need to know it. I have enjoyed the social media memes about the hunger strike case, with the jokes about whether the woman would eat the consecrated wafers from the temple. But at the same time, when I saw the woman’s eyes, I felt sad and empathized with her. And I felt guilty for making fun of it.
In those desperate eyes I recognized the look of my grandmother Antonia, who lived through them all during the Civil War in Andalusia, and who always defended her children and her husband, even when it was obvious that they had the height of a bell tower. There are people who criticize the woman for not seeing that her child is a bad piece. But how many people in our home are the last to see that their father, husband or son is bad?
Rubiales must seem like the perfect son when he comes home, handing out anecdotes and gifts, buying his parents a nice house, laughing and triumphant. We all know cases in our environment of people who live deceived by relatives or partners. Everyone sees it, they don’t. And more so in the case of an old woman who has dedicated her life to taking care of her children, as centuries of tradition had told her to do. The woman does what she can, theatrically, to help her son. He is a tragic figure within a case that has become a great Spanish comedy, with reporters running into a church, comments about whether Aquarius drinks, the bishop of Granada speaking and everyone having their say.
A comedy based on very sad events, at the same time. The classical Greeks already knew that in life, the comic and the tragic are two sides of the same mask.
2023-08-31 14:12:15
#Laundry #guilt #pity #Rubiales #mother
