The wise men passed by leaving a trail of gifts that has filled the joy of the little ones. Child innocence is the most beautiful reality of those past holidays.
And, at home, she has decided to delay the recycling of the cardboard from the boxes, the wrapping paper, the plastic and the glass that has filled the dining room of the house with bottles of wine, beer and champagne.
In the main rooms the largest bags of Mercadona filled with glass, others with the plastic of water bottles, with remains of the deconstruction of those toys that filled the happiness of so many. The domestic landscape is chaotic, corners and columns settled from the remains of a party in which we swept away all wishes.
The colored streamers still emerge, the same ones that were thrown by small grandchildren over the heads of the older ones. She, on that Three Kings Night, remains shrunken, extremely sad, reliving so many Kings Nights in which she slept, she dreamed, and she always ended up discovering a king dressed in a gold and silver cape.
We have inaugurated a year with all its consequences. January is always the month of forecasts and good wishes. Composing these words I am accompanied by the wonderful smell of the frying and cooking of a Sunday paella in one of the interior patios of the house. I feel that it is a good omen, a feeling that transmits security and good vibrations.
We have started a year that is leaving us with a sum of uncertainty. I don’t know, but I think of my grandmother Pepica, who suffered and survived a war, who lived by crossing herself every day so that times of peace and solidarity would return. She conjugated a magical reality that engendered all possible metaphors. She, who walked with difficulty, with a back covered in psoriasis, was the positivism and joy of the Ribera Alta orchard.
I like to belong to a family of wise women and wise men. The same and the same ones that walk through the rooms of my house, sharing infinite feelings with those who were my ancestors and ancestors.
Sometimes I remember the intense aroma of a tomato plant that grew next to my grandmother Pepica’s house, in Gavarda, next to the river, and also the enormous and twisted tomatoes of my grandmother María, from Cuenca. My house is filled every day with the smells of memory, each vital space, each corridor, each window. My house is the refuge of those who I have deeply loved in this life.
And I still feel, deeply, the orange blossom that was climbing the walls and conjuring up all the bad thoughts. Because that house was a kind of starting point for a family and, metaphorically, for a town. In fact, the frogs and toads screamed every afternoon and every night, claiming their belonging to the adjoining laundry room of my grandmother’s house. And the Pantanà, and its cruelty, left on the mess of the remains of my house, a bouquet of orange blossoms from the eternal lemon tree and the fruits of my grandmother’s tremendous pots. It was a magical house.
We start a year and we are nobody, but we are a lot, and everything, we are an overflowing imagination. In my house you could feel the passage of those gentlemen who rescued the vulnerable, those gentlemen who radiated an unbridled masculinity in the face of powerful women, capable of overcoming and facing all difficulties.
In my vital house things are enormously magical. My grandmothers were supernatural beings who taught us to ward off any lurking evil. And they live with me. Every morning they wake me up. They scold me because I fall asleep, they prepare me a breakfast of coffee, porridge and oranges. They warn me that every day is a shitty obstacle, because we are women, they tell me.
We start a year that has punished women from the right and its extreme right. And let no one be fooled. The decision on abortion by the autonomous government of Castilla-León, by Vox and PP, is as cruel as it is significant that the PP is a party that is ultra willing to do anything. Because we are starting a year in which too many women are being murdered.
We start a year of shit. I don’t know how you see this new beginning of the cycle. The news of the last few days has been an overwhelming transit of messages. The spite put to music by Shakira to her ex-husband, the former FC Barcelona player, Piqué, has become the anthem of millions of spiteful women. Well, we are thousands of outraged and humiliated women. Hundreds of thousands. And point.
I hear the voices of my grandmothers, of the women who planted the trees and plants where more roots and branches of my soul have grown. Their complaints, their dreams resound in my house. In my kitchen the stir-fries and broths of those women who deserved the best fate are cooked. This Monday my grandmothers come to eat with me a huge pot of vegetables, legumes, bones and meat, an encounter that recalls all the goodness of the human being.
With each sip of thick, flavorful broth, I think of this selfish, wayward fucking world, in a moment of restlessness and hopelessness. And it shouldn’t be like that.
Opinion | The most beautiful dreams. By Amparo Panadero #OpiniónVP