I have a handful of expressions that I’ve cannibalized from others. I confess the crime because I’m sure it has already expired. I adopted them and today there are people who hear them so often that they wrongly believe they came from my own harvest. “Wear the nails of rigorous mourning.” “It’s heavier than Gloria Fuertes’ poetry anthology.” “If you say that again I’ll blow up your biography.” I don’t intend to renounce being a stockholder in other authors’ attributions, and, of course, that impostor syndrome can go to hell.
Of some I do claim the patent. “Tan important is knowing how to arrive as much as knowing how to leave,” I repeat to my friends when they cross the threshold of my house with a bottle of liquor in hand. Balconing, for example —another day I’ll tell you the story—, or the notion that a colleague “is so fat that it’s easier to jump over him than go around him.” I even have expressions with an origin: “Mallorca is Sicily, but without dead bodies”; and “the Mallorcans are like their blinds: they see you, you don’t see them.”
I have reached a dangerously fragile point for taming the ego: there are people who quote me. Yes, I’ve heard it with these ears in a meeting: “As Pery would say, he’s a spherical idiot: whichever way you look at him.” That feeds me more than a flamenco pot. I am a reference built on others’ references. A plagiarist with a fan club.
There is only one thing that brings me down from the pedestal and wipes the smile off my face. I’ll tell you.
I work surrounded by insultingly young people. Gents who move between their early twenties and late thirties. It isn’t necessarily bad. You learn from them. You discover apps you didn’t even know existed, music you would never listen to by choice, and concerns your generation never even dreamed of. It’s also a humbling cure. There are entire fields in which you’re a functional illiterate while they move with the ease of Gene Kelly tap-dancing in the rain.
And right there, precisely there, is where things go off the rails.
Because all that admiration turns into sadducean hatred when I notice the confused look on their faces as I use expressions that are part of this country’s sentimental archive.
You’re told that it moves more “than the trunk of La Piquer” and they think you’re talking about a videogame. You name Berlanga because what happens with Pedro Sánchez is already “from Escopeta Nacional,” and someone checks if the so-called Berlanga plays as a full back for Betis. You quote José Luis Cuerda and the dawn doesn’t come; it darkens in the wording. You say it “goes on like Las Grecas” and some think you’ve just committed a hate crime.
Come on, for heaven’s sake. We all know that what matters is the concept, the idea, right?
Not knowing who El Fary was should require repeating a grade. Not because one must memorize his discography, but because El Fary is far more than a singer. He’s a generational password. Just like Chiquito, Gila, Tip y Coll, Martes y Trece or José Luis López Vázquez. They’re puzzle pieces that help us understand half of Spain, half the jokes, and a large part of our popular literature.
I have nothing against Bad Bunny. The man does enough by waking up every morning as Bad Bunny and pretending to sing while he sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks — who, by the way, don’t even know who they are.
What worries me isn’t that they listen to Bad Bunny. It’s that between Bad Bunny and Berlanga they only know the former. It’s not elitism. It’s cultural amputation.
Every generation adopts its own icons. It’s the law of life. The worrying thing isn’t that new references appear, but that the old ones disappear without a trace. Because then we stop sharing a secret code that neither Alan Turing nor a whole tribe of Navajos could decipher.
It was ours. It passed from generation to generation without a manual.
And it sticks in the craw.
It really sucks when jokes stop working, when ironies are left orphaned, and when a country ends up speaking the same language without meaning the same things.
Perhaps that’s why I keep stealing expressions. It’s my small way of doing cultural smuggling. Keeping alive words, turns of phrase, and characters that don’t deserve to end up in an attic beside Bordón 4 tapes, the Los Chunguitos CDs, and those orange foam headphones that always ended up smelling like humanity.
If one day an intern answers a Berlanga quote with another TikTok quote, I’ll try not to lose my temper. I’ll take a deep breath. I’ll smile. And, with all the affection in the world, I’ll warn them that, if they do it again, I’ll wreck their biography while I shout at the top of my lungs, who’s steering my boat, who, adrift, is carrying me along, who is it.
Note: Okay, I admit the last line is very eighties, almost to the point of bragging. Oh, and bragging isn’t even the thing. In short: I am up to the very references.