I don't know how to live either

BarcelonaIn one of my childhood memories, I picture a friend and I frightened in the middle of a demonstration in defense of our town's natural aquifer. I also remember my friend's aunt looking at us all overwhelmed, not knowing how to get rid of us, huffing and puffing and saying: "You are at the age of turkey."The expression is not correct in Catalan (Optimot recommends saying "the age of the cake"), but that doesn't mean that we didn't find it very funny.

What was it, the age of the turkey? I understood what the aunt meant, but we kept repeating the phrase for a long time. Every time either of our lips expelled the word. turkey"We were so sick with laughter that we would glance at the nearest public toilet and suffer because of its distance. We had never stopped to think about who we were, but we had a good time.

The age of shamelessness, in reality, would arrive in a few years. Live to tell the tale, by the Zaragoza rappers Violadores del Verso. From there a phrase would come out: "I don't know how to live either, I'm improvising", which we would see many times nicks Messenger, in Fotolog posts and in the graffiti on the streets. We were starting secondary school, our hormones were raging, we didn't understand the world or ourselves, and I can't say that we've improved since then.

A girl who is not very Catholic

I hadn't thought about the most popular verse of this song for years, until I read Irene Pujadas' new book, The intruder (L'Otra, 2025), and I thought it would be funny if it were the featured quote on the cover that will surely announce its multiple reissues (don't worry, Eugenia Broggi, I'm not seriously suggesting it). The intruder It is a clear example that that phrase was as corny as it was true: absolutely none of us know how to live, we do what we can at each moment. Like Diana.

Diana is the protagonist of the book, a girl who is not very Catholic, or so the people around her believe, who ask her "What's wrong with you?" because they sense something strange in her.. The protagonist senses an evil and no one, not even herself, knows exactly what it is. That is why, due to a series of cause-effects that she will discover when she reads the book, the solution she ends up finding is to go inside herself and make an inner journey through her own body, which is actually an inner journey through the self: the great mystery that interests and saturates us all at the same time.

Irene's book has made me realize a number of things: first, how magnificent it is when creators uncover their own ray of ideas and do not create a work following any pre-established moral parameter (sometimes I imagine some producers having a conversation with a wheel. In this way, it will fulfill all the requirements). checks before starting", but Pujadas does not do this, and his imagination is liberating for the reader); second, only when you read an adventure novel do you realize how much you missed adventure novels; The intruder I loved it. Everything could be summed up with a "I had a great time reading it", which would be more like a first year ESO essay than a column in the ARA newspaper. But sometimes, nothing more is needed. When my friend's aunt told me that she was at the age of turkey, I was not yet a self-conscious person; when I heard the verses of Live to tell the tale, my budding self-awareness made me feel that improvisation was the only way, and the self-awareness of my thirties has not shown me, although in the introspection of the self I can find any magic solution. What I think this book says is that we do not need to go around in circles: if everything is chaos, inside or outside our brain, we can relax and find the way to live well and enough. Or as the song said: "If I sing with grace to misfortune, who is the dull one??" Irene Pujadas certainly not.