He who begins bread and does not make a cross…

"He who starts bread and doesn't make a cross, the devil makes it his own." This saying is incomprehensible to us today, but over the centuries it was part of a daily ritual respected by all, and one that I came to know: the practice of making a cross with the tip of a knife on the flat side of a round loaf before slicing it.

There are many things from my childhood that are incomprehensible or even absurd to my grandchildren. I don't criticize them for that. I was also surprised by what my grandparents told me, but sometimes I let myself be overcome by a certain melancholy when I realize the loss of value, and even the sacredness, of small things, like the our daily breadToday, the much-vaunted "consumer confidence" is essentially a devotion to the obsolete, a commercial cult of disposable items. It's necessary to quickly squeeze the use value out of any consumer item in order to replace it and stay current.

I discovered, not long ago, that being old is unconditionally loving all those things that make your house your home.

It's not easy to grow old. There's a conspiracy around you that's determined to deny you that basic right to be old. Old. tout court, not senior, not a man of old age, or of the golden age, or any other corny euphemism. "But you still look young!" they tell you, and they leave the knife of "still" in your heart.

Recently, my doctor advised me to have a bunch of tests done. When I brought him the results, he told me, in a somewhat forced tone, that I was in excellent health.

You're undeniably old when you're more concerned about your knees than your neighbor's knees, and especially when your automatic reaction to a woman who looks at you with interest is to check that your fly is unzipped.

But I wanted to talk to you about bread, that is, about the disenchantment of the world, because bread has become the most mysterious product in our culture, to the point that if you ask for bread in a bakery, they won't know what to serve you. Now, bread is a custom-designed product.

At this point, no one even considers blessing the bread... if there's any on the table. When I was a child, in a small town in Navarre, it was mandatory to always leave the bread with the crust touching the table because otherwise, the Virgin would cry. Bread was so sacred that throwing it away was considered a sin.

When the ancient Greeks dreamed of the Golden Age, they imagined themselves playing dice with large round loaves of bread. It is said that when Democritus, the laughing philosopher, was dying, he observed that his sister was feeling sorry for herself not so much for this fatality as for the fact that it would take place in the middle of the great festival of the Thesmophoria, and the obligatory mourning would force her to shut herself up at home, unable to enjoy the jewel of the street. Democritus asked her to bring him a freshly baked loaf from the bakery every day and leave it by his head. The smell of fresh bread would keep him alive for as many days as necessary. And so it was. After the festivities were over, his sister took the bread away, and Democritus died amidst his sister's unrepentant wailing.

Irene Rigau told me a story her mother used to tell her, that of the Lady of Tous: "In the castle of Tous, there was a lady so capricious that she lived exclusively on the bones of black lambs. After finishing off all the black lambs in her country, she insisted on buying them from increasingly ruined countries and was forced to live on the charity of her former subjects. One day, the landlady of a farmhouse gave her a handful of walnuts and a piece of stale bread.

To conclude: When Alexander Szurek was in the Wülzburg concentration camp, a woman gave him a slice of bread. Someone warned her that the prisoner would soon be shot. She replied, "Perhaps he's not so bad." Alexander Szurek was a communist, a Jew, a Pole, and an International Brigade member in the Spanish Civil War. He could have been executed for any of these reasons, but that woman saw only a very hungry man and offered him the most sacred thing.