There were human wardrobes. Wide open. On the table their ice cream that didn't melt: a speaker. At full blast, at full throttle, at full speed. And the people who watched them also licked, without stopping, bad temper. They looked at no one. They only had eyes for the nervous acoustic box that moved as if it were a ouija board. A woman, defying the evil spirits, approaches and makes a move: turn down the music. They do. Without saying anything. Without looking. With that concentrated bad mood they have transported, exported here. But, hey, hey, ow, they are just a few more.
Of the six hundred and some inhabitants of this town, there are a little more than four hundred swimming pool memberships: half of them people who are not from the town. A photocopy of summer chlorine Catalonia. Everywhere it's the same, the same, similar, more or less... But some go nautical miles. They grab the astrolabe. The navigation chart. And towards the horizon: they charge more for the membership to those who are not registered. From a few euros, to double, to triple... Until you reach port. All for the speaker.
It's the polluting baffle. The non-stop shouting fan. The theatrical fights at agreed times. The canicular thefts of Toretes and Vaquilles. What they want to let in is the dog-shrew-squirrel-hummingbird in the name of the freedom of mother earth who welcomes any beast only if it's mine. Those who bathe with the whole range of underpants: clean, semi-dirty, shat, more shat... (trend 2026). Those who abandon their children and make snotty noises at the lifeguards so they don't wipe their noses. Those who come to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, vomit, with bulging bags from outside and not from happiness.... All this and more. It's full of it. People are fed up to their consecrated peppers. And there are fights.
There is a Supreme Court ruling from 2023 that states that being registered is not a valid objective criterion to justify different prices for a municipal service. Avant-garde translation: swimming pools. Some town councils say forcibly, yes. Others maintain no. They argue that maintaining the facilities is paid for with local taxes. Also the violation of the right to security, order, coexistence... Not a few towns dream of having local police, somatents, elite or PVC corps... Others light candles and pray to invented saints and virgins so that the plagues of barbaric junk don't arrive. Because what is happening walks on water: no longer as a miracle but as the clear and chlorine reality.
Swimming pools are public squares, laboratories, opinion study centers, seismograms, crystal balls. Swimming pools are a rotisserie where the chicken turns and turns because the smoke is an indication of fire or dung. Swimming pools underline with phosphorescent blue that the country is fractured. Communities, cohesions, common places, human aioli... The partition has been waving for years. We swim, we float, we drown in swimming pools divided between the ill-mannered and the well-mannered. Between despair and hope. Between no future and future. Many of those who arrive at the swimming pools flee from cities, a few kilometers away, that are full and empty of everything and look in the villages for a piece of blue. To possess it, to snatch it. The question is what country and what supposedly democratic society can condemn the good little ones in favor of the bad big ones. The small villages, for being fewer, will die by drowning. There is no chlorine that can clean this.
