There are people who eat the same thing every day. Morning, noon, and night. A single dish: resentment. In Catalonia, there is a geography of bitterness. It's starting to show now. As if new regions and towns were being born. The territorial division of resentment. The country remembers what has happened in recent years in the United States. States of resentment. States of hatred.
There were those middle classes. Which are neither classes nor middle classes. From the cities that were smoking. And people kept going. Work, the little house, the children. The life of beer after work. Of TV to fall asleep. Of yum-yum weekends. Everything went to shit. But... stop. Here, it's not exactly that everything has gone to the mud. Here, many people believe they don't have what they deserve. That they are far below. In the dungeon of the country. They will feel like they are saying: "We studied hard, and look what I have!" A job hunt. Little balls of goat dung like pocket change. While they always swallow the teak of resentment, swishing around them as the smoky world fades away.
You'll see it a lot in the villages. Where new classes of what we would previously call immigrants are emerging, but who are now crossing the visible border of not being immigrants. That bricklayer, plumber, painter... has now been forced to become a small business owner. He didn't know it, maybe he didn't even want to. And now he has 2, 3, 4 workers: those who lay bricks, those who use the paintbrush, those who change plugs. These professionals no longer exist in the villages. Dead, retired, or those who remain programmed by the obsolescence of a system that says no to what should be yes. Those who say so-much-we-have-studied-or-have-not-done it get angry. They do; I don't. And I go on biting off obsession. But there are more, and it's for everyone.
Those you knew as a child soften you up in your face: "You raft. They all put you on. A, e, y... You, you're the one who's doing well in everything!" They say it with resentment. Chewing vinegar. Drinking sour wine. As they fall asleep off the table. We paved the way: those of us born in the seventies. The beginning of the Century of Resentment. Here you'll begin to find a percentage of revanchists who would make those in cemeteries dance to rock 'n' roll. And behind wagons and wagons of all ages like a High-Speed Train of Bitterness. Life, they say, looking out the fast, hard, impassable window, shouldn't have been this way. They blame the country. They were born and raised happy. It seemed like everything was a welfare society: now, one of malaise. A country that was going to be free, now everything is a dictatorship of mediocrity, poor education, illiteracy. A pill-shaped, origami-like detention center for the unhappy resentful.
Don't talk to them about anything. They don't want to know anything. And you'll soon see it. Many of the hegemonic parties in inland Catalonia have become unvotable for their traditional, traditionalist, or repetitive voters: Junts, Esquerra, the CUP. They will vote for resentment. They are already doing so without ballots. They say it out loud. Certainly, Catalonia will break before Spain. Broken. The demographics of resentment. Congratulations to all the pieces. All that remains is to pray to (Saint) Gaudí.
Originality consists in returning to the origin, said the poet of stone before the tram ran over him. The fragile Gaudinian: the pieces can also be a whole. What can unite us? What unites the fragments? What could possibly glue the cuts, the pieces, the shreds together? So far, nothing.
