Unlike Lluís Llach, I believe very well that the Spanish monarchs went to Montserrat. No, no, please, readers! Wait! Don't rush to unsubscribe! Don't upset our editor this way! Let me explain!
Montserrat –and He told us about it in Bassas, who is an expert—is a monastery that follows the rule of Saint Benedict to welcome everyone. But this monastic rule, which I share, wouldn't be sufficient for my thesis. There's another reason, a compelling and Catalan reason. You see. Yesterday, walking through Montserrat with Salvador Illa, the queen fled completely. I mean, on TV we saw her husband, and our president, and I think the mayor of Monistrol, but we didn't see her. She didn't appear during the walk. And she didn't appear because she had chosen to, as a journalist surely knows when there are cameras and when there aren't. Melero, on his program, mentioned it, and Jordi Gil, sent to Madrid, made an unprecedented comment: "Queen Letizia is very clever!"
All this makes me think of marital tensions, not good for the stability of the institution. Thinking about the queen, I think going to Montserrat may have been useful to her. There's a very Spanish saying that goes like this: "Whoever wants to be well married takes his wife to Montserrat." It's a saying that some might find heteropatriarchal, because it assumes that it's the man who leads the woman and also assumes that there are no men who want to take their husband to Montserrat to be well married. I know that in the marriages of monarchs, marital differences have sometimes been resolved on the gallows, but always with more unsatisfactory results for the women than for the men, for the monarchy is sexist for a reason.
