José María Albert de Paco is one of the two or three people in the city who reads books. Sometimes he tells me. Yesterday he found this paragraph from Los Lara , written by José Martí Gómez: "The anger with Rodríguez Zapatero took place, according to José Manuel [Lara], because being in the lobby of the president's office waiting to be received, he heard how the president of the Government told his secretary: 'And that shit Catalan to keep waiting,' to which José Manuel replied, making a rage in the secretary's office: 'This shit Catalan goes to Barcelona without waiting for I received this shit. ”The end of the incident was versatile: the next day Rodríguez Zapatero called him to apologize and José Manuel replied that he did not remember anything had happened.

The book came out in April. I have not found a single reference to this paragraph. Neither in the press dossier of Galaxia Gutenberg, which publishes it, nor in the journalistic notes that I have been able to read about the book. The issue is of great importance for several reasons. First is the traditional familiarity of Catalan with shit. Politically aggravated since Luis de Galinsoga pronounced on July 21, 1959 in the Church of San Ildefonso the phrase that triggered the Procés: "All Catalans are bullshit." Then there is the no less matter that "crap Catalans" is highly searched in Google Trends. And finally: the notion that the man of the mood, the one who said: "I will support the reform of the Statute approved by the Catalan Parliament", the friend of Catalonia, starting with his prisoners, could pronounce a phrase like this, and in the intimacy also, knowing that for the vulgarity intimacy and truth are synonyms.

I am a modernist of the twentieth century and I like open works. Those books that the reader must complete. Antidogmatic So I wrote to former president Zapatero per interposed person. The person said it seemed implausible, among other things, "because it is an expression that does not hit anything." I also agreed. He would not have called for a dog that had bitten a man. But I told him that unfortunately I could not settle for the implausibility. A few hours later he wrote again: "I have spoken with the former president. It is not explained where this episode could have come from. He denies it without hesitation."

The cultural system is of a despotic intelligence. A phrase has been hanging there since April. It doesn't matter to the writer. Not to those who edit it. Not even the 672 shoppers who had had the book until yesterday afternoon. Its living protagonist, a former president of the Government, has no idea, four months later, that the phrase has been written and published. This dare to write columns. And collect them.

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