Cádiz

Llegamos al restaurante recomendado por el casero a las 19.45 y le hacemos saber al camarero nuestra intención de cenar. Desconcertado, mirando el reloj, nos pregunta: ¿ustedes son alemanes?

Nochebuena

El maduro profesor corría por un parque solitario bordeando la M-40, ni siquiera los acostumbrados perros siniestros con sus no menos siniestros dueños, poco antes de la cena de Nochebuena. De pronto, en un recodo del camino, bajo la luz cenital de una farola, un mendigo alzó su brik de vino y le deseó Feliz navidad. El corredor paró en seco, se aproximó al mendigo y, despojándose de su guante derecho, le dio la mano, devolviéndole el deseo. Luego, algo aturdido y confuso, siguió su carrera a ninguna parte.

Esperanza

¿Y no tiene esperanza?, le preguntaron el otro día en la radio a un marinero por otro asunto que no viene al caso. Su respuesta fue una metáfora universal: "Tener tengo esperanza, pero una esperanza algo negativa". Feliz Navidad.

Manuel Rivas, El País

Cuento de navidad

Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured," she says.

Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. "It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on," she says. She was already nervous about the birth - her first, and twins - so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't understand."

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

Multitudes

Lo único bueno de este purgatorio navideño es que entre las multitudes que se agolpan en los centros comerciales uno se topa con viejos conocidos, Luismi, Cora, Cristina, y aprovecha para hacer un rápido recuento de las últimas batallas. Y para certificar que, por ahora, no estamos en el parte de bajas.

Mari Luz

Cada cual tiene su Arcadia particular, su paraíso accesible. El mío se llama Mouruso, una aldea de cuatro casas cerca de Luarca, Asturias. Hace muchos años que descubrí por casualidad la casa rural de Mari Luz, y aún recuerdo el impacto de su primera visión: una mujer rolliza de mofletes sonrosados con mandil y un móvil colgado del cinturón. Desde un primer momento me desarmó su mirada azul y su palabra blanca. Fue una amistad a primera vista. Hoy mismo recibo una postal de su hija, Azucena, firmada por también por Tino, Buli y, por delegación, los tres perros, Terry, Towny y Cochito. Echámoste, como tú dirías, de menos, Mari Luz.

Amistad

Desmintiendo rotundamente a aquellas lenguas viperinas que afirman que por culpa de mi carácter estoy solo y sin amigos, comunico al respetable que hoy mismo he recibido nada más y nada menos que cinco entrañables felicitaciones navideñas, remitidas, entre otros, por El Corte Inglés, Ono, Movistar, Peugeot y el BBVA. A ver si cesan de una vez esos comentarios rencorosos.

Así es aquí también

Our politics is strange. We have three large parties that spend most of their energy trying to prove that the other two are wholly unfit to govern. And yet all agree on the major issues of our time: you can barely slide a piece of paper between them on the economy, health, education, law and order, security, tax or foreign policy.

Far from being helpful to democracy this consensus in the middle ground is a drag on our political life. It bores the public and makes people - particularly the young - feel excluded. Those not linked by tribal ties to one of the three parties have come to see MPs as essentially a club of men and women in suits, who are all somehow on the make.

Henry Porter, The Observer

Divina Comedia

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Interludio

Cada vez que ella dibujaba su lenta sonrisa, él se quedaba pedaleando en el vacío.

Gabriel

De su bonhomía da buena muestra el ser uno de los escasos lectores perseverantes de este blog. Lo más definitorio de su personalidad es que nos hallamos ante un tipo normal, lo cual no es moco de pavo en una sociedad como esta que tiende al delirio paranoico o a la estupidez supina. Como esos jugadores imprescindibles en cualquier equipo, sabe apagar un fuego, templar un gaita y, llegado el caso, tragarse un sapo. Cuando me pidan los nombres de doce hombres justos y cabales, él será uno de los primeros de la lista. Como en las elecciones al consejo escolar, claro.

Obertura

Todo lo que necesitaba era un cuerpo hospitalario donde cobijarse hasta que amainase el temporal.

Pinochet

Coincidiendo con un estornudo, leo en la versión electrónica de El País que ha muerto el dictador chileno Augusto Pinochet. Para los que ahora andamos en los cuarenta y fuimos convulsivamente izquierdosos en nuestros años mozos, este tipo representa la maldad en estado puro. Su traición a Allende y a Chile, su siniestra oferta al presidente electo para que abandonase el país con la intención de hacer volar el avión por los aires, los miles de asesinados, las torturas, la sinrazón. Esta maldita gripe no impedirá que brinde por su viaje al infierno, del que nunca debió salir.

Augusto Pinochet, Who Ruled Chile, Dies at 91

Augusto Pinochet ha mort
als 91 anys a l'hospital

Muere el ex dictador Pinochet

L'ancien dictateur chilien Augusto Pinochet est mort

Cile, è morto Pinochet
dittatore sanguinario

Augusto Pinochet ist tot

Chiles Albtraum und sein Modernisierer

Sabia naturaleza

A quienes me dicen que la naturaleza es sabia y que siempre actúa con sentido, les pregunto: ¿por qué los hombres perdemos el cabello capilar y no el pelo del bigote?

Robert Fisk: The Roman Empire is falling

The Roman Empire is falling. That, in a phrase, is what the Baker report says. The legions cannot impose their rule on Mesopotamia. Just as Crassus lost his legions' banners in the deserts of Syria-Iraq, so has George W Bush. There is no Mark Antony to retrieve the honour of the empire. The policy "is not working". "Collapse" and "catastrophe" - words heard in the Roman senate many a time - were embedded in the text of the Baker report. Et tu, James?

The Roman Empire is falling. That, in a phrase, is what the Baker report says. The legions cannot impose their rule on Mesopotamia.

Just as Crassus lost his legions' banners in the deserts of Syria-Iraq, so has George W Bush. There is no Mark Antony to retrieve the honour of the empire. The policy "is not working". "Collapse" and "catastrophe" - words heard in the Roman senate many a time - were embedded in the text of the Baker report. Et tu, James?

This is also the language of the Arab world, always waiting for the collapse of empire, for the destruction of the safe Western world which has provided it with money, weapons, political support. First, the Arabs trusted the British Empire and Winston Churchill, and then they trusted the American Empire and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and all the other men who would give guns to the Israelis and billions to the Arabs - Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush...

And now they are told that the Americans are not winning the war; that they are losing. If you were an Arab, what would you do?

Be sure, they are not asking this question in Washington. The Middle East - so all-important (supposedly) in the "war on terror" - in itself, a myth - doesn't really matter in the White House. It is a district, a map, a region, every bit as amorphous as the crescent of "crisis" which the Clinton administration invented when it wanted to land its troops in Somalia. How to get out, how to save face, that's the question. To hell with the people who live there: the Arabs, the Iraqis, the men, women and children whom we kill - and whom the Iraqis kill - every day.

Note how our "spokesmen" in Afghanistan now acknowledge the dead woman and children of Nato airstrikes as if it is quite in order to slaughter these innocents because we are at war with the horrid Taliban.

Some of the same mindset has arrived in Baghdad, where "coalition" spokesmen also - from time to time - jump in front of the video-tape evidence by accepting that they, too, kill women and children in their war against "terror". But it is the sentences of impotence that doom empires. "The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing." There is a risk of a "slide towards chaos [sic] [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe."

But hasn't that already happened? "Collapse" and "catastrophe" are daily present in Iraq. America's ability "to influence events" has been absent for years. And let's just re-read the following sentence: "Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. Shiite [Shia] militias, death squads, al-Qa'ida and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability."

Come again? Where was this "widespread criminality," this "sectarian conflict" when Saddam, our favourite war criminal, was in power? What do the Iraqis think about this? And how typical that the American media went at once to hear Bush's view of the Baker report - rather than the reaction of the Iraqis, those who are on the receiving end of our self-induced tragedy in Mesopotamia.

They will enjoy the idea that American troops should be "embedded" with Iraqi forces - not so long ago, it was the press that had to be "embedded" with the Americans! - as if the Romans were ready to put their legions amid the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths to ensure their loyalty.

What the Romans did do, of course - and what the Americans would never do - is offer their subjects Roman citizenship. Every tribe - in Gaul or Bythinia or Mesopotamia - who fell under Roman rule became a citizen of Rome. What could Washington have done with Iraq if it had offered American citizenship to every Iraqi? There would have been no insurrection, no violence, no collapse or catastrophe, no Baker report. But no. We wanted to give these people the fruits of our civilisation - not the civilisation itself. From this, they were banned.

And the result? The nations we supposedly hated - Iran and Syria - are now expected to save us from ourselves. "Given the ability [sic] of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively."

I love those words. Especially "engage". Yes, the "influence of America" is diminishing. The influence of Syria and Iran is growing. That just about sums up the "war on terror". Any word yet, I wonder, from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara?

The strategies

The Baker panel considered four options, all of which it rejected:

Cut And Run

Baker believes it would cause a humanitarian disaster, while al-Qa'ida would expand further.

Stay The Course

Baker accepts that current US policy is not working. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The US is spending $2bn (£1bn) a week and has lost public support.

Send In More Troops

Increases in US troop levels would not solve the cause of violence in Iraq. Violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces moved.

Regional Devolution

If the country broke up into its Shia, Sunni and Kurd regions, it would lead to ethnic cleansing and mass population moves.

Baker outlines a fifth option - 'responsible transition' - in which the number of US forces could be increased to shore up the Iraqi army while it takes over primary responsibility for combat operations. US troops would then decrease slowly.

Perfume

Ayer estuve viendo El perfume. No dudo en calificarla como la película más bochornosa de la historia. Las escenas de la cópula colectiva y la del asesino en plan Jesucristo Superstar, con el obispo entregado a sus pies, me perseguirán durante décadas. Después de todo, Almodóvar no es tan patético ni rococó e incluso Alatriste, con su memorable colofón , Muchas grasias, pero somos los tersios españoles, es una película digerible. Y es que hay perfumes que apestan.

Filosofía oval

Voz de Alvy: ...y me acordé de aquel viejo chiste, ya saben, el del tipo que va a ver al psiquiatra y le dice: «Doctor, mi hermano se ha vuelto loco. Se cree que es una gallina». Y el médico le contesta: «Bueno, ¿y por qué no hace que lo encierren?». Y el tipo le replica: «Lo haría pero es que necesito los huevos». En fin, yo creo que eso expresa muy bien lo que siento acerca de las relaciones entre las personas. ¿Saben? Son completamente irracionales, disparatadas, absurdas y... pero, ah, creo que las seguimos manteniendo porque, ah, la mayor parte de nosotros necesitamos los huevos.

(Del guión de la película Annie Hall, de Woody Allen)

Defensa del matrimonio

Mi amigo Benito es un firme defensor de la institución matrimonial. Cuando se le pregunta el porqué, responde: mis mejores amantes siempre han sido mujeres casadas.

The Queen

Pocas veces he visto en el cine un alarde de inteligencia como en esta película. La habilidad del director Stephen Frears para mostrar con benevolencia y sagacidad los dos lados de la moneda, sin maniqueísmos ni moralejas, me parece sencillamente genial. Y la caracterización de los personajes, especialmente los personajes de la reina y Blair, sublime. Un buena muestra de que el buen gusto no está reñido con el éxito comercial.

Geocidio

Leo en El País que los árboles de hoja caducifolia mantienen, a estas alturas de año, las copas en todo su esplendor. Tuve ocasión de comprobarlo antes de ayer, en un paseo solitario por El Retiro. Es una lástima que el geocidio no esté recogido en el catálogo de crímenes contra la humanidad. De ser así, más de un gobernante que aprueba con entusiasmo proyectos altamente contaminantes, debería estar a estas horas ante el pelotón de fusilamiento.