So, here I am back in politics again, as a Mojácar town hall councillor. So now I’m checking out the accounts, reading the reports, meeting the petitioners, programming what’s going to be done by this government (together with my fellow councillors), asking for subsidies, trying to get the municipal sound-measuring device to work (so as to be able to monitor the louder venues here – something I’m determined to do).
And now, already, just a few days into the new legislature with this coalition government, I have to admit that, seeing that everyone is working hard and anxious to do things, with all the difficulties that working with a team always supposes, I have found that I’m really enjoying the challenge.
But, of course, just for a while.
I write this, not because I’m worried about another change of government in a moción de censura – a betrayal – since I think, at least here in Mojácar, that those kinds of treasons have been finished with. We’ve had enough of them over the past twenty years, but we are more mature now as the results of these recent elections showed. It wasn’t so much who won, as who lost. The losers represented, let’s say, the old ways…
Of course, I’m not a politician. Or rather, I don’t believe myself to be one. I think that politics are circumstantial in my life, although they have been standing, as it were, at my shoulder. Perhaps for always. Because, you know, it’s one thing to worry about social injustices, to worry about your community, to support and help your neighbours with their problems… and it’s quite another thing to actually become, and live, as a politician.
If anyone were to ask me what I did, or who I am, I would never answer: ‘I’m a politician’.
Being in politics is, for me, temporary, an anecdote, one of those things… so now I have to answer a much harder question: So, what am I then?
It’s all right, I‘m not searching for a metaphysical answer here or some philosophical stuff. I’ll keep it simple.
When I have to fill out one of those forms which we Spaniards are so fond of, perhaps to get my daughter into college, or filling out some administrative paper in triplicate, and they ask for my profession…
What do I put?
The easiest is to slam down the word which sums up your lifetime’s studies – doctor, architect, dancer…
So, following that logic, I should put down ‘economist’. However, I don’t feel this is really what I am, because I may have passed all the exams but I’ve never worked as one per se.
Sometimes I think I should answer the ‘what am I’ question on the form with my nationality or place of birth. Or then again, my family condition might do – I’m a father, a cousin, a brother.
The answer (which I’m sure nobody reads anyway) could be one’s human condition – homosexual or carnivore. Maybe the answer is to write down one’s summation - as ‘egoist’ or ‘short-sighted’ or ‘addle-brained’.
Of course, that’s silly, since we are all more than just a couple of descriptive nouns. So that’s not an answer.
We return then, to that all-important question: ‘who are you?’
I would love to be able to answer – ‘I know, I know, ask meee!’ I would like to say proudly ‘I’m a writer’.
But, you know, since the eighth century BC, when Homer wrote ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’, and since (rather more recently) I’ve read them both, with their masterful stories of the anger of Achilles, the death of Hector, the fall of Troy, the ten year return of Odysseus… when the nostalgia, the love, the jealousies, the violence, the sex, the families, the relationships with the Gods, power, charity, sickness, struggles are all so well told… I am left with just one answer. Me?
I’m a reader.
