My socialist friends don’t come to Christmas dinner. The “problems” they allege sound like an excuse. This did not surprise us. Pablo and Ana have been part of the group since high school. They were for each other. He a revolutionary dandy, she a young woman from the Christian movements of … base. I remember the conversation they had and the leadership they provided within the group. We were young and filled ashtrays during long nights of transcendental conversations. So we talked about freedom, culture and dreams. These Fridays were extraordinary. Between letters, smoke and a long drink, we confronted liberal, conservative, social democratic and communist ideas with passion and with the intention of repairing the world until dawn.
In the 80s, Pablo and Ana were the coolest of the group. They never denied belonging to the middle class, thanks to their salaries at the Council, nor to their working-class origins. That’s why Pepe, the trade unionist, was there, that we stopped seeing the day he was released and he freed himself, even though he still makes a mess around Pablo and Ana’s house. They were the moderns, the ones who recommended the best places to go. They had everything, even more than Tere and Ramón, whose construction company kept building apartments until the crisis left them in ruins. The coffee afternoons in our little friendly parliament were epic, during which we continued to talk about politics and corruption which was a topic of concern. Although sometimes they didn’t end as well as before. The ERE affair has become an uncomfortable subject for Pablo and Ana. I remember Ana came forward defending the indefensible. However, they congratulated Tere and Ramón when the PP arrived at the Council. We all knew what they had voted for, even if they always hid that they were united by the New Generations. They also thought that Bárcenas was a very elegant man and Montoro a serious man. But I loved these meetings, because in the disagreement of my friends, I found a way to know us better and to understand how we were changing and mutating all around us.
Everything was going pretty well. Until the arrival of Alicia, the university teacher, and Pelayo, director of the multinational Pormisco. Two single people wanting to have fun and go to war. So we couldn’t talk about politics as much anymore; neither bullfight nor cinema… And even the silence was a cry. Ramón and Pelayo do not speak. And it turns out that Ana discovered Pablo and Alicia, what they were doing at the tide meetings. He always suspected this posh squatter who had ended his marriage. Then he left. Pablo took everything from Ana, he joined the wrong people. He does everything he is told. He wanders around like crazy, spends more than he has, hates the group and thinks he’s invincible. Ana won’t budge and will do everything she can against Pablo, even if it costs them everything they had in common. I don’t know if it will come back. I’m sure we will miss them in the future.
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