Before being confined in cities, like an animal locked in a zoo, the bicycle was in Spain a mythological creature like the horses of the Centaurs of the Desert and all the westerns. Of course, ours was a postman’s bicycle.
Spain has always been a country of cyclists rather than a country of bicycles. The individual loses us, or perhaps saves us. Peninsula of individualists, nowhere else in the world has a wave of collectivizations been experienced with so much despair, and with so much hope. But to be the opposite of what one is, and thus see oneself again, one must open up, I will die soon, what the musician Stefano Landi said in his old Parades of life.
When everything was worse (don’t listen to the far right, they lie disgustingly, then everything was worse, even for many of them, the laziest), a cyclist would reach the top before a scientist, than an imaginative person, than a composer of piano and sheet music, not to mention a composer. So, only skirts were left for the women of the mountains. The old cyclist represented us. The name of the team did not weigh on his surname. The only thing people had to work with was their surname, and that’s why they always used it in their work, and it was also their lonely surname, hidden in their body, that made cyclists pedal hard on the hill.
Ocaña, Bahamontes, Indurain, Perurena, Contador, Perico Delgado…, by dint of family names, a new division of the Nine would historically form, which entered Paris; but, this time, with the mission of freeing us, the spectators. About what? About our history. Perhaps the Republican soldiers of the Nine (read the shocking comic strip by Paco Roca, The grooves of chance, Astiberri, 2013), they also freed themselves from a condemnation, everything is alliance and condemnation, they redeemed themselves from a savage defeat, that of our war, by freeing Paris from Nazism. Now, with globalization, countries do not exist, cities do not exist, there are only their images that multiply on the screens like the stained glass windows of a cathedral that does not exist either (it is virtual), where we meet every day.
The difference between being poor and not being poor is the difference between plowing the furrows of chance and plowing the Elysian fields. They are different lands, they have different humus, the tribes buried in one place and in another are not the same. All rich countries are alike, but poor countries are alike in their own way. At that time (sorry for not naming it, I have sores on my lips), Spain was a country of cyclists and China was a country of bicycles, and both were miserable nations (in the sense of unhappy, not in the sense in which one would say the miser Fagin, the abject protector of the children of Oliver Twist). Or maybe it is. Francoism (oh, the plague) was full of miserable people, as was Maoism. On the Champs-Élysées in France, the cultural elites denounced Franco and celebrated Mao. My cyclist friend, never trust any elite, even if they speak well of you. You only have your family name and a mountain of problems. You should not trust governments either, power is a mirage. You believe that your own people are in charge, but it is those who rule who aspire to belong to you.
The middle ground between the Chinese on bicycles and the Spanish village cyclist (who invented the rapper’s cap at a time when it was still said that one shaved one’s head) was found in Holland. In the canals of Amsterdam, on its bridges, in its alleys, the authentic democratic way of cycling was practiced, since not only was the bicycle used to go to work or to go shopping, but many citizens also rode bicycles to study at school, at university, or to buy books, or to eat herring, or to the cinema, or to attend demonstrations against wars, atomic energy and oil. The Dutch bicycle was a small form of private property with the right to steal. It is strange, but before, to be European, one had to accept contradictions.
The bike is not the same either. bike thief (the film by Vittorio de Sica), that the bicycle Amelie (Film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet). The evolution from one to the other gives us the image that we have created for ourselves as Europeans. Why be poor when you can be wonderful? Amélie’s bike is not a Dutch bike, far from it. In Holland, the bike retained a certain unpleasant smell of residual water, of rusty iron. It was human and dark like an anatomy class or a night patrol. For its part, the music of Yann Tiersen, in Amelie, This reminds us that we have long preferred a toy reality.
Before being confined in cities, inside its own street, like an animal confined in a zoo, the bicycle was in Spain a mythological creature in the same way as horses in Spain. desert centaurs, and in all the western movies. Of course, our bike was a postman’s bike. It’s in the old series Chronicles of a city. The closest thing to John Wayne was Braulio, the postman played by actor Jesús Guzmán. Jacques Tati, playing a postman in vacation, The French film was something else, it had a different type of city, a different type of main square, a different way of wearing a cap and a different way of waging war. Let’s not compare their holidays with ours. Four days are enough to open a chasm between July 14 and 18.
Then we saw him in the gang of kids in the series Blue summer. In every Spanish child on a bicycle there was a potential factor. Here, when a boy appeared on a bicycle, he was made to run errands, carry things from one place to another, or make trips from the cottage to Chanquete’s boat. Never has the drama of the child and the bicycle been represented with such vividness as in the adventures of Zipi and Zape, by the cartoonist Escobar. The dilemma posed by Don Pantuflo (the ancestor of these cartoon brothers) between the pumpkin of exams and the graduated bicycle, as a reward for good grades, will continue throughout the adulthood of the Spanish people. Part of the success of the contest One, two, three…, answer again, resided in this diatribe. The pumpkin and the car.
That is why we are so happy when Pedro Sánchez, the tireless Prime Minister, agrees to help us with the bicycle. It is a sign that we have been good! That there is no pumpkin! There is nothing like a bicycle to be able to do what you want. Where there are bicycles, remove amnesties! Where will it stop? A person on a bicycle is happier than a person who is amnestied. It does not occur to a person on a bicycle to disappear into the crowd. On the contrary, they want everyone to see them on their bicycle in the street.
Even Buster Keaton was not lost in the crowd, nor lost sight of, when those crowds chased him at the end of his films. Federico García Lorca imagined Buster Keaton on a bicycle soaked in innocence. A happy being does not disappear even if he travels through the air on a bicycle, as in the poem that Alberti dedicated to Harold Lloyd, pursued by the secret police. No cyclist will need to climb into the trunk of a car or put on a summer hat to go unnoticed. On the contrary, there is no cyclist who does not like to ring the bell so that everyone knows that he is asking for passage. And besides, everything adapts. Otherwise, how could someone who is incombustible know a means of transport that does not require fuel.
