I understand that people are very upset that the angonoka turtles are disappearing, but what has me on edge is the slow extinction of blondes. For years, blondes have been the last hope for joy in a declining world. I have no intention of disparaging brunettes and redheads, but without blondes, the West is dying, this time for real.
These are days of trenches, thick scarves, and camaraderie. Of friends, steamy bars, and good love.
Some say it’s a seasonal thing. Everything changes at this time of the year. With the cold, girls parade their beauty wrapped in large plaid scarves, thick jackets, and delicate trench coats, while men favor long dark coats, hanging down above feet, laced in rain shoes. Eyes become dense and bright, and smiles float strangely complicit in the night time gloom. With the cold, the tyranny of good taste and elegance returns to the city, and somehow takes us back to one of the oldest setbacks in the history of mankind: how to respond to the freezing inclemency?
The ancients invented bonfires and braziers, and then we spoiled it with electrical appliances that smell of short circuits, and are just as good at warming your hands as grilling steaks. But anyway, with this early morning breeze, sharp as crystal shards, the festival of exposed flesh that has given us so many misfortunes this summer is over, and the cities receive the best news possible: people are getting dressed again.
Let us toast to celebrate that we will once again see artists painting murky canvases of streets, full of puddles, but with her appearing in black and white, a foreground of surprise and beauty, protecting herself under a borrowed umbrella, with him, a picture of the classic gentleman, hand inside the pocket of that black coat and an urgent cigarette between his lips.
Everything in November could be a happy work of art, were it not for the fact that we miss the golden reflection of the sun’s mane. There is a whole theology of weather about which little has been written. Heat calls for bad taste, and I suppose vice, while cold encourages virtue. The author’s theory does not meet with ecclesiastical approval, perhaps because it is based on the apocryphal moral principle of exposed toes: a time of year that encourages men to show their toenails can only be related to sin, while a season that encourages covering up, seclusion, and closing one’s mouth, is an impulse towards contemplation and ascetic struggle.
The cold prods us towards the fervor of friendship, towards an embrace, balustrade love, and the best red wine. It also invites us to read a good book under thick blankets, to watch embers crackle in the fireplace for hours, or to visit those coffee shops that seem suddenly aged, and that, behind dense and foggy windows, hot chocolate is served while nutritionists drink carajillos at the back of the bar, asking themselves where their impeccable business plans have gone wrong.
A wet Paris blooms in every neighborhood and so we know that October is already bending its promises of eternity. It succumbs, like everything else. November arrives on the horizon carrying a cruise ship of cement overhead, a gray and deceptive sky, like that pre-Christmas weather so very ours, so Galician, which seems to hesitate between raining and raining, or raining again. It comes full of moray eels and that is the only thing that makes me uneasy.
Finally, hair gets darker. November is a month of few blondes. And of going gray. November is the month of many gray-haired men. It’s all part of the same deal, to rent our Mediterranean and colorful soul, and become, for a while, one of those capitals where it snows like any Christmas in a Frank Capra movie.
And how beautiful it is to be alive on those days, when the photos of couples come out as if trapped in the 1920s, when winter love was a sparkle in sepia and two intertwined glances, telling each other things in silence for many pages of the kitchen almanac. These are days of trenches, thick scarves, and camaraderie. Of friends, steamy bars, and good love. Of cursed poets, old books, and big families, swirling around the stew pot, among the kitchen vapors that have seen us grow up.
Here beside the sea a soft sadness is painted, while joy sprouts inside homes and those restaurants that overflow with meat, laughter, and wine. The seaside on the other hand, cold, sparse and discreet, only shelters lonely poets, lunatics and lovers, who if we are to be honest, during this hour of tremor and storm, are the same thing, the same brown cat in the infinite night of the incipient winter, which arrives again with its hands full of good taste and beauty. Everything is, I suppose, perfect, except for the extinction of the blondes who, with their jovial, augustian look and their sixties striped bikinis, saved us from the festival of bad taste that is summer.
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