an old king he will always pretend to be king, although he is retired and no longer is; he has too much habit. Changing a habit, forced by circumstances, and not by choice, is very difficult, almost as difficult as changing an opinion. Who changes their mind just like that? You have to admire the people who do it and who he doesn’t mind admitting he wasn’t right, not before, not surely now. That change is a fascinating adventure, like when you answer “yes; not; Okay, yes; no, wait; bah, who cares, yes; although better not”, and the question was only if you wanted red wine. Playing king becomes tempting even when you are a taxi driver, a poet, a civil servant, a rancher, an engineer, a bus driver. Being a king is also a tic. At one point it comes out unintentionally, out of sheer arrogance.
Playing king has something gestural: you say hello in the distance, you navigate, you speak plainly, you roll down the car window, you let out a bit of your importance with a «And?»… Years ago I established trust with a man who spent his afternoons typing on an imaginary typewriter, in a square near my apartment. He seemed sane. He also smoked imaginary cigarettes. Some days I invited him to a real one. He could spend hours typing on air. He even ran the drum when he got to the end of the line. One day I asked him if he was with a novel. He put a finger to his lips and told me to shut up. Sometimes he peeked out from behind me, as if to spy on what he was writing, and told him «You’re doing well. He is going to be a jerk. Do you have an agent? Overnight he disappeared. I never saw it again. Time passed and one Sunday, in Madrid, I saw a woman playing an imaginary piano, like a virtuoso. She looked like a ghost, and as a ghost, she acted under the same spell as the man she typed on that non-existent typewriter.
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I remembered these spectral beings when I saw the emeritus king in Galicia, moving, letting himself go, saying simple things, like the joker king he once was, to whom they almost always shout pleasant words, although never “genius”, which is not understood . It seems to me that through the three characters the existence of unreality is verified. In the case of Juan Carlos I the feeling of fantasy increases because there is already another king in his place – coincidentally a son of his! – who has slowly been pushing him off the stage, until he has been reduced to a name of a street, a park, an avenue, even a living statue.
The greatness of a monarch reserves these tricks of fate: being degraded to iron busts, oil paintings, pavilion signs. There is no semblance of eternity in it. In a short time, you are a hulk, a plaster figure, a stuffed animal. And you are still alive. “Make yourself king,” you say to yourself in the morning, and perhaps ask for quail for breakfast, while praying to heaven that nothing similar to what happened to the pope doesn’t happen to you. John Paul IIto whom a photographer, in the Basilica of San Pedro, asked him on a certain occasion «Holiness, make him pray», reducing him to a wimp.