It is not in the great stones, buildings, monuments where the story of humankind is written, but in the little words spread across the narratives. The truth isn't ever revealed in the cathedrals, palaces or great walls; not in the milestones that pretend to show the way to some important far away place, but in the quiet, almost unaudible adjectives used unassumingly to prop up a little tale that is being told as a matter of fact, perhaps full of gossip, for wide audiences to enjoy. The small touches of passing colour that give meaning to an otherwise closed whole. Something the teller himself might be fully unaware of, but an awaken reader in some other part of the world will find extremely revealing.
They are secret codes which allow to decipher a deeper meaning behind the manifest one. The narrator might have dropped them as a manner of speaking with shorthand overtones that nobody will question as they are seen as ornaments of a bigger and transcendental story and nobody will question them because they are everyday life form of speaking.
Well, nobody, except the awaken one who stumbles upon them and understands their exact meaning as a way to unravel the truth around him or herself, his or her country and his or her history.
If you read this extraordinary BBC piece on the great Bourbon scoundrel, by Linda Pressly, I endare you to stop at the two little words just at paragraph tenth of the tale, "tortured and bloody". Two words to define the history of Spain, a country unable to come to terms with itself and where you could provoke a serious turmoil would you dare to repeat them in public when being an authority of whichever round. Two adjectives which define precisely the way other peoples see the Spaniards, two words you were used to see applied to some remote barbarian tiranny, but not to a supposedly advanced and civilized european country; something which feels like a slap at the face of the dark pride of a people whose legacy in history is precisely a long trail of torture and blood. A country all the authorities, whether right or leftwing, are proud of, and is even loved by its political prisoners.
Something you wouldn't believe.
