Of all the supposedly sensational revelations contained in King Juan Carlos’ autobiography, only one made me raise an eyebrow. It’s not the fact that he admired and appreciated the dictator Franco. Nor does he claim with all his regal ease that it was he and he alone who personally brought democracy to Spain after the tyrant’s death. Nor must he think that his heir, Philip VI, is ungrateful for not having solemnly acknowledged all that his father owes to His Majesty. No. All this was clear to anyone who, in addition to having eyes and ears, knew how to read between the lines of his gestures and speeches. What amazes me is that the emeritus has the sacred attributes of publicly calling his wife, dead for 63 years, “Sofi”, as he called her in private, just as she called him “Juanito”, and that, after half a century of infidelity and humiliation, he proclaims Queen Sofía the woman of his life and reproaches her for not having gone to visit him in exile in Abu Dhabi so as not to upset her son. There is the key to the hundreds of pages of the billet. That passage is not just another in the sugar-coated autobiography of a historical figure, but rather a uric-acid self-portrait of a sexist, passive-aggressive man, and a monarch so accustomed to receiving orders in and out of the palace that he still can’t believe they are no longer obeyed.
It is not a question here of claiming one over the other, nor of remembering what one has swallowed and the other has swallowed. Time has put everyone in their place. While Sofi just celebrated her 87th anniversary by listening to Alaska herself sing Happy Birthday and thinking about what beautiful dress to wear to receive the Golden Fleece, Juanito hasn’t even been invited to the fiftieth anniversary of his own proclamation and stifles Gulf boredom by occasionally showing up in Sanxenxo to bargain, get blinded by barnacles, and, in the process, take the Crown for granted. However, I wouldn’t put my hand in the fire because there is no authentic reconciliation, beyond the title of his memoirs. When they coincide, they still look into each other’s eyes, and it would be neither the first nor the last former elderly couple who, once the urgencies of the flesh have passed, go back to taking care of each other, licking their wounds and waiting for death together. In First dates happens.
