Christmas raffle: the day when black Spain rises | TV

I am one of those who think that this peninsula is not the worst place in the world to live, and I do not say it for paella, fried fish or cod pil-pil. Nor for the well-pulled reeds of Chamberí or for the jaranas in the caves of Sacromonte. Not even for the good that breaks the sea at the mouth of the Urumea in San Sebastián or for the meigas that hide in the Galician fragas.

I am admired from this country how it went without apparent effort from two centuries of wars, dictatorships, ruin, backwardness and hunger, to an advanced democracy with very broad rights and great social protection. I like living here because I know how they continue to spend them in other places where they have not known how to work the miracle of building a plural, free, safe and complex society like this. And I know that to say this today, without government in sight and with shaky institutions, sounds idiotic, but my idiocy has a deeper democratic background than the intelligence of others: although we stubbornly strive to destroy the free country we have made, Its foundations are so solid that the cracks still do not affect its integrity.

All this constitutional and naive patriotism, which I can defend the rest of the year, falls apart every December 22, the only day I renounce my Spanishness and I would like to be anything else, even French. With the Christmas lottery emerges from who knows what catacombs all that blackness that Goya painted, that Spain that we thought was past and buried under seven layers. For a few hours, among singing children and rivers of cava offer, this country ceases to be what it is to return to be what many believe it remains. And not turning off the TV escaped from that tuf to fritanga and superstition.