Since I can remember I remember the velvety voice of Françoise Hardy whispering their melancholy songs on dad’s old record player. All the boys and girls, How to say goodbye, My youth is leaving… That fragile girl with her hypnotizing androgyny conquered Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie, who confessed to being “passionately in love with her. All the men in the world were, and a few women too.” I confess it, too. Her melancholy seduced me and I have followed her for years through cinema, fashion and even books as recommended as her memoirs: ‘The despair of the apes and other trifles’.
From defensive pessimism to intelligent optimism
Hardy composed in the bathroom, where he locked himself with the guitar that his single mother gave him when he was sixteen. “The bathroom walls improve the sound of my guitar,” he said. A muse of pessimism who lived in love with a love that did not comeperhaps it didn’t even exist. “Only men endowed with a sufficient dose of femininity can disturb me,” she confessed, dismantling the myth of the alpha male. An elegant look that I always dreamed I would come across at a train station, walking along the boulevard of Saint-Germain or on the terrace of any café in Montmartre. Something that will no longer happen. We knew it when reading “Mom is gone” on instagram! of his son. What a lack of grandeur!
Hardy recruited me for his army of melancholics and pessimists. I will say in my defense that although I am still a loner, I have given my pessimism a certain pragmatism. A defensive pessimism that makes you think of the worst so that the worst does not happen, very much in the style of my favorite hypochondriac, Woody Allen. As Ancelotti said when praising Nacho, I am also a “pessimistic defender”. In reality I live between that defensive pessimism and what we could call ‘intelligent optimism’, the one that leads me to get up when I’m down thinking that nothing can get worse.
Francis Hardy. / Agencies
Without Laporte, “the “optimistic” defender
Between defensive pessimism and intelligent optimism the days pass in Donaueschingen, where Luis de la Fuente will bet on Nacho, the “pessimistic defender” as a starter against Croatia. He will do it alongside a ‘compatriot’ of Hardy, Le Normand. Laporte has fallen out of the eleven due to some suspicious discomfort that seems to hide a disturbing lack of competitive rhythm in Saudi Arabia. It seems strange that Le Normand and Nacho, two defensive hitmen, form a duo, leaving out a Laporte with a better foot to deactivate defensive curtains. In fact, he is the only center back with the ability to filter that first pass. He and Unai Simón, our first attacker who we could call “the optimistic goalkeeper.”
The day of the debut in this Euro Cup is approaching and at the national team’s base camp they begin to formas usual, both sides. Those who get on the elephant of euphoria and they proclaim the favoritism of this young and talented Spain. And those who emerge in front, the anthropological spoilsports, something very Spanish. Those who, since everything is going well, maintain that something bad is going to happen. They apply cognitive distortion to self-sabotage us by arguing that we do not deserve the success or peace of mind we enjoy now. I have always suspected that low self-esteem hides behind this vital attitude. People installed in a negative dialogue that must be kept at a distance so as not to be trapped in it.
And so we are, while I pack my suitcase to get up at 4 in the morning and take the car to Stuttgart, where I will get on a train that will allow us to cross Germany to Berlin, almost 800 kilometers. Clinging to my defensive pessimism, away from those who sabotage themselves and sure that I will never be able to meet Hardy in a wagon again. At least we have his voice and his guitar left. ¡Farewell Françoise, hello Berlin!
2024-06-13 15:22:14
#Teuton #chronicles #Adieu #Françoise #hallo #Berlin
