For many years, sweet things caused me a certain weariness. When I was a child, I couldn't understand how adults, after an intake worthy of a herd, still had the stomach to down one of those horrifying desserts of yesteryear (like the "pijama," one of the most nauseating aesthetic combinations ever imagined by human beings). As for the sweets that children like me were supposed to crave, I understood even less the enthusiasm of kids for vomit-inducing artifacts like the Bollycao or a disgusting time bomb called Pantera Rosa that left your teeth as if you had sucked an elephant's phallus. Something similar happened to me with the Easter mona, and it was difficult for me to figure out why my peers could get excited with that delirious scene of chocolate eggs and those sinister chicks and showgirl feathers that crowned a cake as vulgar as it was Catalan.
But, when old age looms, one experiences that strange reconciliation with things that had seemed absurd, and that is how ---for a few days now--- I have noticed a mysterious physical anxiety to eat the mona this weekend. Not only that, but, in the absence of godparents (because I grew up when my parents were going through a progressive phase and I was left without baptism, fortunately for me), I have asked the one who gave birth to me to buy a mona to celebrate these few days of retreat. As I was telling her, I myself was surprised and scared about how a person like me, who had systematically detested this clerical cake, of a limping tieta and indigestible sugar mass, was now experiencing a crazy desire to eat it; I also wondered how it could be that, after hating it with all my heart, I now couldn't spend these holidays without the whim.
Sometimes we deeply detest a person, an object, or, in this case, a particular delicacy for no apparent reason. I hated the poor monas surely because they forced me to sit even longer at the table during endless festive meals, banquets where people talked endlessly and ---as a general rule--- I wandered lost in my thoughts, not interested in anything that was said. The mona, for that me who is no longer my me, only personified that dreadful custom of prolonging meals that we have in the Mediterranean, this inframental habit of eating for three or four hours as if we were Neanderthals who must complement a snack and a roast with a cake, as if we were a pilgrimage of pigs who never have enough until they leave the table with a crane. As if that weren't enough, we covered the cake in question with that dreadful, troglodyte-worthy decoration.
But now, who knows if due to my scarce hope for life and for the world in general, I am the same person but ---mysteriously, due to psychological effects that escape me--- I have asked Mother that, above all (and I used the words "above all") she not forget to buy this year's mona at Can Moner in Palamós. A request that years ago would have seemed absolutely impossible to me, a wish that just a couple of lustrums ago would have made me laugh, is now what I want most in the world. I long to feel the fineness that the bun gives my tongue, that discreet layer of chocolate and, what gives me the most delight, the grace of being able to complement coffee with those eggs that decades ago had seemed to me a product worthy of imbeciles. This is how I will soon be the one to take the egg in question and noisily break it into pieces, provoking the laughter of the diners, and also compulsively grabbing a fragment to put it in my mouth.
The perspective of the grim reaper pushes us into the cloying sordidness of the sweet; and not only that, but the delight in this particular cake is the reminder that we are no longer that more or less original and no less extravagant person who felt an authentic visual repulsion for that egg salad, absurd chocolate figures and all that junk; but rather we have become, precisely because we now adore many things that we had found boring, someone who conforms to following the norm of the "mona" without being so much of an anti-system nuisance. In the end, I will gobble up the "mona" and it won't be a big deal, and who knows if I will joke with the diners by placing one of those unbearable chicks on my head, like a fair clown. Really, it is an extraordinary defeat to see how everything we had repudiated we now need, even an object as questionable as the Easter "mona", just to sweeten an afternoon of leisure.