It isn’t hard to change your first name, although I don’t mean from a bureaucratic point of view – hardly anything is possible from a bureaucratic point of view. The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.
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…as to the Dutch, they were really a bunch of slags and sat down anywhere at all, a race of opportunist polyglot tradespeople it can’t be said often enough.
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… in particular I suffered rebuffs from the English (which wasn’t very serious, you’re never well received by the English – they are almost as racist as the Japanese, like a lite version of them), but also from the Dutch, who obviously didn’t reject me out of xenophobia (how could a Dutch person be xenophobic? That’s an oxymoron: right there: Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best),
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… the caudillo – sensing that Spain would never catch up with the train of the industrial revolution (which, let’s face it, it had completely missed) – had boldly decided to burn its bridges and invest in the third and final phase of the European economy, the tertiary sector: tourism and services, giving its country a crucial advantage at a time when salaried workers in newly industrialised countries, having achieved greater purchasing power, wanted to spend their money in Europe on gracious or mass tourism, in accordance with their status.
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… the number of things that she needed to maintain her status as a woman was actually startling, and though women don’t generally know this, it’s a thing that men don’t like, that even disgusts them, and gives them a sense of having acquired a tainted product whose beauty can only be maintained by infinite artifice, artifice which one quickly comes to see as immoral (despite the initial indulgence an alpha male might display towards the repertoire of feminine faults)…
