On Politically undesirable (Ediciones B), one of the best-titled books of this year, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo recalls that her mother Patricia, a woman who wore a miniskirt and smoked cigars to the scandal of the Cuban Revolution, found herself one day in the early seventies, during a party, with Gabriel García Márquez. The writer told him several legends inherited from his grandmother Tranquilina (“if you slide your fingertips over the edge of a glass and the glass creaks, it means that a sailor is dying on the high seas”) and then he said something that made her mourn. Tomás Eloy Martínez, who would write the story in The nation, He asked García Márquez what he had told him. I asked her why she felt so lonely, answered the Nobel.

“And how did you know I was alone?”

“Have you ever really met a woman who doesn’t feel lonely?”

“Loneliness”, Álvarez de Toledo concludes, “is the hidden face of independence”. The deputy of the Popular Party was not alone this Monday in the presentation of her book, which is a treaty of solitude limited to the scope of a party, hers, which the author dynamites without discretion, sheltering herself in a kind of corollary that she signs herself. : “Only when politicians say the same in public as in private will we be able to rescue democracy from the dirty jaws of populism.”

Therefore, Álvarez de Toledo reproduces in Politically undesirable conversations as you remember them and wasaps how they were written to “fix the facts of a time in my life and in the life of Spain,” he said in the crowded Fernando de Rojas auditorium of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, where many readers, many friends, also writers gathered (Mario Vargas Llosa, Andrés Trapiello, Arcadi Espada), a lot of family and few politicians (the deputies of Ciudadanos Guillermo Díaz and Edmundo Bal, the MEP of Vox Hermann Terstch), especially few of his party (only the deputies Pilar Marcos and Gabriel Elorriaga) . None of the Genoa dome. “Do you think the current leaders can reach La Moncloa?” Asked a reader. “I wrote this book for you to do it,” he said.

There was no more noise on the spot, however, than there is on the pages. Álvarez de Toledo has broken moorings and, embarked, does not look much back. He did thank Pablo Casado for having offered him the “most exciting” challenge of his life. The journalist Santiago González was more forceful; Casado complains that Álvarez de Toledo has written 500 pages instead of helping people, well: “Each one helps people in the best way, one by writing books and the other by winning olive pit tossing contests”, said in reference to “Teodorico” [Teodoro García Egea], as he called it, citing journalist Rosa Belmonte. The audience was started in a very timid applause that soon ceased; The bun oven is not there and the loudest applause was directed against the Government and its partners.

The greatest burdens were reserved for Pablo Iglesias: the policy, said Alvarez de Toledo, allowed him, among many other things, “to call the son of the FRAP by his name and even by his title, at the headquarters of national sovereignty,” he said, avoiding the expression “son of a terrorist” for which the deputy was sued by Iglesias’s father. Ayuso? “The most important electoral asset of the center-right; a correct attitude and without fear. The debate on whether the PP in Madrid should preside should have ended in two seconds ”.

There was more room for “joy” than for “pessimism”, as defended by an overwhelmed Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo. She remembered that as a child she liked to do puzzles until she smashed her pacifier, as she has done with this book. That his mother once told him that “forms sophisticated the truth”, but “now there are no forms and there is no truth.” That his father’s last words before he died were: “The trade winds have come.” That her grandmother used to say, amusingly: “It’s my opinion and I share it.” That Spain is a “stubborn will to live together the different ones”, and it is also “sun, salt and sensuality”. He recalled great friends, the joy of friendship (“what does a blonde like me do among people as smart as this?”), Also deceased friends like David Gistau. That his book is the story of a disappointment and of people who did not measure up, “I’m sure neither.”

At the end, when asked if she would leave politics if she was expelled from the PP, she added: “They will not throw me out of the PP.” And with that phrase, which finished off Vargas Llosa’s wish (“it would be absurd for retaliation against Cayetana”), he closed the act.