Best Job in the World

We are faced with a scene in New York that would be considered an “escarni”* — a demonstration of exposure — and severely punished in Spain.

No sooner had we emerged from JFK airport than we are greeted with the true national anthem of the United States: the din of horns opening a gap through rush-hour traffic. The bad weather has unfurled the white flag above the streets of Manhattan and right now Central Park is a cake iced with butter cream, awaiting our footsteps. After 10 minutes, feet soaked and hands holding a Starbucks coffee, you would find yourself wanting to queue up to register your residency in New York. Yes, truly, this city welcomes and shelters you the moment you step off the airplane. It makes you feel small beneath its unending skyscrapers and inside its yellow cabs, but it also makes you feel tall when that passerby who doesn’t know you from Adam makes a detour to get you to the address that you have asked about, or when the anonymous travelers with whom you share the bus come up to you to give you change to pay the conductor without you even having asked.

But above all, you understand why this country of contradictions and contraindications has for years talked of liberty when, during the visit to the White House gardens, you become an unexpected spectator to an organized demonstration against Guantanamo and CIA torture. The police who guard the president’s house look on calmly and respectfully, as if the official residence of the highest authority in the country were not just a few meters away. The guide explains to us that in the United States, demonstration about any cause is permitted at any time and in any place; no one will say anything so long as you are not provoking disturbances. In Spain, the scene we contemplate would be called an “escarni,”* and a law against it providing for severe penalties passed. Now we are in front of the Dakota building where Roman Polanski filmed Rosemary’s Baby, and where cinematographic celebrities and top business people have or have had an apartment. No one knows for sure the identity of the residents because their privacy is jealously protected. It is only the apartments’ doormen who know it, people who consider theirs to be the best job in the world and who even pass it on from father to son. Apparently, the doormen are those with the best-decorated houses in the entire city, as they are the first to be able to pick up the furniture left abandoned on the sidewalks by the millionaire residents when they want to get rid of it. Well, that is the shame of this great country, that throughout history those who govern it have become used to treating the rest of us like their doormen, obliged to open and close the door for them because they think the world belongs to them.

*Editor’s note: “Escarni” in Catalan or “escarche” in Spanish is a demonstration outside the house or workplace of a public figure to draw attention to their perceived crimes.