The myth that Camilo José Cela farted in Parliament to interrupt a Catalan senator

2023-09-26 12:20:31

The irreverent anecdotes that Camilo José Cela has in his resume are as many as his erudition, which is saying something. And here is an example that allows us to discern how the writer spent his money. The calendar marked October 19, 1989, having just won the most important prizes in culture and the arts, when an unfortunate journalist was attacked with a question simpler than the mechanism of a botija: «Mr. Cela, have you been surprised? that they granted him the Nobel Prize in Literature?». The author smelled blood and went in to cut his throat: «Very much! “Especially because the Nobel Prize in Physics was waiting for me.” Not a hair was cut.

But if there was a topic that dazzled Don Camilo, author of some of the greatest works of our national literature, it was flatulence. In that sense he was like another great of our arts, Francisco de Quevedo, who already wrote five centuries before that “the fart is life, because even the Pope farts.” The author of ‘Viaje a la Alcarria’ was involved in – or so it is said – an infinite number of embarrassing situations related to the most gaseous environment, as his son explained in an interview in 2022: «The farts, and especially the belches, which They are easier to hide, they were their favorite weapons to scandalize.

There goes the most famous one. A thousand and one chronicles, books and articles tell of an unknown day when good old Cela decided to put an end to the intervention in the Senate of one of his colleagues: the priest Lluís María Xirinacs, from the Catalan left. “Suddenly, Don Camilo let out a loud fart that thundered through the room and left the speaker and the audience speechless,” explains Sebastián Moreno in ‘The academy has fun’. The cake-sized icing came when, with the camera silenced by the thunder, she addressed him again: «Continue the mosen, continue». The variants of the joke are many, many, damn.

It’s hard to get to the origin of the anecdote. Some claim that they were present and almost felt the noise; Others limit themselves to replicating the event without providing the day or year in which it happened. You go to know. As far as the ABC file goes, not a mention of windiness. In fact, Cela himself denied it in an interview with Mercedes Milá on RTVE back in the seventies:

–What things have they said about you that you had not done?

-Many. And it’s a shame because there were some really funny ones.

-For example…

–What Eduardo Chamorro attributed to me when I interrupted a speech to a senator…

-What happened?

–Ask Chamorro. It seems that he resounded in that noble place… It was a lie. […] They attributed to me that I let out a tremendous fart. This is a lie. First because, to interrupt a speech to anyone, whether priest or not, in the Senate, an elephant would be needed, not a Galician. And secondly because I would never have done this, God forbid, because I am, like all Spaniards, a domiciliary fart, but not a transient fart.

Don Camilo seemed upset. “This was repeated everywhere, because people repeat everything, especially lies,” he insisted. With the myth broken, it goes without saying that the news spread at full speed on and off camera because Cela’s attraction to flatulence was popular. The anecdote, in fact, was not the only one that haunted him in this sense until he left this world. Among the best known is the one in which, in the middle of a dinner, he let out a huge fart. When everyone present turned to the writer, he looked at a woman next to him and said: «Don’t worry ma’am, we’ll say it was me». True or false? You go to know.