It is an advertisement that I have been hearing for years on the radio in the mornings while I eat breakfast and read the newspapers: “The Fernandez are very kind”. The curious advertising slogan, which is repeated both in a plain and colloquial male voice addressed to the listener and in the melody intoned by a thin and angelic timbre of a young woman, corresponds to a centenary Madrid commerce of sale and cleaning of carpets. But it seems to me that it is something more than an advertisement. It is an indulgent irony, sympathetic, kind (for the sake of redundancy) and a discreet invitation to to think about the world in which we live. and its values.
Yes. One can’t help but ask oneself a question every time one hears that laughable, early morning announcement over the airwaves: “What is it?So hostile and brutal is our societySo intemperate and ill-mannered is our daily life; so difficult is it to come across in it the simple and simple and sweet kindness for it to serve as an irresistible commercial hook when selling carpets and tapestries or promoting their washing? What kind of acorn animals have we Spaniards collectively become so that the mere kindness in the treatment given to us by the owner or the employee of a store is presented to us as an exceptional and precious value?
I discussed this advertisement once with a friend of mine and noticed that for her it was a question of an outdated, stale, old-fashioned advertisement from another time. I noticed that she thought that today kindness is not going anywhere and that people identify it with an anachronistic value, if not with insolvency, with unsuitability to modern life and even with inefficiency in service. My friend let it slip that perhaps the fashions of carpets, porcelain floors that imitate wood, empty walls, minimalist decorations and unoccupied spaces had turned carpets and tapestries into a thing of the past, of older people to whom that propaganda, that marketing of exquisite treatment that today is considered a waste of time, was aimed precisely at.
Reality, however, proves otherwise. That of the kindness of the Fernandez is, in a proven way, the advert most catchy and successful of Madrid’s radio. And its apparent naivety is wisdom in the background; its supposed candor is a sardonic understanding of the human soul and its hypothetical extemporaneity is an awareness of the time in which we live.
Yes. Young people also miss a world run by the Fernandezes. I believe that the unredeemed kindness of these is an excellent proposal for this Spain poisoned by the political debate.. One is not in favor of sugarcoating this debate or of playing down what is dramatic. If one has to defend categorical positions, one defends them. But it is precisely because of the forcefulness that such a debate requires that kindness in daily and civil life is more necessary than ever.
The Fernandez are very kind… I confess that, no matter how many times I think about this candorous slogan, I can’t get over my astonishment. How did someone come up with such a basic and necessary claim? Was it intuition or a deep sociological knowledge of the country we live in and of the countrymen who make it up? Long live the kindness of that carpet store!Long live the Fernandez! Long live the Spain of the Fernandezes, who are indeed very kind, which is no small thing in these hard times.