It is a shame that so much signature, so much demonstration and so much autumn that has suddenly fallen on us has distracted us from an event that should have been greeted by the population with total enthusiasm. I am referring, of course, to the meeting of the two drilling teams of the Rocafort tunnel. I don’t know if the protocols they use today to drill holes in rocks have allowed that ancient ceremony that used to happen whenever this happened: through the smallest hole that connected the two mouths, the engineer in charge of one of the brigades would shake hands with the engineer in charge of the other. Afterwards, everyone had a snack, with champagne, general xerinola and public demonstrations of satisfaction. And there is no less. The video they showed us is rather sleepy. And this is not so obvious, that the calculations are so exact; that there is no detour, or geological impediment, or that, in the course of the works, a monster older than the mountains awakens and we have to run to save ourselves from being trampled and scratched by a Devonian beast. But that hasn’t happened, as far as we know, and now I guess it’s a matter of polishing the hole, getting the finishing touches done and letting people go through it, happy and dejected. And what are tunnels, if not the infrastructures that you get used to more quickly, as if they were a natural phenomenon, as if that wide and slightly curved orifice had been there forever. As if it had been there all its life and we had only had to remove meters and more cubic meters of rubble, until we managed to recover its former perfection. We will pass without thinking about it, and all previous journeys will seem like a dream.
