Lanzagrava, 28º-7º

March 20 2023 (17:44 WET)

Oh, Agustín, is this why they tore down your mural, to excavate another plot, another black hole in the heart of the city? It had been more than a year since I had passed by and this Sunday of clouds and clearings, on the way to get some donuts at Lolita, I saw the Lanzagrava sign, with its infamous bird, hovering over the metal fence, watching the street, like a Promethean vulture about to swoop down and devour the liver of the capital.

Because I witnessed your crime. I was one of its few witnesses, perhaps the only one who saw it live and in person, being fully aware of what it meant to erase your surreal effigy from our streets. I was recording it and I still keep the video. It was February 1, 2022, early, around 9 in the morning, when the backhoe, equipped with its hydraulic hammer, pierced your right eye, after drilling your skull. When your eye fell, like a stone cataract spilling onto the asphalt, I couldn't keep watching. That one-eyed cyclops, with half his face broken and his brains exposed, was no longer you. So I left there, dead of grief and rage. Wanting to grab an adamantium bat and start hitting all the machines that are massacring our Arrecife daily. Instead, what I did, to appease my wrathful magua, was resort to words. To one of your texts. I rummaged through my memory, which is like Funes' (because I barely sleep) and found the right fragment. I ran to take refuge in my library, opened the copy of Crimen and there it is, that passage from your "Epilogue on the island of curses":

«I, the stepson of the island. The isolated one.

I am witnessing the opening of the longest shipwreck of the centuries. The one that the beating of a raven's beak measures on the heart of a virgin, and from which bitternesses, oils and dreams are pending».

There are more and more bitternesses, Agustín, there are fewer and fewer oils and fewer dreams. Your Lancelot is dissolving. Your face is no longer there, it will no longer look at us, winking at me when I took my dog Duna to the vacant lot in front of El Almacén square and our pupils, accomplices between the lines, met, while the letters of the alphabet, dancing around you, performed their secret choreography, and the corner of your mouth, always so serious, seemed to curve into a half smile. That image only exists in my memory, but I will never see it again. And all, for what? We have sacrificed the art of Tono Márquez and Felo Monzón to obtain, in exchange, another damn empty lot. Or another building in bad taste, when they deign to build it. That's how the whole city is, Agustín, dismembered, falling to pieces, its historical and artistic heritage agonizing, only to build apartments and more apartments. The Hotel Oriental, where you wrote Lancelot, 28º-7º, throwing the pages to fly through the half-open window of room no. 5, in ruins. Abandoned to its fate. And miraculously, thanks to the fact that it was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest by Historical Heritage, they have not torn it down. An exception that does not free us from collective suicide, perpetrated by the hands stained with gray cement and black money of our politicians. Arrecife deluxe and Lanzarote premium. Tourist despotism: everything for the tourist, but without the native. 

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But, despite this, Arrecife (and Lanzarote) are still standing, they continue to resist, refusing to sink in this sea of cement and neglect that threatens to engulf us. And it is not thanks to its leaders, but to the many humble people who love their city, their towns and their island. I am one of them, Agustín. Like you, I was not lucky enough to be born here (not even in Tenerife or the Canary Islands), but I am another stepson of the archipelago. I have been stateless for half of my life, but Lanzarote has welcomed me with open arms and Arrecife has become my home. And I am not going to allow them to continue destroying it with impunity, not at least without raising my voice to denounce the abuses, even if I cannot remedy them. Because I am blending in with the city, establishing a symbiotic relationship with Arrecife, vibrating in harmony with the neighborhoods of Valterra and El Lomo, but also with the Charco de San Ginés and the streets of the center, and now, every wound they inflict on them, I feel it in my flesh and in my skin, it hurts in my soul and I don't intend to tolerate it any longer. All those putrid madalenasjumasera of volcanoes, that they have spread, like a cancer, at the expense of public funds, should return them and use the money for something really beneficial for the city and its neighbors. And not waste another euro of public funds, which must be quite diminished with so much bleeding, on nonsense and aesthetic homicides. Do they want to beautify the city? Well, plant trees! Repair the ruined houses, tidy up the peripheral neighborhoods, take care of the historical rubble, damn it! It is falling to pieces, while they insist on continuing to build, without first restoring what is broken or damaged. Have a bit of compassion and humanity, of affection for the island and its capital, since they fill their mouths so much in their speeches with Lanzarote and Arrecife. All the rallies, the programs and the verbiage, all this electoral circus that they put on every four years, only shows me that they only aspire to establish themselves or perpetuate themselves in power, to start sucking from the udders of the State and continue and continue sucking, until they leave the rest of us dry and turn Lanzarote and Arrecife into a gravel cemetery and a cement island.

 

 

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