I'm on the road that led you to Haría, the one that passed through Tahíche and that before reaching Guatiza, approached (a lot) El Mojón.
It's 1979.
I often think that this road helped a lot to explain Lanzarote in the 70s. In its curves, the engineer who imagined it took special care so that the Tahíche, Guenia and Tinamala mountains (near Guatiza) would be facing each other for a moment.
It was as if he knew that those mountains were a beautiful monument to contemplate (which they are).
A leisurely, winding, arrhythmic layout, before all the rush arrived.
Juan's death takes me back to that landscape.
I am sitting in the back seat of his 1973 Sunbeam 1250, going up that road, with my eyes glued to the glass, absorbing all that spectacle.
He's driving.
Haría was depopulated enough for your own neighbor to be, the teacher (on leave at that time), the father of your schoolmate ("Lourditas"), mayor... and driver.
The same one who spent the summer in Órzola, and the one who took us on his boat to La Graciosa. The same one.
He's driving, and I'm just the son of another teacher, I must be about six years old. And that everything happened in less than half a minute.
In a clever and agile gesture, Juan dazzled a rabbit crossing the road with the high beams... he stopped the car, honked the horn... and... done.
I don't know if in this 2025 with animalistic sensitivity on the surface it is a good example.
I assume the risk.
For me, that scene carries with it a genuine, scarce, slow, depopulated, surviving, vital... poor and dignified Lanzarote.
A Lanzarote that lives without knowing what will come next.
Before tourism occupies everything.
Juan led a corporation that had to coexist with the construction of the Church of Máguez, the children's park in Haría, the Mirador del Río, the church in Ye (I'm not entirely sure about this, because the one in Ye sounds like it was difficult to get it on track).
The consolidation of the Tourist Centers.
And at the same time he presided over a corporation that somehow managed to prevent the municipality from tourist overcrowding, that stood up to a hotel proposal for Caletón Blanco, to the extraction of stone in the Malpaís de la Corona, to the first growth of Punta Mujeres...
A stage of energy and early mornings... that must have been exhausting...
When I had him as a teacher he had already stopped being mayor.
As a teacher, I remember more than he taught English, I remember that his voice resonated in the classroom using a language that the boys said he invented... the boys said it was something like a kind of "Spanglish" (before "Spanglish")...
Sometimes the language of the students is daring, the student has the bad luck that he only knows the complete course at the end of the course and that is when it is better to listen to him...
Giving classes is talking to the future... and only in the future do you find out if you pick up the baton.
On Thursday (August 28), after finding out, I took some time to remember Juan as a teacher, as a person.
I was amazed at the number of times that in some way we coincided again: the errands to my mother, what he told me in a fleeting conversation... always in detail, direct...
From his classes I keep that "Repeat please" that I put in the title.
A colloquial phrase, a flat and soft tag that we heard him repeat tirelessly.
I already told you that some students realize later...
I needed time to see all the determination that phrase held, which in addition to being generous, is a listening, it is a "try again", it is a "you can do better", it is a "I'm waiting for you", it is a "please", it is a "you haven't fallen", it is a "we have time"...
The Japanese have the healthy habit of saying goodbye to the traveler with a "please come back", and we, even knowing that life goes in one direction, will have to make room for Juan...
His work as a dynamizer, vertebrator, axis, lever and engine leaves a longer shadow, leaves the sensation that Juan has not left.
Thank you, Juan.
Alejandro José Perdomo Feo