Late in the afternoon you are having a drink, on a terrace in the center of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with a couple of old friends. The conversation, as always, passes between laughter, anecdotes and books and movies discovered or reviewed until, suddenly, someone approaches the table. One of my friends greets him and the individual jumps on me as if in a parody of a hug and begins to repeat:
– Ah, my insulter, my insulter, how is my insulter…
I have no idea who the baldheaded asshole is and I’m about to shove him away, but one of my friends gives me a nod and I back off. He finally sits down at a nearby table, where several people accompany him. The conversation continues and a few minutes later I ask about the baldy. The friend reminds me who he is. He a whopping ten years ago, maybe more, I had a very brief skirmish with that individual in an exchange of articles. I don’t remember it very well, but I think the worst thing I called it was dumb and rude. Ten years later –ten years of work, of deaths and agonies, of loves and heartbreaks, of nights and dawns, of books read and written– that individual believes in the right to throw himself at me and remind me that I insulted him until I broke his soul . Ten years. But what kind of life do these chumps have who have spent ten years festering shit for three sentences in an article that nobody remembers?
Records, however, can always be broken. Last year, after a terrifyingly leaden parliamentary plenary session, he was having lunch with a colleague when a definitely older lady came over to greet him. When she kindly introduced me to the madam, her face darkened and she began to talk about butcher journalists who for a minute of glory are capable of anything. In her case, anything was a comment to a socialist councilor exactly 22 years ago. Yes, exactly, still in the last century. No, it was not a derogatory comment that alluded to the private life of that mayor who had no further political career because he was stabbed by his own party colleagues; It was not referring to his physical appearance, his family, his sex life or his taxation. But it had been awful and she hadn’t forgotten it, she hadn’t forgotten it and, of course, she would never, ever forget it, as she emphasized several times. The lady spoke while fixing her eyes on the void, as if the simple fact of looking at her face meant an unbearable torture for her. She even had the detail of indicating to my companion that one should be more selective with whom she chooses for lunch, and she then left down the street majestically dragging her dignity or her memory or her oligophrenia.
I could stretch this article out for a week and turn it into a serial. Once, arriving at a job, I bumped into a public official – otherwise an intelligent, responsible and industrious person – who reminded me that I had written something awful about his father – also a politician at the time – decades ago. Fortunately, I think he eventually found out that I’m not a monster and we ended up professing a firm respect for each other. Of course all this can be reduced to a set of more or less funny or funny or surreal anecdotes, like the case of that guy whose tiny party I put to birth and who, not finding a way to talk to me, sent me a tape to the newspaper tape full of insults and disqualifications. But no, they look like symptoms to me. Symptoms of a radical misunderstanding of what is the critical function and freedom of expression that define journalism and that an immature and unforgiving, uncivil and inhospitable, intolerant and indifferent society like that of Tenerife has always endured like a foreign body. And you know where one best disposes of a foreign body: in the toilet.
