No, it can not be. I look up frightened from the newspapers. The Michael Jackson concert in Santa Cruz de Tenerife again? And now why? Because apparently it’s been thirty years. Or forty. Or maybe fifty. This infinite and extremely poor ritornello is suffocating, agonizing, unbearable. And always, of course, three or four old announcers who have unjustly survived – death is blind to guilt but merciless with distractions, as Borges said – always appear to remember the anniversary with their arteries bursting with supersaturated fats and nostalgia. Because, of course, all this repeat garbage is a trap. Who the hell physically remembers that concert? Who remembered it and has forgotten it? And who cares? 95% of boys and girls under the age of 30 do not know and will never know who Michael Jackson was. Of course, you can find exceptions. Some pedantic child who will explain it clearly: “Michael Jackson was a famous billionaire pedophile who in his spare time danced and sang and screamed trying to erase the black color from his skin.” But not the worst. The worst thing is that remembering Michael Jackson’s concert inevitably leads us to remember another of our great cultural milestones, Celia Cruz’s concert at the carnivals. For me you are nothing, you don’t have the colorful bembas. Ah, although I doubt that they don’t know it, because it is part of the education of all chicharrero children from kindergarten, with this performance by the Queen of Salsa we achieved the Guinness Record for the most crowded dance in fucking history. And that’s because we don’t present ourselves to the record of uncles and aunts pissing simultaneously in an Atlantic capital of sparkling and puddled nights. We would have devastated there. Here you piss and vomit with civic order, police security and extraordinary sphincter freedom. Mine is an exceptional town. “The black woman has a tumbao / she has a tumbao, she has a tumbao / and she doesn’t walk like that / and she doesn’t walk like that and she doesn’t walk like that…” Do people really remember it? I was there, pushed by a magmatic crowd from one side to the other of the Plaza de la Candelaria, and I remember absolutely nothing. Not even if Celia Cruz sang in the Plaza de la Candelaria. Surely she was the only one loaded like a hedgehog on that magical and unrepeatable night.
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