He is already out of all consensus. That’s why he screams. To be more precise, his are not screams, but howls that he launches in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, shocking the cheesy and narcoleptic center of this small city. He no longer has anyone left. That’s why he howls under the sun or the moon and people twist and cross the sidewalk, a child is scared, someone jokingly insults him from the car. He is haunted by oblivion, shadows, indecipherable terrors into which his blue and motionless eyes sink like a dead sea. He is hardly a man anymore, but a scream that rises to heaven like a hymn of pain. He’s been like this for months. He will continue like this until the dread kills him because absolutely no one cares.
holy cross of Tenerife, my city to my regret, my sorrowful city, my city as light as oblivion and heavy as piles, has a long and sad tradition of crazy, insane and outlandish street people. Nobody pays the slightest attention to them. Neither do journalists, of course. But what else can you expect from a city that doesn’t know or want to tell itself? A few days ago I returned to contemplate with a melancholy that has not been able to get rid of the disgust the commemorative plaque dedicated to Lluís Companys right in front of the moat of the castle of Montjuïc where he was assassinated by the Francoists. And I thought the same as thirty years ago. Not a commemorative tablet remembering the murders and torture of hundreds of Tenerife in the city with the best carnival of the world. There is not even half a monolith for the memory of who the mayor of Santa Cruz and the civil governor of the province were in 1936: both were vilely shot. Nothing at all. But please, be careful not to remove the exaltation monument to Francisco Franco prematurely. A monument erected almost 30 years after the end of the Civil War. Don’t move a bloody centimeter out of unrestricted respect for whoever heroically massacred us and for the indescribable beauty of that sculptural milestone.
Yes, I believe that in this caricature of the city –as in many others– there is a deep and pathological relationship between forgetfulness, power and madness, with the permission of Michel Foucault. Power even makes us forget that we have forgotten. Madness becomes invisible thanks to forgetfulness and power, as always, is the one who creates the basic consensus to know if one is sane or crazy, if one is outside or within normality. Foucault himself begins a famous essay stating that “someday, perhaps, we will no longer know what madness was.” It will happen, perhaps, when power is transformed into another strategy for organizing collective life and Bermúdez, Tarife, and Patricia Hernández no longer govern or misgovern, to give close examples. «The neuroses will be placed among the forms that are constitutive (and not deviant) of our society…and what we designate as external could one day designate us». That time has not come. It is perfectly possible that it will never come. The screaming man will continue to launch his shrieks like salivating arrows to pierce the sky. He will keep screaming because he has no other way to breathe. Sometimes they will call the police who will rarely show up. A few days ago another madman –a lover of silence, like any president of a neighborhood association– knocked him down with a punch. Some of the regular customers of the street terraces yell at him so that he doesn’t come near, they wave their hands and kick on the ground, as if scaring away a pigeon. And the man screamed, run away, a dove that crawls along the sidewalk. How do they not notice that he is screaming because he is terrified and his fear is beyond the reach of all hope, how have they not discovered that if he howls like a dying wolf it is because he wants to reach a scream that will explode him once and for all? Dying for an exceptional, righteous, final cry. Only then will silence mean something. Santa Cruz de Tenerife, August 10, 2023.
