No doubt we were living in untimely, crazy, hot, twisted and more than difficult times. I thought that all this was going to be like a great birth, where the histrionic pain (and sometimes unbearable, if you have had the bad luck to get double oxytocin) comes to cloud the real reason for suffering. I confess that I wanated to believe with all my strength, every day I greased my engine of hope so that “all that” was for something wonderful. And the fact is that somehow, we all already knew that what was happening was not only the consequence of an absurd era that had become ill, but also the necessary transmutation towards a great change of paradigm.

Spain (that very characteristic country), with those “new” times that were running, seemed (also) to have a bizarre tendency that took it towards its more bizarre origins. The shortcomings brought back the essence of our character (did we ever escape from it?) Everything would have been fine in this sense, if it weren’t for the dust and the stale smell that the suit and the comb were taking out of the old trunk…

-Everything seemed to be a déjà vu on a cosmic level (in the province, if you know what I mean!), with a very grotesque and theatrical character,” said the lady in the fruit shop after my arrival from abroad after 14 years away. The shops in the neighbourhood seemed to have practically the same clientele, but the lady who claimed to know me, I didn’t remember at all. -(…) And at last something sneaked up in some newspapers. -No one dared to put it on the front page for the first few days, and believe me, it took weeks before it became apparent that the various stories were about the same man. I think he was the one who helped me with the shopping bags the other day,” she exclaimed excitedly.

The point is that this elusive character had mysteriously perfumed the neighborhood, the city and the whole country. Some said they had seen him stopping traffic in the middle of the city, others contradicted themselves in describing his height: some were over two metres tall, others were the height of an average Spaniard. He was wearing a raincoat and a hat, several said; others came to the conclusion that this rare visitor was usurping the newspapers by blending in with politicians and businessmen in order to get his message and essence into each and every important negotiation. Some called him an artist, the more superstitious related him as the devil himself. What was becoming clear was that he had several faces. They also ventured to claim that she was a transvestite woman. Others that he was evidently some kind of androgynous..

I met an important octogenarian ex-director of the Treasury, who told me with total conviction that one night, in one of the parking lots near the west park, he saw him climb into a kind of spaceship and flee through the trees, flying at a height of approximately one meter.

(…)

To be continued…