I imagine a contingent of worthy elders, men and women, all Righteous who - despite having saved all of humanity with their anonymous actions - leave without farewell, parading towards a quiet Arc de Triomphe. At each step hundreds and perhaps thousands of other elders - and perhaps also young and even children - join in this silent march of their posthumous honor. Someone wants to hum a hymn that the steps of thousands of walking corpses seem to mitigate the notes and although some cry, an aroma of dignity and honor prevails, of that seriousness that the grandmother who knows that she did good without No one would recognize him or the great-grandfather who keeps in the depths of his memory the exploits that decorated him as a hero, even though there is no politician who remembers his injuries.
I speak of the thousands who are joining the devastating contingent of the dead who are now leaving without farewell, in anonymous seven-minute sermons on the edge of a funeral carriage or the trucks of the Italian army that took from Bergamo the souls that no longer fit in their graves. I speak of the grandparents who were left dead in their beds in nursing homes in Madrid and its surroundings, and of the wonderful old man who discovered that all his peers would not wake up the moment he decided to jump out the window and flee, walk to Paris perhaps to join the growing contingent of old mandarins or tyrolean grandparents or wrinkled Mexican faces and so much faded and ghostly ghost that they have left lying in the streets of Guayaquil.
Rafael Gómez has died from one of the sinister nails that the so-called coronavirus bears on the dial. He was 99 years old, but he deserves eternity: he was a militiaman in the Spanish Incivil War and later, he was part of La Nueve, the heroic company of the Leclerc Division that liberated Paris. Nothing less. Now that the tufts of fascism are inexplicably resurrected (with new robes or tonic, but the same stupid racist stench), Rafael Gómez marches at the head of the contingent of a whole generation, of a whole idea of the world, through the Champs Elysées where he himself led the steering wheel of a tank called "Don Quichote", among tanks that had the names of Belchite, Ebro or Guadalajara painted on them. He goes to the front with all the dead who have now left in the midst of an indescribable suffocation on a planet where at least two inconceivable clowns have referred to the pandemic as "influenzazinha" or "an amazing miracle that's under control and then dissapears" , without thinking a single second about the tireless summation of the dead and their relatives who remain locked up without being able to say goodbye to the old mother, the veteran of so many battles, the grandfather who seemed to have forgotten everything, the great-aunt who did not leave never smile ... or not a few young people who had their whole lives ahead of them or infants who had not yet received the first vaccine.
Like Salamis, the soldiers or like the Righteous in Kabbalah, thirty-three that are three hundred thousand or three million, impalpable specters that go in endless lines precisely so that their memory is alive. A flame that seems to illuminate the pupil that looks at them in the void ... and yes, the Marseillaise often makes me cry.
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