Chamisku, a dog with the name of an Iraqi refugee camp, looks at me with a “come on, give it, now or never” face, and I, who have been in Spiderman mode mid-afternoon, climbing the walls, can only reply: “Thanks for exist".
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The ritual begins. Glove on the right hand for the strap, shoes, railing, switch, latch and contingencies that arise on the go. My left hand free to feel the breeze, the risk and the freedom to put my glasses back on when the underwater effect of the mask leaves my lenses foggy like the dust of DiCaprio and Winslet in Titanic . Like them, we too embarked happily in this 2020, but now there is no longer even the orchestra.
Music still. I listen to Manolo Escobar from a doorway without a doorman and Alan Parsons' Eye in the Sky plays in a house in front of the Machichaco Monument. I snort under the mask made from baking paper and believing myself Jacques Cousteau's bathyscaphe I let myself be taken to the Pereda Gardens. Not a soul. Leaden atmosphere. The head is a blender in these troubled times, and Chamisku pisses as if there was no pandemic, no EPIs or half truths. The sun falls in front of it, more by gravity than by Earth's rotation, and given the circumstances it is a true wonder that the particles remain suspended in the air.
On a calm sea the Cantabrian Himalayas is outlined, reminding me of Kashmir and Kuldeep, who is Sikh from the Indian Punjabi, who two years ago had no place to fall dead and dreamed of arriving in Spain and working in a restaurant. Kuldeep, who is flirtatious - Tom Cruise's look and little bangs dropped as a pirate's patch - convinced his cousin Saim to take the backpack and go into debt with a local lender to buy a plane ticket and travel from Delhi to Belgrade, since the People of Indian nationality do not need a visa to land in Serbia. There their adventure began: someone put the cheese and they fell into the trap. Today, after more than 700 days trapped between Serbia and Bosnia, without asylum, without a floor, or signs of improvement, he survives the cold, hunger and violent returns in the formwork of a building that never knew how to be more.
With the epidemic, Bosnia closes borders, businesses and hopes. At No Name Kitchen we have decided to evacuate international volunteers and Kuldeep told me how some supermarkets have vetoed the entrance of migrants in these days of rationing, in which many are right, but almost no one reasons.
Kuldeep cannot stay at home, he has none. Yesterday it snowed and today Kuldeep is hiding under blankets, fearing that a police raid will destroy his bones in a CIE barracks by Velika Kladusa, the one that nobody can get out of despite overbooking . The virus trap, which infects the plagued with misery, and the fearful with selfishness.
It is almost time: 19:59. The speakers turn on and Resistiré starts playing, the song of the Dynamic Duo, so appropriate for the moment. I face Cádiz street with the dignified and plebeian aura of the archer who nailed the Olympic torch in Barcelona '92 and a balcony opens next to the Hotel Bahía. An old couple looks out and start clapping as if they have been waiting all day for this moment. They carry it. Full breasts, yours and mine; Chamisku keeps raising his paw without fear of what they will say. Two more windows open, three, seven, twenty-six, all of them clapping almost in unison, turning each step into an imperial parade.
The Spanish anthem plays as I pass through the Zara on Lealtad Street. All this is rare: its owner evades 585 million euros to the treasury and relocates his business to maquilas where the right to breathe is not respected, but he buys respirators and now half of Spain wants to sing him happy birthday. It is not easy to be rich, nor is it easy to be a patriot. Nationalisms have been killing us since the Babylonian Hammurabi and some of them only revive us when Iniesta scores a goal. Well, and today too, when I surprise myself crying tears that are seas. People are no longer sure what they applaud, some believe that it is hope, but most know that we applaud fear, because we have never celebrated open-heart operations en masse, although there are those who continue to applaud on landings as if instead of doing his job, the pilot was working miracles.
People are no longer sure what they applaud, some believe it is hope, but most know that we applaud fear (...)
I come upstairs, I know they don't applaud me, and there will even be people who hate me for having a dog, but I can't help it. I look at the stands and raise my fist - Black Power roll - and Chamisku raises his ears like John Carlos on the podium in Mexico '68. I nurture the stands, who greet me infected by the need for interaction and fuss. I close my eyes, the whole Isabel II street sounds, clap, clap, clap, it looks like a velodrome and I imagine Kuldeep next to me, with his resilience, with his unheard of courage to seek a better future. He smiles overwhelmed by the ovation and the balconies tell him that he is welcome, that there is only one humanity and that he continues to fight, that we are idiots and selfish to colonize, consume and pollute so much, while he kneels in gratitude.
My eyes are still closed and next to me are Zehida, Hajran and Alma, local volunteers who continue to callus in Bosnia so that thousands of Kuldeeps do not fail. Along with them is Marta, a doctor anesthetist at the Infanta Sofía Hospital, who has spent weeks turning the ICU into a field hospital to get home and deal with two twins and a baby. Marta defies crying and faces the nightmare. This applause is for her, for doing her job and because when the world looked the other way, she covered the medical expenses of two Syrian women, emigrated by war and sexual discrimination, and Leila, a single Iranian mother victim of violence Macho and rejected by his family because of the divorce. Women migrating through the Balkans whom no one applauds and all repudiate.
Actually, I look around and see a lot more people. I see Paula and Jorge. She, a pharmacist at the Gregorio Marañón; he, a doctor in Puerta de Hierro, who combine guards, children and double shifts, until finishing with the eyes turned inside out. I am also accompanied by Javi Soto, who is a gardener, and his partner Rosa, who take the van and bring water and food to those Albanian boys that the press stigmatizes as the lousy stowaways in the port of Santander. Gushing applause, also for the souls of the Cantabrian Network of Mutual Support, who do not stop not stopping, taking the purchase to the isolated elderly in the Valle del Pas and distributing protective visors in Valdecilla.
I cry, I applaud, I laugh and my snot falls and there is no god who can blow his nose these days without being afraid of getting it but I do not think to despise the moment. I walk the catwalk as a designer after a fashion show, and although I know that the credit goes to Kuldeep, Marta, Javi and company, - as I am - I enjoy myself trusting to be able to capture so much emotion in words when I return to the bunker. Emotion and admiration for those who carry boxes of pizzas to hospitals so that health personnel have something to eat and a place to keep the tons of applause that are thrown into the sky every night, that place where we always look for some hope, when Almost no one remembers where he last saved it.
Applause as if there was no tomorrow; and maybe there isn't, at least not a tomorrow like this today. Perhaps this world is extinguished, so full of homeless people and so full of walls to repel those who have less, without solutions to the drama that thousands of people live today in Edirne, Melilla or Tijuana. A different world is born and, therefore, every night at eight o'clock, we applaud those who have spent their whole lives fighting that damn virus that is indifference.
Ricardo Fernández belongs to the NGO No Name Kitchen, which works in Los Balcanes with refugees.
