The night Nacho Cano wanted Miguel Ángel Blanco to listen to him

Either I didn't know about it or I erased it from my memory with extreme efficiency. In September 1997, RTVE staged the mother of all festivals in Las Ventas, with a cast worthy of the most cantankerous New Year's Eve (from Los del Río to Julio Iglesias, passing through Nacho Cano), to pay a (ahem) tribute to Miguel Ángel Blanco. I do remember his murder, and a lot. I was old enough to shudder and cry like everyone else. Luckily, by the time public television set up that nativity scene, I was already distracted by other things. From what Juan Sanguino says in his superb podcastDelirios de España (on Podium), I must have been one of the few Spaniards who didn't find out.

You have to listen very carefully to the chapters in which Sanguino narrates that night, with an exemplary narrative pulse and elegance. Don't put them in the background while driving or cooking if you don't want to get into an accident, because their emotions will range from hallucination to horror, and there will be times when they won't know if the laughter comes from someone else's embarrassment or indignation. I was irritated by some of the perpetrators, who seemed proud of that disaster in which an out-of-his-s Nacho Cano cheered the audience: "Louder, let Miguel Ángel hear us."

We discovered in Delirios de España that this phrase, which has gone viral in recent times, was not the worst part of that collective mental alienation that turned a funeral into a village party. Sanguino could have chosen the easy path of moral superiority, but if Delirios de España is worth it, it is not because of what it tells but because of how it tells it, trying to understand what happened that night and putting it into context. The result is much more desolate than a simple mockery, as it ends up revealing something very serious about that eternal tragedy that some of us call Spain.

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