Many Times You Asked Me to Tell You About Those Years

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 2008 · Authors: Juan Cruz Ruiz

In this book Juan Cruz delves into the most intimate memories of his formative years, when he was starting out in journalism in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In the following excerpt he describes his impressions, and those of his intellectual mentor Domingo Pérez Minik, about Juan de Ávalos's monument to Franco.

«He did not see me, I went up to have a coffee, I was alone in the city, Santa Cruz then smelled of oil and sun, and I ate mixed dishes on the Rambla which is still called, oh, it is still called when I write to you, Rambla del General Franco, a name that Don Domingo repudiated and crossed out at night, we would go up he and I to the most hidden part of the street and there we would cross out that monstrous invocation, then we would continue down the street to the edge of the pier, where was (oh, there it is, still) the monument to the Caudillo, they had built it by collecting from the purest misery a sack of bills of submission and filth, and there it was, full of the inner moss of putrefying things, a winged angel who went with his flaming sword towards the blackest night where the blood spilled because of the man to whom the ex-voto was dedicated dwelt; the monument had been conceived by Juan de Ávalos and was near, almost symmetrical, to the other monument, the monument to the Fallen, which would have been Humboldt's seat if he had arrived two centuries later at the Atlantic bar, where the German discoverer disembarked on the island. When we reached Ávalos's monument, dark as the tomb where my friend lies, Don Domingo performed a ceremony that I now remember as if memory were inventing it, he launched his sonorous, perfect, balanced, almost chivalrous spit, and then continued walking, perhaps whistling La Marseillaise .»

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