We will be Maricarmen
Two years ago, one of the spokespersons for the Madrid Renters' Union, Valeria Racu, uttered a sentence that—though we didn't know it at the time—these days we remember with sadness. It was a program of Espejo público that began with the story of a pensioner named Maricarmen, the owner of an apartment whose tenant had stopped paying rent and was subletting the rooms. After acknowledging that, undoubtedly, it was a difficult situation, Racu asked to talk about another Maricarmen: "A Maricarmen I know […], who is facing eviction because a company has bought her building to invest in it".
The renter Maricarmen—Maricarmen Abascal, 87 years old—has finally been evicted. She had been living in her home for 71 years. The eviction was on the morning of September 23rd, and coincidence—or a cruel wink of fate—willed it to be exactly the same day and at the same hours when, two years earlier, Racu and Lacalle were arguing over one Maricarmen or the other. Although the comparison between the two cases is misleading, they are two sides of a multifaceted problem: having normalized rentierism as a source of income, whether to accumulate capital or to bolster an insufficient pension (the insufficiency of which would, in any case, be a social failure), and being incapable of placing firm limits on real estate speculation.
In Madrid, the banner at the demonstration after the eviction said "We are all Maricarmen". In Barcelona, "For all the Maricarmens". They are more than just slogans. Maricarmen is now a woman split into person and symbol: an individual case and a political event that is uniting the population in the face of an emergency that affects us all. Because no, it is true: we are not all Maricarmen, however many Maricarmens there may be. We are not all octogenarians with modest pensions and mobility problems; we do not all have ruthless landlords who throw us out with boiling water; we do not all struggle to pay rent; we do not all have rent to pay. Without going any further, the businessmen of the real estate company that evicted Maricarmen without accepting negotiations surely do not have parents who "tomorrow […] might find themselves in the situation in which, unfortunately, I find myself", as the tenant suggested.
However, it would be a mistake not to take the warning seriously. We are all Maricarmen because we all depend on the whims of the market and deal with the serious consequences of the lack of access to housing, from the growth of inequality, the generalized impoverishment of one or two generations, and the evictions of vulnerable people to the cultural, psychological, and political imagination crisis that, among other things, lies in the fact that we lack spaces, bases, and homes from which to think and organize ourselves. We are all Maricarmen because we live crossed by a devouring system without memory. There are no loyalties either for those who believe themselves to be on the side of the winners: all bodies are firewood for the fire of speculation as soon as impunity wears off and, we know it, good luck crashes in a minute: more or less what it takes to pronounce words like black Monday, 2008 or crash.
The possibility of failure unites us; it is the basis of our existence. We live knowing that we will die, and although we try to relativize this certainty, anxiety beats in the taboos we invent for ourselves. We try to avoid pain, precariousness, misfortune. We compare ourselves with whoever we have immediately below us: "That, to me, would never happen; we are different for so many reasons: this one and that one and that other one", we enumerate mirages as if we were reciting Our Fathers.
Recognizing oneself in the vulnerability of the other is an act of courage. It takes many doses of hope to look into the abyss of another's pupil and accept that we fall together. I say hope and not despair because, contrary to what one might think, it is not so much dispossession that pushes us to act as the company we find in that dispossession, the community that is forged in the ruins and on the margins and in the collateral damage of oppression.
It is also an act of solidarity. The fear of being the next ones is a trait that links us to a movement and that can become the basis of our alliances. Fear gives us a common language: we know we are entangled in the same dynamics of power and precariousness, but we also see the differences that separate us. The distribution of violence and privileges never creates two equal realities. There are sparks of connection, of understanding, but they are intermittent. Alliances are not born from equivalence or proximity, but from related asymmetries. They are, above all, a matter of desire and reciprocity.
Perhaps we are not all Maricarmen, but we will be. Because the possibility of being something is already part of our reality. The fictions of fear are as much ours as our reflection and it does not matter if the curse is not finally fulfilled. We will have lived with its shadow hovering over our heads, treading on our steps, making a place for itself between our ribs until it sinks so deep that it is impossible to know what is what, who we were and who we could have been if we had been others.