On the street, on a stretcher and well tied up

MadridThe eviction of Maricarmen Abascal in Madrid is one of those events that mark a stage of Spanish life. It has an enormous symbolic weight, just as in the eighties it was held by Cojo Manteca, a young man with a disability who was then 20 years old and who became famous for how he charged against street furniture during the student demonstrations that took place in Madrid in 1987. The meaning of the current protagonist's appearance in all the news reports is quite different from that of Jon Manteca Cabañes, who was born in Arrasate in 1967 and died in Orihuela in 1996. However, the images that unite them have many things in common, although the protest has undoubtedly been carried out with more dignity by Maricarmen Abascal, because Manteca went down in the country's graphic history striking all kinds of glass and telephone booths with his crutches, when they were a standard fixture on city streets.

Jon Manteca emerged from the crowd with his crutches as an expression of a broad protest movement, and left a mark of limited urban destruction along Madrid's Gran Vía. He did so on the occasion of mobilizations that ended with the resignation of the Minister of Education of those years, José María Maravall, a scholar of social democracy and with more of a university professor profile than a political manager.

Those protests forced Felipe González's government to rethink priorities in higher education, as part of the dialogue with the youth, which was essentially that of the baby boom, now already in the process of retirement. Maricarmen Abascal's action—who knows if she was also in those mobilizations of the time when she must also have been in her twenties—will surely not cause any resignation now, but it has been as effective or more so than that of her companion in a possible photographic exhibition on the history of social movements in Spain, Jon Manteca, a disabled boy who unfortunately died very young, at 28 years old.

A case that cries out to heaven

The case of Maricarmen Abascal is one that cries out to heaven, especially for its provisional ending, that of her departure from the house where she has lived for 71 years, on a stretcher surrounded by health workers and police. This image, by itself, is one that describes a complex situation, and becomes forever etched in the collective memory. In reality, if one day this story is brought to the cinema, even harsher versions could be made. For example, by having the woman's accidental companions abandon her between two cars, already out of the sight of the protesters, or at the foot of any tree, like waste that is now useless and a burden on the system. I say this because Maricarmen tied to the stretcher brought me back once again to some frames that I had forgotten, covered by the passage of time, but which were very shocking years ago, for me and I dare say for the entire Spanish society.

Look for these images, you will find them on the internet. It is a work made especially for Spanish Television in the 70s. It was called La cabina, and it starred José Luis López Vázquez. It was the story of a man who one morning, after dropping his son off at the bus, enters a telephone booth and gets trapped inside. What happens from then on is quite distressing and surreal. Kafka could have been one of its screenwriters. They were, in reality, José Luis Mercero, the director, and José Luis Garci, also a filmmaker and winner of the Oscar with the film Volver a empezar. The fact is that López Vázquez sees how people approach him, trying to get him out of the booth, but they fail one after another. And finally, some Telefónica employees arrive and take him to a warehouse where there are other men trapped in the same circumstances and stored with complete indifference, like broken, old, and unrecoverable junk. I could not and did not want to avoid remembering it.

Maricarmen Abascal has reminded me these days of López Vázquez trapped in his phone booth, unable to get out or receive help from other people, who fail in their attempt to free him from the trap he has fallen into, set in this case by who knows who and for who knows why. Except that they take him away with indifference and practically to throw him away like a broken toy. You have to think that for many months the impact of La cabina made people talk in those glass phone boxes by putting a foot in the door to prevent it from closing, for fear of being stuck inside without being able to get out, like the unfortunate protagonist of the medium-length film.

A hasty political reaction

It is quite significant that Maricarmen Abascal's experience can evoke these memories, making us all, or many of us, feel defenseless. And it is shameful that it has to be an episode of this nature that provokes a political reaction of haste and rushing to agree on what should have been agreed upon long ago. Polls say that the housing problem is a torture for many people in Spain, an unbearable situation.

I know that at the Constitutional Court, every time they have to deal with an appeal on this matter, they don't quite know where to start, just as it happens to them with the issue of immigration. The right to property, the defense of the vulnerable, economic freedom, the protection of the general interest and the social interest, all go into the blender, and it is very difficult to extract a broad-spectrum preparation that includes the legitimate interests of everyone. A demonstration that parties are not the same, that ideologies continue to exist, and that pacts and shared definitions are always needed to avoid dramas, for example, evictions as an expression of violence, without alternative solutions and without elemental pity.

Hopefully, there will be agreements in Congress on Tuesday for the most distressing situations. We need a counterpoint to spectacles like the one at the last plenary session, following the display of a pepper spray canister by a PP deputy. The PP, at full throttle. Later, the product spread through various rooms of the chamber because an employee of the popular group poured part of the contents into a sink, in order to be able to hand it over empty—as the deputy had said she had it—to the police. How much frivolity regarding what women must carry to protect themselves in Ceuta. Meanwhile, Maricarmen Abascal waiting to be allowed to stay in her neighborhood.