“A man always ends up facing what he fears most,” they said in a Jim Jarmusch samurai code movie. If you are afraid of poverty, you will end up dealing with it. If what you fear most is loneliness, you will end your life alone. You cannot escape the monster because the steps you take to run away are leading you back to the monster. We run in circles. That is what novels are always about.
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Desperation, anger, the feeling of abandonment of the Ceuta neighbors we have been seeing and hearing these days of pornography and information go beyond those feelings and delve into panic and paranoia. Perhaps because what they always feared is happening: an unarmed army, a battalion of misery entering the city. A crowd, a mountain of people, a great carnival. There is no way or means to stop it.
An unarmed army, a battalion of misery entering the city; there is no way to stop it
A Spanish city that tried to escape the monster with patriotism, good neighborliness, and courage in its desire to live. Running to get away from the geography, its particular monster. A city in a rich country embedded in a poor country and a Strait, suddenly coveted. It has felt humiliated and abandoned and ministers, police, and military, politicians, agitators, journalists, and puppeteers have been arriving. And the people of Ceuta looked them all in the eyes and asked what they were going to do and no one knew what to do not only with those who broke the border control and took away their normality and peace, but what they were going to do with the geography. And there they do not answer. They do not tell them that they can do nothing about that, about being surrounded by Morocco and the sea. Nor that the United States wants the neighbor to manage the southern part of that Strait. That nothing can be done but what is done: nothing, wait, nothing, wait, for the cameras to leave, for no one to look, nothing again.
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Perhaps one could have the courage to tell the truth. The truth of geography and not so much the truth of history. The truth of those more than 80,000 people who are and feel citizens of a country called Spain. The truth that the solution is very complex and unpopular – any of them – but those eighty-some thousand souls deserve a little more than to be talked to about the World Cup or to be assured that Ceuta is that Spanish city that is between Toledo and Albacete, that they are safe and that it has a sea.
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