"If I can't lie." Rita repeats over and over again, to each journalist who approaches her, that she is there "for justice." "There" is the little garden of the church of the Divina Pastora de Motril, ground zero of the family, sports and political melodrama of the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, inside which his mother, Ángeles Béjar, fasts so that restore your child's reputation. Rita insists: Jehovah's Witnesses "are committed to justice." She accompanies Mariángeles Montes in her mid-afternoon canutazos on television. Everyone listens to them because Montes is the woman of the day: she gave Cope her WhatsApp conversations with the penitent mother. “No, I'm not alone, I'm with my sister-in-law, she entered with me and I can't be alone because I can get dizzy. (...) When they say mass they are going to take me out of here so that no one knows where I am. (...) Come on, kissers. We'll see each other, God willing."
In front of the chapel, at the unrepentant and sticky hour of after-dinner, there is not a soul that does not carry a microphone, recorder, camera or earpiece. Motril yawns with the blinds down, as the southern half of the country does from June to September after eating, waiting for the sun –and on this tropical coast, also the humidity– to give humans a truce. Rita has made an artistic couple with Mariángeles and repeats to everyone that they - both of them, she emphasizes - are Jehovah's Witnesses, not their good friend Ángeles Béjar, who, they say, will be praying inside the Catholic temple for the good name of your son.
With just under 60,000 inhabitants – and in these final days of August, surely three times more than the floating population – Motril is the second city in the province of Granada. It occupies the eastern end of the majestic and fertile estuary of the Guadalfeo River, guarded to the west by the formidable pinnacle of the Salobreña castle, the Andalusian Mont Saint-Michel. Rubiales' father, Luis Manuel, was mayor here for the PSOE between 1995 and 2003, so it is surprising how little interest the locals have in the drama experienced by a distinguished family. There is a long tradition of the left in the city, marked by the milestone of the first democratic mayor's office, by Enrique Cobo, a member of the Spanish Labor Party, a communist formation that defined itself as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. This is how we were in 1979.
In the quiet square of Dr. Jaime García Royo, located in front of the Divina Pastora church and next to a dilapidated CNT headquarters, there are barely half a dozen curious children who are entertained with a ball, bored with how little fun it is finally it's having the Portuguese CNN delegation camped right under your nose. If on Monday barely two dozen relatives and friends came to express support for the suffering mother, on Tuesday the payroll fell seriously. Apart from relatives and Jehovah's Witnesses, the hunger strike only seems to be of interest to the journalistic profession, which always lives in August under cover. But there are no echoes of The Great Carnival, Billy Wilder's masterpiece of sensationalizing crime journalism about a man trapped underground. This hunger strike is not the scene of the agonizing rescue of the child from the Rincón de la Victoria well, but rather a press call from the Rubiales family that does not seem to excite anyone but that the press has had the courtesy to attend to. Some stood guard at dawn in case the prodigal son appeared to rescue her mother and others simply wanted her to call them to tell her to stop, that the self-injurious turn did not work this time. The empathy battle was lost in a testosterone rush.
Because there is before this strange sentimental derivative of the reputational crisis of the Spanish Football Federation, which more than Berlanguian seems written for that Albacete that José Luis Cuerda dreamed of in Amanece that is not little, a patent apathy of the sovereign people. And that perhaps also provides a reading of how times change, despite the appearance that there are reserves of biodiversity, like football, impenetrable to mutations. Perhaps if Rubiales had rectified and asked for credible apologies the first night, this southern and Catholic country would have opted for forgiveness, regardless of legal and disciplinary considerations. We are a demanding but generous society with repentance. However, the challenging harangue before the extraordinary assembly of the Federation, which would be said to be inspired by that of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (as the actor Víctor Clavijo has astutely imagined with a memorable dubbing on the social network formerly known as Twitter) seems to have frightened the lawyers of the "hair to the sea".
A handful of parishioners arrive at the eight o'clock mass, but there is no news of adherence to the cause, except that of the witnesses. Just as the gaucho invented by Jorge Luis Borges died at the hands of his own "for a scene to be repeated", the death of Julio César, they are unaware that today they have existed to interpret a beautiful memento by Chus Lampreave, whose garrulous concierge of ¿ What have I done to deserve this? –A very appropriate title– he used to say, to justify his constant indiscretions with the neighbors: “If you ask me, I have to tell you everything with hair and marks. I would like to lie, but that's the bad thing about witnesses, that we can't. If not, I would be here." And so this Tuesday Cope achieved an exclusive.
