All your M24 storiesh: SCRAPS - MEMORIES OF MY LAND
Feluco was swallowed up by the south a year ago. Like someone who disappears walking toward the sea, leaving no trace but the wake of his shadow. He left with the dignity of old shepherds, without asking permission or making a sound, like a good man of other people's memories. He died in July, at the time of the sirocco, when the heat bursts the cornices and the birds fall silent.
They say he fell suddenly, after leaving the radio. That before collapsing, he still had time to talk about songs, the kind that played when dances were held in borrowed houses and not in cardboard discos. Because that's who he was: an emissary of nostalgia, a sower of words in parched soil, a madman who insisted on writing by hand the history of a people who didn't know they had a history.
Feluco—with that name that sounds like a boy in shorts and an old soul—was more than a chronicler. He was a memory medium. He sat with his grandparents and drew on them until they bled with anecdotes. He wrote them down in school notebooks, with a black pen, and then hung them on the walls, like someone hanging wet clothes in the sun. He called these his "history paintings." And there wasn't a bar, tavern, shop, or gas station in the south that didn't have one of those paintings pinned next to the Saint Pancras calendar.
He never sought the spotlight, or subsidies, or a Facebook photo with a politician. He walked around San Bartolomé like a monk without a habit, spreading the memory of him by word of mouth, like someone handing out holy cards of a saint no one has canonized. That's why when he died, the news was like an earthquake: the festivities of Santiago Apóstol were suspended, the City Council went into mourning, and the residents bowed their heads, as they do at a proper wake.
During his lifetime, he published eight books, all written by hand, because the keyboard seemed cold to him. He pursued pastimes with a taste of history and spoke every two weeks on Radio Dunas, that municipal station that is more of a parish than a media outlet. On the last day he spoke on air, he spoke as if he knew it was his last. He spoke about music, of course. Because he knew there are songs that stick to life like chewing gum to the soles of your feet.
A year later, Feluco hasn't left. Because there are voices that hang in the air and letters that refuse to die. His writing remains on the walls of Tunte, on the posts of El Tablero, on the street corners of El Pajar. His chronicles are the lines from the soul of a municipality that learned to see itself thanks to him.
Perhaps that's why there's now a rumor that they want to make a sculpture of him in front of the Municipal Archives. But not in marble, please. Let it be old wood and smell of cheap tobacco. Let it have a notebook and a pen. Let it have a quote of his. Let it say, for example: "The people who are not counted, are forever silent."
Feluco left behind his heirs. All those who one day heard him, read him, or simply crossed paths with him and understood that there are people who walk the world so that others don't forget where they come from. Saint Bartholomew still mourns him. And in the moonless early mornings, when the wind blows hot from the peaks, you can hear his voice whispering through the muted radio of some sleepless taxi driver.
