Either I didn’t figure it out or I erased it from my memory with extreme efficiency. In September 1997, RTVE held the mother of all festivals in Las Ventas with a lineup worthy of the dirtiest New Year’s Eve (from Los del Río to Julio Iglesias, including Nacho Cano) to pay a (ahem) homage to Miguel White Angel. I still remember his murder very well. I was old enough to shake and cry like everyone else. Luckily, I was already distracted by other things when public television put up this nativity scene. From what Juan Sanguino says in his great podcast Delirios de España (on podium), I must have been one of the few Spaniards who didn’t figure it out.
You have to listen very carefully to the chapters in which Sanguino recounts this night with exemplary narrative impulse and elegance. Don’t play them in the background while you’re driving or cooking if you don’t want to get into an accident, because your emotions will range from hallucination to horror, and there will be times when you don’t know if the laughter comes from someone else’s embarrassment people or outrage. I was irritated by some of the perpetrators who seemed proud of the disaster, with a crazed Nacho Cano cheering on the audience: “Louder, let Miguel Ángel hear us.”
We discovered in Delirios de España that this phrase, which went viral recently, was not the worst of that collective mental alienation that turned a funeral into a city festival. Sanguino could have chosen the easy path of moral superiority, but if Delirios de España is worth it, it is not because of what he tells, but because of the way he tells it, trying to understand what happened that night happened and put it in context. The result is far more devastating than mere mockery, as it ends up revealing something very serious about this eternal tragedy that some of us call Spain.
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