Big malls are like the pretty face of capitalism. The smooth cheeks of a fifteen year old could be. In these temples of consumerism, the altars dedicated to vegetables and fruits stand out. There they sell watermelons, this water with a very red, sweet and semi-solid core that we Cubans call melon.
Eleazar Blandón, as Nicaraguan as his surname, left his original and fresh Jinotega in October (2019), crossing the immensity of the Atlantic and stumbling through half of Spain in that exchange of sweat and tears for money that ended the lives of many being summed up . emigrants.
In his backpack of memories he carried the memory of Pablo Benjamín, the father who was also looking for a dream, more precisely for an American, and on June 25, 2016 left his life under the Texas sun.
On the first day of August (2020), a 42-year-old spirit man was harvesting watermelons on a plantation at a place on Earth called El Esparragal. On his head, the sun radiated the brutality of a temperature greater than his age, 44.4 degrees Celsius to be precise.
On the last evening of July, Luli Zenteno, the landlady for whom she cooked in the evenings in exchange for food and part of the rent, saw the day laborer scrubbing an empty oil bottle. He needed it to bring recycled water to the watermelon field to counteract dehydration. His thirst, terrible as it was, was ignored by the employer and he could not afford to buy a simple bottle of water with his 30 euros a day wage.
On a day in July, which the reports do not specify, but very close to the August border, the collector of palate pats called Ana, the sister who had emigrated to Almería. With dry tears, like his throat burning under the Murcian sun, he told her what is so difficult for a man to say. About the humiliation of being treated like a donkey and being treated slowly because your back doesn’t do more for the harvest. That they throw dirt in his face while he sticks it to the fruit to be cut.
And the man, besmirched by the foreman, the sun of Mediterranean Spain and the insult, reaches the limit of his strength, which capitulates to the dehydrating troupe of impotence. They call it heat stroke. Pure formality.
Making matters worse, the mayor, an Ecuadorian, shoots him in the face with a bucket of water, the same one he refused him as long as the body held steady. The beastly resuscitation works for a moment before descending into vomiting and a second spell of fainting. Then let the hours tick by to transport the lifeless body in search of medical attention in the same van that transported the bracers. When the clock of the immaterial whip, but eventually a whip, will mark the climax of the day of disgrace. The ambulance was a luxury for a star-struck immigrant who had given up being a king to be a tyrant.
At a health center in Sutullena, Lorca, they left the man, who was already less than a ghost, like someone leaving a bundle by the door of a shop. If they had already taken their fellow martyrs to their places to sleep, it would be nonsense to call them residences.
When the physical heart, not the poetic, neither sweet nor semisolid gave its last beat and light was synonymous with utter absence. Just as a merciful soul closed the windows of his eyelids forever, perhaps contemplating helplessly over the dirty ocher plaid shirt he’d sewn from an early shroud, Eleazar Blandón’s dreams shattered into a million pieces, like his father’s four summers earlier.
That same week, possibly in Spain or in an exotic destination, someone escaped the heat wave agony of August with the freshness of the last watermelon harvested from the trembling hands of a Nicaraguan expatriate whose embalmed body later cost five thousand euros for his family. Give him a Christian burial in Jinotega, where the shade of Pinolera’s green mountains prevents anyone from dying of heat stroke.
The man who left five children on the left side of the ocean, one of them at the tender age of two months, only made headlines once in his life. The day when the Celsius degrees exceeded his years and fate set the trap it had in store.
The dry throat, the pain in the lower back, the six euros deducted from the poverty wage every day to pay for transport to the torture site, the stinky plaid shirt, the bundle of muscles and bones hanging on the door of a health center left behind, and so on. A bunch of broken dreams also belongs to the body of capitalism.
A separate part of the shelves of large supermarkets that also sell watermelons, this water with a very red, sweet and semi-solid core that we Cubans like to call melon.