Monroe, Capote, Cardenal, Tits, Sex, Alcohol, Theft, Chocolate and Mental Illness: The Night Spain Learnt to Confess…
Shabbat Reflections:
Peace, Memory and the Weight of History Between Gaza and the Memory of History
On this Sabbath, I wish you all health, good fortune and the protection of those you love. And I pray — with a heart heavy and unflinching — for an end to the genocide in Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel since 29 December 2022 in his current term, and in previous stints dating back to 1996, does not represent the Jewish people as a whole. The Jewish family, in all its breadth — from the Ashkenazim of Europe to the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, through the Sephardim and the Mizrahim — condemns violence that sows only more hatred.
I do not write this to forget. I will not forget the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, launched from Gaza by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades under Yahya Sinwar, with the political shield of Ismail Haniyeh. That morning, some 1,200 people in Israel were killed and more than 240 taken hostage. It was a Trojan horse that unleashed a war without precedent in the region.
The Jewish people want peace. They have wanted it for centuries. They need it to remain who they are.
We are living a Sabbath among thorns. And yet, in the darkness, I have been given an unexpected gift: more than 20,000 readings on LinkedIn in recent days. My thanks to those who join me in this vigil of ideas, to those who hold the word steady when the world seems to fall away. Above all, my gratitude to my dear friend Manuel Francisco Pérez Dubuc, for his unwavering solidarity, his care, his outstretched hand.
Today I remember one who is absent yet never far: José Elías Álvarez. In the solitude of my analyses, he was unmatched in his ability to read the signs — a man who could see the future with disarming clarity. An admirable soul. This embrace travels beyond time to find him.
It is said I work quickly. But this short novel has taken decades. It never set out to be one; it began as scattered notes on a subject that gripped me deeply. I wrote without haste, for it addresses a malady that cannot be handled lightly: the diseases of the mind — that invisible tragedy which shatters families and devastates lives.
Ernesto Cardenal (Granada, Nicaragua, 20 January 1925 – Managua, 1 March 2020) was a friend to my family. I cooked for him with affection, and in my home, with the help of intellectuals from around the world, part of his Nobel Prize campaign was born. In verse, he captured the elusive nature of the human mind.
And who can forget Marilyn Monroe, whispering “Happy Birthday, Mr President” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on 19 May 1962? Or Truman Capote, who dared to inhabit the fractured minds of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the killers of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, on 15 November 1959 — rendering them in his 1966 work In Cold Blood.
Or the broken life of Jorge del Carmen Valenzuela Torres (Chillán, 6 March 1938 – Santiago Penitentiary, 30 April 1963), the “Jackal of Nahueltoro”, immortalised in 1970 by Miguel Littín: the tragedy of a man undone by poverty and illness, not by deliberate malice.
On this Sabbath, in times as sombre as these, I wish you the best life possible. To you and to your families: you are loved, and you are remembered.
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"1,000+ reads in 24 hours. The Absolute Trend: USELESS IN THE DARK—a thought-provoking piece inspired by the philosopher and visionary, almost a fortune-teller of the energy world, Andrés Gluski, CEO & President of AES. Energy isn’t ‘green’ or ‘cheap’ if it’s not available when needed. Resilience, storage, and smart grids are the true game-changers.
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All rights are preserved to German & Co.
Germán & Co, Karlstad, Sweden | August 6, 2025________________________________________
Life is a wild mind’s fever, only soothed by diving deeper into its vibrant chaos.
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A Novella
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Copyright Notice
© 2025 Germán Toro Ghio All rights reserved.
First conceived: Mallorca, 1979. Written: allorca, 1979 • Santo Domingo • Karlstad, 2025. Santo Domingo - Karlstad, 2025.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and specific other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. If you need permission, please contact the author. This is a work of fiction based on real events and historical figures. While some characters and incidents are based on real people and events from 1979 Spain, dialogue and certain situations have been recreated for literary purposes. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental except where noted as historical fact.
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“Prayer for Marilyn Monroe, Lord, receive this girl known throughout the Earth by the name of Marilyn Monroe. However, that was not her actual name (but You know her true name, that of the little orphan raped at 9 years old and the shop girl who at 16 had wanted to kill herself) and who now presents herself before You without any makeup without her Press Agent without photographers and without signing autographs alone like an astronaut facing the spatial night…
Ernesto Cardenal
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Chapter I: The Balearic Sun The sun. Blinding over the largest of the Balearics.
July 1979. The month that would change Spain forever.
In Madrid, Felipe González prepares his ascent to power. PSOE posters reading "Por el cambio" cover the walls of a Spain learning to breathe. In Guernica, Picasso's painting prepares to return home after forty years of exile. In the Basque Country, ETA kills, and Spain bleeds its freedom.
But in Mallorca, on this Mediterranean island that touches Africa with its fingertips, history is different. Here, the revolution is sensual. Corporeal. Silent.
Truman walks down Calle Marqués Torre. His small feet, almost feminine, sink into hemp espadrilles that offer no protection against the fire of Mallorcan tarmac. It's midday and the thermometer reads forty degrees in the shade.
The ground burns with that characteristic ushhh of Mediterranean summer. As if the earth itself had a fever.
It smells of Coppertone mixed with European sweat. Of paellas cooking in beach bars where reddened Germans attempt to pronounce "cerveza" in Spanish. Of Moroccan hashish that crosses the Strait in speedboats and arrives in Mallorca in the rucksacks of hippies who have made the Mediterranean their particular Kathmandu.
In his head, obsessive, hammering: Gloria, gloria, gloria... Umberto Tozzi won't leave him in peace. The song that will define the summer of '79 has been playing on loop in his brain, tortured by last night's Manhattans, for five hours.
The remains of a Moroccan chocolate joint that had circulated until the early hours mix with alcohol in his nervous system, creating that sensation of hypnosis that has accompanied him since dawn.
A figure pursues him as well.
Elegant. A woman of fifty or more. Platinum blonde hair, short, with that asymmetric cut fashionable in Paris. Deep blue eyes like the fjords of her native Norway. Always leaning against one of the bars in Alexandra discotheque.
What was this solitary Marilyn doing, so elegant, in this Mediterranean chaos?
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Chapter II: Flashback - Oslo, January 1979 Six months earlier.
The mansion facing the fjord is buried under three metres of snow. From her bedroom window, Marilyn Zetterlund contemplates the lunar landscape of a winter that has already lasted four months and still has three to go.
It's three in the afternoon and it's already night.
The artificial light from her library creates dancing shadows over book spines. Munch, Ibsen, Hamsun, Undset. The Norwegian geniuses who transformed Nordic depression into universal art.
On the tea table, a letter with embassy letterhead from the Spanish Embassy in Oslo. An invitation to a charity dinner for Spanish orphans. The sort of social event she hates but attends out of obligation.
Her late husband, Lars, a naval industrialist, had left a fortune that automatically included her in all Scandinavian power circles—money she didn't want. Social position, she despised. Obligations she fulfilled like an automaton.
In the fireplace, birch logs crackle with that sound she's heard all her life—the sound of Nordic solitude.
She pours herself another aquavit—the third of the afternoon.
On the side table, next to the blue velvet armchair where she spends her days, a photograph: Astrid at fifteen, a month before the diagnosis. Blonde like her, with those same blue eyes that now look at her from the silver frame like an eternal reproach.
"Mummy, when I'm older I want to go to Spain. To dance flamenco. To drink sangría. To meet dark men who whisper to me in Spanish."
She never knew Spain. Never danced flamenco. Never loved a dark man.
Leukaemia took her in six months, between November and April, whilst the Norwegian winter covered everything with its mantle of white death.
Marilyn makes the decision that afternoon. She'll go to Spain. Not for the charity dinner. For Astrid. To see what her daughter never could see. To live, even a little, what her daughter never could live.
To flee from the frozen fjord that has become the mirror of her dead soul.
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Chapter III: Manhattan, February 1979 Five months earlier.
Truman Capote's flat in the UN Plaza building is a mausoleum of lost glory. The walls are covered with photographs documenting a life that no longer exists: Capote with Jackie Kennedy, with Babe Paley, with all the high society ladies who have now erased him from their invitation lists.
It's four in the morning, and Truman can't sleep. He's never been able to sleep since "Answered Prayers" was published.
On the coffee table, empty martini bottles accumulate like fallen soldiers in a lost battle. Beside them, letters that no longer arrive. Invitations that have dried up. Telephones that no longer ring.
On the answering machine, the only messages are from editors wanting more scandals, more revelations, more literary betrayals. As if he were a gossip-producing machine rather than a writer.
He gets up and walks to the window overlooking the East River. New York never sleeps, but at this hour, even the city that never rests seems exhausted. Yellow taxis circulate like mechanical ghosts through semi-empty streets.
He thinks of Perry Smith. He always thinks of Perry Smith when he can't sleep. The executed murderer whose death has obsessed him for fifteen years. Perry was beautiful in his violence. Vulnerable in his evil. Everything Truman never dared to be: authentically destructive.
But "In Cold Blood" gave him glory. "Answered Prayers" took it away.
On the desk, next to the Olympia typewriter that now remains silent, a travel brochure to Spain. "Discover the Balearic Islands. Mediterranean paradise within your reach."
He'd bought it that afternoon at a Fifth Avenue agency, almost on impulse. As if Spain could save him from himself.
Why Spain? Why Mallorca?
Perhaps because Spain was also being reborn, it had also killed its past and was learning to be free. Probably in that newly awakened Spain, he could find something resembling redemption.
Or because in Mallorca, he could be Truman Capote without having to bear the weight of being Truman Capote.
That dawn, he made the decision. He books a flight for June. He doesn't know that in Mallorca, he'll meet a Norwegian woman who carries her living death.
He doesn't know that the woman will restore his faith in literature as the ultimate confession.
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Chapter IV: Diego - Witness to His Generation
Diego Hernández is twenty years old and studies Fine Arts in Madrid. He's come to Mallorca with what remained of his study grant, determined to spend the freest summer of his life on the island everyone says has gone mad.
His father, a civil guard stationed in Cuenca, voted for Popular Alliance in the first democratic elections. His mother, a national school teacher, secretly voted for PSOE. Diego belongs to the first Spanish generation that doesn't know fear.
Or so he believes.
He's grown up between the Spain that was dying and the Spain being born. His first conscious memories are the demonstrations demanding amnesty, the first covers of Interviú with naked women, and the first songs by Serrat sung in Catalan on television.
He's the transition generation. Those who inherited freedom without having conquered it. Those who feel guilty for living what their parents couldn't live.
In his student rucksack, he carries three books: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by García Márquez, "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by the same author, and "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote in Spanish translation.
He doesn't know that tonight he'll witness the most important conversation of his life.
He doesn't know he'll be witness to the encounter between two literary geniuses in a Mallorcan discotheque whilst Spain learns to be free.
He doesn't know that what he sees and hears tonight will pursue him for decades, until he becomes a writer himself to try to capture what he witnessed.
Because Diego will be the one who, forty years later, writes this story you're reading.
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Chapter V: The Liberation Soundtrack
On the transistor radio in the boarding house where Diego has breakfast, Radio Popular de Palma broadcasts the summer hit: "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge. The song that's become the unofficial anthem of Spain, celebrating its first decade of freedom.
Disco music has arrived in Spain with the force of a cultural revolution. Donna Summer, Bee Gees, Chic, Gloria Gaynor. Sounds coming from New York and Paris, but which in Spain acquire an almost subversive political meaning.
Dancing is an act of rebellion against forty years of military marches.
In Costa del Sol discotheques, Spaniards learn to move their bodies without shame. In Barcelona, the Catalan movida rediscovers the rhythm that Francoism had tried to kill. In Madrid, Pedro Almodóvar films transvestites dancing "I Will Survive" as if it were a declaration of war against eternal Spain.
And in Mallorca, in Alexandra discotheque, young Europeans move to the rhythm of music that speaks of liberation, chosen family, survival and free love.
"Le Freak" by Chic plays whilst Diego walks towards the beach. Nile Rodgers' guitar mixes with the sound of seagulls and the engines of Seat 600s that have invaded Balearic roads.
It's the soundtrack of Spain discovering that it can be happy.
In Oslo, Marilyn listens to Edvard Grieg in Nordic solitude. In Manhattan, Capote listens to jazz from the forties, the music of his lost youth. But here, on this Mediterranean island, both will discover that disco music can also be a form of prayer.
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Chapter VI: Goya's Gallery Under the Sun
Twenty minutes to Palma Nova. Diego crosses Passeig Mar towards the riverside pavement. He goes down to the coast through the first entrance coming from Palma.
He observes every metre of sand. He looks for his friends camouflaged amongst the beach citizens.
And he finds himself before the most extraordinary gallery in the world.
The horizon had transformed into an open-air museum. An exhibition of flesh and desire under the Mediterranean sun. Seventy-nine. The year Europe discovered that breasts could worship the sun king without shame. Without modesty. Without the moral chains that had imprisoned bodies for centuries.
Diego walks amongst this living gallery. His Fine Arts student'’ eyes immediately recognise the forms. The textures. The volumes that have obsessed masters for millennia.
Goya's Majas, naked under the Balearic sun.
Here are the languid tits. Melancholy. Like Spain itself, which was dying in the last gasp of Francoism. Breasts that guard the sadness of generations of silenced women. Dry breasts, plagued with sorrow. The same desolation that Modigliani imprints on his taciturn faces. Breasts agonised by historical absinthe. By the time it becomes extinct by dictatorships that die.
They carry in their fall the genetic memory of submission. The invisible weight of black mantillas. Of perpetual mourning. Of dark churches where bodies were sin.
Diego stops. Observes. These women have come to liberate themselves under the Mallorcan sun. Their flaccid breasts don't seek beauty. They seek freedom. The right to exist without the masculine gaze that judges. That classifies. That possesses.
A fifty-year-old woman, with silver stretch marks marking the history of pregnancies and breastfeeding, slowly sits up on her towel. Her fallen breasts, veined, beautiful in their devastation, move with the gravity of one who has nursed children during dictatorship and now allows herself the luxury of existing in the sun.
Diego sees in her his mother, all Spanish mothers who raised children between whispers and fears.
But there are other breasts—those of the Nordics.
Fertile women arrived from countries where sexual freedom had been conquered earlier—beautiful volumes, exquisitely sensual through their anatomical excesses. Almost naked in absolute freedom, covered only by minuscule underwear, lost to humanity.
These breasts inspire freshness. Impeccably positioned on the torso as if a Greek sculptor had carved them. Round in their forms, with that pale pink colour that only exists in Raphael's virgins. The striking dark brown nipples, small diamonds embedded in the perfect architecture of young flesh.
They're the breasts of Germans, Swedes, and Dutch women who have invaded Spanish coasts. They bring with them the sexual revolution that Spain is barely beginning to taste. Their bodies are political manifestos—declarations of feminine independence.
A Stockholm blonde, no more than twenty-five, plays volleyball with her liberated breasts bouncing to the game's rhythm. No shame exists. No modesty. Only the animal joy of a young body moving in space without asking permission from any Catholic god.
And there are the ethereal ones—those who seem to emerge from a surrealist canvas.
Long and slender bone structures, covered by a veil of ochre-brown to moss-green skin. The sun has toasted them until they've become a Mediterranean landscape. They denote every joint of the body like a topographic map of desire.
Their tits adopt impossible forms. Hanging pears. Inverted triangles. Small hills in the geography of their elongated bodies. Two enormous aureolas around almost non-existent nipples. Like the long women with happy feline faces that Wilfredo Lam paints in his compositions about the Cuban jungle.
These are the Spanish women. Those who have inherited Moorish blood. African sensuality that hid under centuries of repressive Catholicism. Their breasts aren't European. They're Mediterranean. Ancestral. They carry the memory of Al-Andalus in every curve.
Diego understands he's witnessing a revolution.
Not only aesthetic. Political. Social. Anthropological.
Every pair of breasts exhibited in the sun is an act of rebellion against Franco's Spain. Against Catholic morality. Against the idea that the feminine body exists for reproduction and masculine pleasure.
Here, on this Mallorcan beach, in the summer of seventy-nine, women have declared that their breasts belong to them. That they can show them. Hide them. Offer them. Deny them as an act of their own will.
Breasts as a symbol of the new Spain.
The smell of Coppertone mixes with the saline aroma of the Mediterranean and the sweet perfume of hashish smoked discreetly behind psychedelic-coloured parasols.
A group of Catalans sing "L'Estaca" by Lluís Llach whilst a German woman with monumental breasts applies coconut oil with the parsimony of one performing a sacred ritual.
Diego observes how some women move, how their breasts oscillate as they walk towards the sea. Without haste. Without the urgency to cover themselves that would have existed just a few years before. A new corporeal grammar exists—a new language of skin.
He sees an adolescent with diminutive breasts, almost non-existent, playing frisbee with a freedom that would have been unthinkable for her mother. Her small breasts bounce with each jump. No shame exists. No modesty. Only the joy of a young body inhabited without complexes.
Tits as political resistance.
Because that's what Diego understands whilst walking amongst this human gallery: every naked breast is a vote against the past. A declaration that New Spain will be free. Sensual. Without complexes.
The breasts he sees aren't passive erotic objects. They're active subjects of their representation. Like Goya's majas, who looked directly at the spectator with defiance. Like Fellini's women, who inhabited their sexuality without asking permission.
The technique of observation.
Diego has learnt to look at the Fine Arts Faculty. He knows how to distinguish between voyeuristic gaze and artistic gaze. Between lust and aesthetic analysis.
He observes textures. Bronzed skin against the white skin of recently arrived tourists. The contrast between the pink nipples of Nordics and the brown nipples of Mediterranean women. Different flesh densities. Distinct degrees of firmness.
It's not pornography. It's visual anthropology. It's the study of the feminine body in its natural habitat of newly conquered freedom.
In his head, he takes mental notes that forty years later will become this story because Diego will be a writer. Because this beach is converting him into a writer without his knowledge.
The appearance of marine Venus.
Unconsciously, he peers at the ocean. He glimpses shadows against the light of people bathing in the sea. Marine life reminds him of familiar summer pastime scenes in Sorolla's paintings. The Sorolla who became the painter of light. The portraitist of beach people. The painter of naked children splashing in water, when childhood nudity was innocence, not suspicion.
But now there's something more. A new iconography. That of adult bodies that have chosen their nudity.
Within the blindness produced by being on the opposite side of light, Diego manages to distinguish the silhouette of a young woman emerging from the water. Like Botticelli's Venus emerging from marine foam.
She stops for a few moments to pick up a nightgown thrown on the sand. Her movement is ritual. Sacred. Diego observes how she puts the tunic over her naked breasts. The body's humidity embraces the fabric to her skin like a second birth.
The fabric over the young woman's complexion creates unusual clarity on her breasts. It highlights the perfection of their conformation. The wet tissue becomes transparent, revealing more than concealing. It's the wet-veil technique that Greek sculptors mastered to suggest anatomy without showing it completely.
These breasts are perceived as immaculate. They maintain the support of a newly cut diamond. The firmness that only exists before gravity, pregnancy, and time leave their mark, perhaps due to the lack of bustle that the timeline doesn't yet provide.
The young woman reminds Diego of that beautiful femme that Sorolla masterfully interpreted in "After the Bath". Covered by a transparent tunic, with the sea in the background, emerging from the water like a modern goddess.
Breasts as liberated territory.
Diego understands he's witnessing a historic moment. The conquest of women's right to sun. To air. To corporeal freedom.
Every pair of breasts exhibited without shame is a victory against centuries of Catholic repression. Against the idea that the feminine body is shameful. Sinful. Object of temptation that must be hidden.
Here, on this Mallorcan beach, in the summer marking the end of an era, women have planted their flag in skin territory.
Their tits are their declaration of independence.
And Diego is a witness to that declaration.
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Chapter VII: The Foreigners - Ambassadors of New Europe
Three beautiful Scottish women from Edinburgh. Two sisters and a friend. Anne, Paulette and Cindy. Between 18 and 22 years old. Their skins, stripped of northern sun, displayed a faded white that made them look like reddened ghosts under Mediterranean sun.
They'd arrived on the Barcelona ferry, with rucksacks full of bikinis they'd never used and tanning creams bought at Boots. They came from a Scotland where Margaret Thatcher had just come to power, promising a firm hand and where youth unemployment exceeded twenty per cent.
But in Mallorca, they were free. In the biggest of the Balearic Islands, they could be the women that Scottish Presbyterian morality forbade them to be.
They'd met an island friend of Truman's. Capote fuerte, as they called him in Spanish. Capoti in English. That was the name of the American writer's summer lover.
Capote fuerte is twenty-five and has the Mediterranean beauty that drives northern tourists mad. Skin bronzed by generations of Balearic sun, black eyes that seem to guard Arabic secrets, and that smile mixing Mallorcan innocence with newly awakened sexual malice.
His father has a mechanical workshop in Palma. His mother sells ensaimadas to German tourists. He speaks four languages, which he learned on the street, and is an expert at making lonely foreigners feel at home.
Truman has a relationship that neither of them bothers to define. Summer love. Mediterranean sex. A mutual company between an American literary genius and a young Balearic man discovering he can be desired by someone famous.
—Hello Capote! How's it going?
—In full swing, —Truman would reply, with senses more in order after the marine bath.
—Let me introduce some friends.
Capote fuerte bowed like a buffoon when introducing Anne. With Paulette, he engaged in the same melodrama. His gestures are even more dramatic. But with Cindy, it was different. Capote fuerte revered his admiration. Despite the love affair between him and Truman, his face took on a serious look. He joined hands at heart level. Head bowed in emulation of a Buddhist greeting, trying to transmit the emotion he felt for her. For Cindy.
Cindy represents everything Capote fuerte will never be able to have: class, British education, a future extending beyond Mallorca's tourist seasons. She's a Literature student at Edinburgh University. She's read Virginia Woolf. She knows who Truman Capote is before being introduced.
And Capote fuerte falls in love with her with the desperation of one who knows love has an expiry date: the last September ferry.
They responded to Capote Fuerte's theatrical presentation:
—Hello, Truman...
—Hello...
Capote approached and kissed them on each cheek. Sealing a third kiss on his right hand palm. A gesture he'd learnt in Manhattan salons and which here, on this Mallorcan beach, acquires a different meaning. More authentic. Less calculated.
—Ça va? Capote fuerte...
—Ça va? Capote...
—Ça va?
They were Ann-Charlotte and Marie. French friends from Arcachon in Bordeaux. They'd been involved in the group's affairs for some time. Ann-Charlotte studies Philosophy at the Sorbonne and is writing her thesis on Simone de Beauvoir. Marie wants to be a photographer and carries a Leica she never uses because she's too busy living to document life.
They come from a France where François Mitterrand prepares to win elections, promising to "change life". A France that has already had its May '68 and now exports its sexual liberation to the Mediterranean.
Marie said goodbye almost instantly:
—See you tonight...
Ann-Charlotte remained with the tribe, conversing with Capote. She was melancholy because she had to separate from her summer love. In four days, she had to leave for France. Summer was dying, and with it the fleeting loves of that season.
But there was something more. Ann-Charlotte had connected with Truman on an intellectual level that surprised her. She'd read "Music for Chameleons" in French and wanted to talk to him about the technique of "novelised journalism". She tried to understand how one can write truth using fiction techniques.
She didn't know she was talking to a man who had sacrificed his entire social life for doing precisely that.
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Chapter VIII: Capote fuerte - The Mediterranean Incarnate.
Whilst Truman floats in the Mediterranean, letting saltwater cure the wounds Manhattan had opened in his soul, Capote fuerte observes from shore with that mixture of adoration and perplexity his American lover produces in him.
For Capote fuerte, Truman is an extraterrestrial. A being coming from a world where people live in skyscrapers, take yellow taxis and publish books read by everyone—a world as distant from his native Mallorca as Mars.
But at the same time, in the bed of the small flat they rent together in Cala Mayor, Truman becomes what he is: a forty-five-year-old man, short, with a high voice that in intimacy becomes a whisper, and a need for affection frightening in its intensity.
Capote fuerte doesn't understand why someone so famous, so successful, so brilliant, needs constant confirmation that he's loved. He doesn't understand why Truman sometimes wakes up screaming names he doesn't recognise: Perry, Babe, Lee.
He doesn't understand why a man who has dined with Jacqueline Kennedy cries when seeing photos of New York parties in American magazines he buys at the port kiosk.
What he does understand is that Truman needs saving. And he, Capote fuerte, with his twenty-five years and limited education, has become the involuntary saviour of one of America's most important writers.
The sentimental education of Capote fuerte
Truman is teaching him things he never knew existed. Not just about sex —though that too— but about life. About how to look at a sunset and see a metaphor in it. About how to listen to people talk and detect the lies they tell themselves about how to convert pain into art.
—Do you think rich people are happier? —he asks one afternoon whilst watching German millionaires' yachts pass by.
—No, —Truman responds without hesitation—. Rich people are more complicated. And complicated isn't the same as profound.
—And are you happy?
—I'm honest. And honesty and happiness are natural enemies.
Capote fuerte doesn't fully understand what that means, but he files it in his memory along with all the other phrases Truman drops like seeds that will someday germinate in his consciousness.
Mediterranean jealousy
But something is consuming him: jealousy. Not sexual jealousy —the relationship with Truman isn't exclusive and both know it— but intellectual jealousy.
When he sees Truman talk to Ann-Charlotte about French literature, when he sees him converse with other writers who sometimes appear in Mallorca, when he realises there are parts of Truman's mind that are forbidden territory for him, Capote fuerte feels a frustration he doesn't know how to express.
He can give Truman his body, his youth, his Mediterranean joy. But he can't give him what Truman needs: an intellectual equal. Someone who understands references, who has read the books, who can follow his thoughts when they become too complex.
And that makes him a perfect lover and an impossible companion.
The future that won't exist
Capote fuerte knows this is temporary. He knows September will come and Truman will return to New York, to his world of skyscrapers and cocktails and literary critics. He knows he'll stay in Mallorca, helping his father in the workshop, living off memories of a summer when he was a genius's lover.
But there are nights when he wakes up and finds Truman writing on the balcony, with that small portable typewriter he always carries, and he wonders if perhaps, just perhaps, love could be stronger than differences of class, culture, and education.
He wonders if perhaps Truman could stay. If they could build something real on this island, where everything seems possible.
He doesn't know that Truman asks himself the same questions. He doesn't know that Truman has seriously considered the possibility of never returning to New York, of staying forever on this island where he can be happy in a simple, Mediterranean way, without complications.
He doesn't know that the only thing separating them isn't the difference of worlds, but the fact that Truman Capote can't live without being Truman Capote, and Truman Capote can't exist in Mallorca.
He can't be a literary genius and a Mediterranean lover at the same time. He has to choose.
And both know what the choice will be, though neither dares verbalise it.
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Chapter IX: Alexandra in Magaluf - The Existential Laboratory
Alexandra was an atypical discotheque located in the heart of Magaluf, a beach which had become the epicentre of European liberation on Spanish territory. Different from the ordinary. Instead of being shrouded in darkness and illuminated by those lugubrious ultraviolet lights that highlight white colour, it was illuminated.
As if it were a metaphor for new Spain: transparent, without secrets, without the shadows that had defined the previous forty years.
But also like an existential laboratory where each individual faced the terrible freedom of choosing who to be without the moral chains that previously defined every gesture.
The Sartrean nausea of freedom
For Spanish youth who filled Alexandra every night, the experience was simultaneously liberating and anguishing. For the first time in their lives, they could choose everything: whom to dance with, whom to kiss, how to move their bodies, what to think, what to say.
And that absolute freedom produced what Sartre would call existential nausea.
Diego observed from his corner how many young Spaniards were paralysed on the dance floor, overwhelmed by infinite possibilities. Forty years of dictatorship had prepared them to obey, not to choose.
Freedom was a condemnation they had to learn to bear.
The anguish of being authentic
In Alexandra converged all contradictions of Spain '79: the desire for modernity and fear of change, the need for liberation and nostalgia for lost certainty, the euphoria of democracy and anguish of having to build national identity from scratch.
Every young person entering Alexandra faced the fundamental question: Who am I when I can be anything?
Germans, Swedes, and the French who populated Magaluf came from societies that had already resolved these questions. For them, Alexandra was simply fun. For Spaniards, it was an existential battlefield.
The older woman: The weight of knowledge
Amidst all this explosive youth, Marilyn Zetterlund's presence created a contrast going beyond the generational. She represented the weight of knowledge, the burden of one who has lived enough to know all choices have consequences.
Young people had adopted her as a sort of existential oracle. They came to her not only with their love stories, but with their fundamental doubts about the meaning of existence in a Spain that no longer believed in God, Franco, or any external authority.
—You'll be wondering what this old woman is doing sitting in this bar, alone, every day, stuck here in this young people's discotheque. Incidentally, this old woman is called Marilyn Zetterlund.
But her response was deeper than juvenile curiosity:
—I'm here because I've learnt that shared solitude is less cruel than solitary solitude. I'm here because you still believe your choices matter, and that faith keeps me alive.
The drama of mortality
The discotheque had become a theatre where each night the fundamental human drama was performed: young people pretending to be immortal, adults knowing they weren't, and music as soundtrack to postponed mortality.
Every song that played was a reminder that time passes. Every dance was a desperate attempt to stop the clock. Every kiss was a small victory against death.
And at the centre of everything, acute awareness that Spain itself was mortal. That this newly born democracy could die. That this freedom could be lost. That nothing, absolutely nothing, was guaranteed.
Authenticity as a moral imperative
In Alexandra, being authentic had become the only remaining moral imperative. In a society that had lost all external certainties, the only possible truth was the interior truth.
But being authentic meant accepting one's contradictions. It meant confessing that civil guards could be thieves. That brilliant writers could be profoundly unhappy. Mothers could hate their motherhood. That young people could be terrified by their youth.
That's why Capote's phrase resonated so much: "Have you heard a policeman say he's a good thief?"
Because it was the perfect question for a society learning that authenticity was more critical than respectability.
Around two in the morning, no fewer than twenty girls and boys had gathered around Marilyn. I don't know what magnetism she possessed. Perhaps her fluent pronunciation of Spanish with a traditional accent. Or the deep, harsh voice, typical of abundant cigarette consumption. Or the calm and audacity of her stories. Uncommon. They made youth love sharing with that lady who represented the tragic wisdom of one who has lost everything and continues living.
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Chapter X: The Encounter of Broken Souls
Around three in the morning, when other young people had dispersed on their nocturnal hunts, Truman Capote slowly approached the corner where Marilyn Zetterlund remained motionless, like a Nordic sphinx carved in bar marble.
Diego, from his observation table, witnessed what would be the most important conversation of his life. He didn't know it then, but forty years later, he would become a writer solely to tell this story.
—So Marilyn... —said Capote with his characteristic voice, high and theatrical—. Or do you prefer Karin?
The woman raised her deep blue eyes towards him. A melancholy smile drew itself on her lips.
—Call me whatever you want, darling. Names are masks we use to hide from ourselves.
Capote settled on the adjacent stool, ordered a martini with a sign to the barman, and studied the profile of this woman who had captivated all of Alexandra's youth.
—You know who I am, don't you?
—Of course, Truman. I've read "In Cold Blood". I've read "Other Voices, Other Rooms". I know your work. I know your pain.
The writer started slightly. He didn't expect that direct reference to his pain.
—My pain?
—The pain of one who writes about murderers because he understands the darkness of the human soul. The pain of one born different in a world that punishes difference. The pain of one who loves men in a society that condemns him for it.
Marilyn lit another cigarette, smoke forming spirals ascending towards disco lights.
—But tell me about you, Marilyn. About your real pain. Why is a Norwegian woman of your age and your class here, night after night, in a discotheque of young Spaniards?
Marilyn's laugh was harsh, like broken glass.
—My pain? Oh, dear Truman, my pain has a name and surname. It's called cosmic solitude.
—Explain.
—Have you ever felt you're an extraterrestrial on your planet? Do you observe humanity from outside, incapable of really connecting with another human being?
Capote took a sip of his martini, thoughtful.
—All my life.
—Exactly. That's why I'm here. These young people look at me like a curiosity. An ancient woman who tells them stories. They don't see me as a woman. They don't desire me. They don't judge me. They listen. And in that listening, I find something resembling company.
The Oslo of memory
—And in Norway?
—In Norway, I'm the wealthy widow. The woman who lost her husband in a boat accident. The one who lives alone in a mansion facing the fjord. The one neighbour's pity and fear at the same time. Because solitude, dear Truman, becomes contagious after a particular time.
Capote nodded, understanding.
—I'm also fleeing. From New York. But you know what's curious, Marilyn? Our cities are opposite, and yet they've produced the same type of existential emptiness in us.
—Explain.
—Oslo is the city of silence. Of forced introspection. Of winter that obliges you to look inward because there's nothing to see outside.
—Exactly. In Oslo, the cold pushes you towards your interior. The nights are so long you have no choice but to face yourself. There's no escape in light, in frenetic activity. You only have your mind as company.
—New York is the opposite. It's the city of constant noise. Of perpetual movement. Of infinite distractions. But curiously, it produces the same solitude as your silent Oslo.
—How is that possible?
Capote took a sip of his martini and looked towards the dance floor.
—In New York, you can be surrounded by eight million people and feel completely alone. The city's speed is so brutal that nobody has time for real connections. Everything is superficial. Immediate. Disposable.
—In Oslo, it's different. Their solitude is honest. Pure. It doesn't disguise itself as socialisation. In dark months, it's simply you, your house, and the emptiness of the frozen fjord.
—Do you know what I envy about your Oslo?
—What?
—The honesty of its emptiness. In New York, solitude disguises itself. People go to cocktails, galleries, theatres, pretending connection. But they're as isolated as you in your Norwegian mansion. They don't admit it.
Marilyn lit another cigarette, thoughtful.
—But do you know what's most fascinating about all this, Truman?
—What?
—That's where we are. Two castaways from the north. Two souls frozen by our respective urban solitudes. And we've come to take refuge on a Mediterranean island that's practically in Africa.
Capote looked around, as if seeing the discotheque for the first time.
—You're right. Mallorca is a stone's throw from Morocco. From Algeria. From the chocolate continent.
—Exactly. And here we are, immersed in the lust of an island belonging to a country that's just beginning to know freedom. Spain has just awakened from forty years of moral winter. Franco died only two years ago.
—It's as if we'd come to witness a birth. The birth of Spanish sensuality.
—Do you realise? We come from countries already free, already developed, already cynical. But Spain... Spain is discovering freedom like an adolescent discovers her sexuality.
Capote observed the dance floor where young Spaniards mixed with European tourists in an orgy of music, sweat and desire.
—That's why everything here is so intense. So carnal. So desperate.
—Exactly. In Oslo, repression is Protestant. Cold. Contained. In New York, repression is economic. Competitive. Calculated. But here... here repression has been Catholic. Mediterranean. African at the bottom.
—African?
—Of course, darling. The Moors were here for eight hundred years. African blood runs through Spanish veins, though they deny it. When Franco died, he not only liberated Spain from fascism. He liberated Moorish sensuality that had been chained for centuries.
Capote took a long sip of his martini, processing the idea.
—That's why everything here seems so... primitive to me. So authentic. These young people haven't yet learnt to be sophisticated in their freedom.
—Exactly! In New York, sexual freedom is just another accessory. Like a designer handbag. Here, it's emotional survival. It's breathing after having been underwater.
—And we're voyeurs of that newly born freedom.
—We're anthropologists of desire, Truman. We study a society rediscovering its own body.
Elite secrets
—I'm also fleeing, you know? From New York. From my demons. From fame that devours me like cancer. And now... now I'm also fleeing from my former friends.
—What have you done, Truman?
Capote took a long sip of his martini, as if needing liquid courage to continue.
—I've written the truth. The terrible, destructive truth about American high society. About their most intimate secrets. Their adulteries. Their betrayals. Their golden miseries.
—"Answered Prayers"?
Capote's eyes lit up with surprise.
—You know it?
—Darling, in European circles, there's much talk about your book. About how you've destroyed Manhattan's elite with your poisonous pen.
—It wasn't poison, Marilyn. It was honesty. Pure, brutal honesty.
—Tell me.
Capote lit a cigarette with slightly trembling hands.
—For years, I was confident in America's most powerful women. Babe Paley, the CBS magnate's wife. Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy's sister. Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest... They all told me their secrets. Invited me to their parties. Treated me like an exotic pet.
—And you betrayed it all?
—No! —Capote's voice rose, high and defensive—. I documented the truth. I wrote about how Babe discovered her husband was sleeping with her best friend. About how European royalty comes to New York to borrow money. About blackmail, drugs, marriages of convenience...
Marilyn smiled bitterly.
—Ah, monarchy secrets. I know some of those, too.
—Really?
—Darling, when you have money in Norway, you automatically enter certain circles. I've dined with Danish royalty. I've heard nocturnal confessions from alcoholic princes and depressive queens.
—Have you never felt tempted to tell it?
—Of course. But I'm not a writer. You are. And that's your curse.
Capote looked at her intensely.
—Explain.
—Writers are condemned to transform life into literature. They can't live a moment without wondering how it will sound on paper. They can't hear a secret without imagining how they'd write it.
—Exactly! —Capote struck the bar with his small fist. That's precisely what happened to me. For years, I accumulated stories. Observed. Listened. Took mental notes. And when I finally wrote them...
—The world fell apart.
—My friends became my enemies. Doors to the most exclusive salons closed to me. Overnight, I became a social pariah.
Royal genetic patterns
—And what about Spanish royalty? Since we're here...
Marilyn took a long sip of whisky, as if evaluating how much she could reveal.
—Ah, Spanish royalty... You know? In my Nordic circles there's much comment about certain patterns that seem to repeat generation after generation.
—Patterns?
—Genetic, darling. Tendencies are inherited, like eye colour or height. But more... intimate.
Capote moved closer, lowering his voice.
—In "Answered Prayers" I wrote about Pablo Gracia. Do you know him?
—Of course. The one who lives the perfect double life. He's not open like you, Truman. He hides behind marriages of convenience and impeccable public appearances.
—Exactly. Pablo is the master of disguise. He has a wife, children, and a perfect façade of aristocratic respectability. But at night...
—At night, he's completely different.
—And what's fascinating is that this pattern isn't unique to Pablo. It's almost a family tradition. An inheritance passing from fathers to sons, like a recessive gene that occasionally surfaces.
Marilyn lit another cigarette, thoughtful.
—Are you suggesting there's a genetic line of... let's say, unconventional preferences in the Spanish high aristocracy?
—I don't suggest it. I affirm it. And not only Spanish. European in general. But in Spain, it's fascinating because Catholic repression has been so intense that it's created perfectly divided personalities.
—Like Pablo?
—Like Pablo. Like many others. Men who, during the day, are pillars of conservative society, and at night explore their true nature in very, very secret circles.
—Do you think this will continue in future generations?
Capote took a sip of his martini, contemplative.
—Marilyn, genes don't lie. Repression can hide, but can't change fundamental nature. Pablo has children. Those children will have children. And some of them will inevitably inherit not only titles and fortunes, but also... inclinations.
—Even if they reach positions of supreme power?
—Especially if they reach positions of supreme power. Power often amplifies those tendencies. The sensation of being above conventional moral rules.
—It's a fascinating time bomb.
—Exactly. Imagine: within one or two generations, we could have leaders carrying that genetic inheritance to the highest levels of power. And they'll have to choose between authenticity and political survival.
—Like Pablo has had to choose?
—But Pablo doesn't have the pressure of maximum scrutiny. A future king, for example, would have to navigate those waters with much more precision.
Marilyn looked at him intensely.
—Are you talking about someone specific?
—I'm talking about genetic probabilities, dear. About patterns that repeat. About the fascinating possibility that future Spain might have to face truths about its leadership that would be unthinkable in Franco's Spain.
The weight of honesty
—Is it worth it? Is truth worth it?
Capote reflected for a long moment.
—Do you know what hurts me most? It's not having lost my friends. It's been discovered that they were never really my friends. They loved me for my talent to entertain them, for my capacity to make them laugh with my cruel gossip. But the moment I directed that cruelty towards them...
—They abandoned you.
—Like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Marilyn ordered another whisky and lit a new cigarette.
—Rich people are the same worldwide, darling. I've seen the same patterns in Oslo, Copenhagen, and London. They have a code: you can mock anyone, except them.
—So homophobia doesn't only damage individuals. It damages entire societies.
—Exactly. And whole countries lose their leaders' complete potential because those leaders are spending half their mental energy maintaining secrets.
—It's a Shakespearean tragedy on a national scale.
—And what I wrote about Pablo is only the tip of the iceberg. There are entire families, complete dynasties, where this is a recurring pattern.
—Do you think the whole truth will ever be known?
—Oh, it will be known. Truth always comes to light, Marilyn. Always. The question isn't whether it will be known, but when. And whether it's known, society will be ready to accept it, or it will destroy it.
Ernesto Cardenal and Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn remained thoughtful for a moment, turning her whisky glass between her hands.
—Do you know what's most curious about all this, Truman?
—What?
—That you call me Marilyn. That all these young people call me Marilyn. As if unconsciously, they'd detected something in me connecting with her.
—With whom?
—With the honest Marilyn. With Marilyn Monroe. With that broken girl, the world converted into a sexual symbol without ever asking who she was.
Capote straightened on his stool, suddenly interested.
—Tell me about that.
—Have you read "Prayer for Marilyn Monroe" by Ernesto Cardenal?
—The Nicaraguan poet? Merton's follower?
—Exactly. The Nobel Academy denied the well-deserved prize to him because his poetry is too pure, too honest for European tastes.
—I've heard of him. They say he's extraordinary.
—He's more than extraordinary, Truman. He's a visionary. And he wrote about Marilyn Monroe like no one else. He described her not as Hollywood's dumb blonde, but as what she was: an orphan raped at nine, a shop girl who wanted to kill herself at sixteen.
Capote remained quiet, processing the words.
—Continue.
—Cardenal sees her presenting herself before God "without any makeup, without her Press Agent, without photographers and without signing autographs, alone like an astronaut facing spatial night".
—My God.
—Do you realise the genius of that image? "Alone like an astronaut facing spatial night". That's precisely what Marilyn was. And that's exactly what you and I are.
—Astronauts facing spatial night.
—Exactly. Cardenal understood that Marilyn wasn't a sexual symbol. She was a symbol of cosmic solitude. Of absolute vulnerability disguised as power.
—Like us.
—Like us. That's why I identify so much with her. That's why when these young people call me Marilyn, they're not wrong. Because I'm also an emotional orphan. I've also been raped by life. I've also wanted to die.
—And you've also presented yourself without makeup before the world?
—Tonight, yes. With you. For the first time in years, I've removed all masks.
Capote extended his hand towards hers.
—Do you know what else Cardenal wrote about her?
—Tell me.
—That she dreamt as a child, she was naked in a church before a prostrate multitude, with heads on the ground, and had to walk on tiptoes not to step on heads.
Marilyn visibly shuddered.
—That's... that's exactly how I've felt all my life. Walking on tiptoes not to hurt others with my pain.
—And Cardenal understands that the dream wasn't about exhibitionism. It was about absolute vulnerability. About being exposed before multitudes that didn't see her.
—Like tonight. Like every night, I come here. I am exposed before these young people who don't see me. Who sees me as a curiosity, not as a person.
—But I see you, Marilyn. I see you.
—And I see you. And that's what Cardenal understood about the honest Marilyn: that all she wanted was to be seen. Seen. Not adored, not objectified. Just... understood.
Astrid's confession
—Do you think Cardenal personally knew that solitude?
—Of course. How else could he write like that? Only someone who has been an astronaut facing spatial night can recognise another astronaut.
—Like us tonight.
—Like us tonight. Three cosmic loners: Cardenal in his Nicaraguan monastery, you in your Manhattan flats, me in my Oslo mansion.
—And the honest Marilyn in her Brentwood flat, dying alone with a telephone in hand.
—Do you know what's most terrible?
—What?
—That Cardenal had to write a prayer for her. As if she were a saint. A martyr. Because that's what she was: a martyr of the system that converts vulnerable people into consumer products.
—Like the system that converts writers into salon celebrities.
—Exactly. Marilyn died of being Marilyn Monroe. You're dying of being Truman Capote. I'm dying of being Oslo's respectable widow.
—And what saves us?
—Nights like this. Conversations like this. Moments where we can remove disguises and be simply human.
Marilyn took a long sip of whisky and closed her eyes for a moment.
—I must tell you something, Truman. Something I've never told anyone.
—I'm listening.
—I had a daughter. Her name was Astrid. She died at sixteen. Leukaemia.
Marilyn's voice broke slightly.
—For two years, I watched her die slowly, day by day, cell by cell. And I couldn't do anything. Absolutely nothing.
Capote felt a chill run down his spine.
—I'm sorry.
—I don't want your pity, darling. I want your understanding. Do you understand now why I talk to these young people? I see in them the life my Astrid never could live. The summer love she never had. The dance nights she missed. The silly and meaningful conversations at once.
—Is that why you came to Spain?
—I came to Spain because here death doesn't follow me. In Norway, every corner of my house has its ghost. Every object reminds me of what I lost. Here I can pretend, for a few hours, that I'm just a woman telling stories.
Truman extended his small, pale hand towards Marilyn's. They touched briefly.
—We're two castaways on the same desert island.
—Exactly. Two souls who have seen too much. Who knows too much. Who has lost too much.
—Do you believe in redemption, Marilyn?
—No. But I believe in small moments of grace. Like this. Like this conversation. Like seeing these young people fall in and out of love without knowing that time is the only thing that matters.
—I've also lost faith in almost everything. Except words. In the power of telling stories.
—That's why you write about murderers. Because in the absolute darkness of the human soul, you find some light. A small spark telling you it's worth continuing to live.
—And you? What keeps you alive?
Marilyn looked towards the dance floor, where dozens of young people moved to the music's rhythm.
—Them. Their youth. Their blessed ignorance. Their capacity to believe love will last forever. Their ability to be happy without reason. They're my morphine against existential pain.
—Do you know what's most terrible about knowing the truth about life?
—Tell me.
—That you can't unknow it. Once you've seen behind the veil, you can't be innocent again. We're condemned to lucidity.
—That's why we drink, dear Truman.
—That's why we drink.
Both raised their glasses in a silent toast. A toast for the dead. For lost loves. For illusions that would never return.
The improvised prayer
—Do you know what I like about you, Marilyn?
—What?
—That you don't pretend. Don't pretend life is beautiful. Don't lie about pain.
—And I like that you write about darkness without romanticising it. That you show evil as what it is: banal, stupid, terribly human.
—Let's toast then to honesty.
—To terrible, necessary honesty.
At that moment, "Sad Eyes" began playing through speakers, and both remained silent, listening to the melancholy melody that seemed composed mainly for them.
—Do you know what's the only thing giving me hope? —Marilyn whispered.
—What?
—That we exist. That souls like yours and mine exist in this world. That we're not entirely alone in our lucidity.
—We're truth's custodians, Marilyn. Those who keep the memory of pain alive. So others don't forget. So others know they're not alone.
—Exactly.
Marilyn closed her eyes for a moment, as if channelling the Nicaraguan poet.
—"Lord, receive these two souls known throughout Earth with names that aren't their true names, but You know their true names: that of the different child who grew up in Alabama and that of the girl who lost her daughter in Oslo, and who now present themselves before You without any literary disguise, without their social masks, without their public characters, alone like two astronauts facing Mediterranean spatial night."
Capote remained silent, tears in his eyes.
—You're a poet, Marilyn.
—No. I'm just someone who understands pain. Like Cardenal. Like you. Like the real Marilyn.
—Like all of us who have been converted into symbols when all we wanted was to be human.
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Chapter XI: Dawn: The Ritual of Endings Dawn was approaching.
Fever amongst Alexandra's citizens rose in intensity. On the dance floor, Marcus, one of the two Jamaican disc jockeys, perched atop the mixing desk, displayed his intrinsic rhythm to his genetic nomenclature. He contorted like a slow-motion snake to Isaac Hayes' "Shaft" beats. Whilst Winston synchronised turntables with complete concentration to release Dawn's most sentimental song: "Sad Eyes" by Robert John.
Those "Sad Eyes" unleashed feverish states amongst Alexandra's citizens. Moreover, that musical theme helped dispel unknowns about the fortune conquest efforts that would have occurred that night. That's when spirits ignited amongst hundreds of souls infected by Mallorcan dawn lust.
Discotheque citizens rushed, almost running, to the dance floor in an actual sexual hunt.
Diego observed from his table, fascinated by the transformation he'd witnessed during recent hours. The conversation between Capote and Marilyn had been like attending a masterclass in literature, psychology and human pain.
He'd taken mental notes of every phrase, every gesture, every silence. Without knowing it, he was documenting the story he'd write forty years later.
The closure ritual
From couples came fusion aromas of oestrogen and testosterone. They awakened hidden senses by sheltering antonymous sex with touch. They passed with love in unconscious on culmination's verge. Inciting the other erotic self and carnal appetites. Hands accompanied feelings. Undressing prey in the mind's imagination. Bodies contracted by perverse inertia with deliberate intention. Openly seeking the desired slip.
Summer loves also became more endearing. Calling for the innocent youth's climax. "I won't forget you," murmured the lover in another's ear. Leaving breath's imprint.
Cunning efforts were far from ingenious youthful intellectuality. Young men, like broken records, fired obvious nonsense to win over some girl.
—You're sensational...
—You're unique...
—Super nice...
—Your eyes are multicoloured. They look like violets... Or maybe they're emeralds. All I know is they're so cute, —said the inexperienced heartthrob.
Return to youthful reality.
In "Sad Eyes" last stanza, all young people gathered again with the elegant lady to continue hearing her stories in that busy bar corner.
Moods reached by alcohol touched the elegant lady's interior. Her voice had deepened. Her stories were even calmer. Topics are more erotic and interesting. Young people paid even more attention to the story about to begin.
—I'll tell you a story that has much to do with your present state of mind.
That state of mind, what's it called? How?...
Ex... Excid... Excited... ayyy... How difficult... Please help me...
Oops, let's see, better, easier. "Hot." Is that okay? "Hot" is the right word...
Young people's laughter was contagious. In the vicinity, you could hear the sound of glass bottles crashing into wooden crates.
This elderly Norwegian lady's figure, leaning against the bar, with hard binding she'd reached at that hour, created such rapport with discotheque citizens that interest in hearing stories extended to bartenders on the other side of the marble circle.
With a cigarette in her right hand, she wouldn't let go, a mocking smile on her face, examining each youthful face with her eyes, trying to establish the necessary mystery for her next story, Marilyn began.
Munch's Madonna
—I'll tell you, Munch created a second series of five works he called "The Madonna". The series is also known as "Munch's Madonna". It's guessed that with this work Munch tried to describe your sexual states, humans... Its interpretation. As you'll understand, nobody was in Munch's mind. So nobody can assert these reflections are entirely accurate. However, I'm pretty sure they're close to his thoughts because, after all, we're all human.
Munch's Madonna is a rectangular composition. In the centre of the painting, he placed a young woman, more adolescent. You can also distinguish the upper part of her body in the pleasure pose. Or seeking pleasure. Or desiring pleasure...
In the composition's periphery, in contour, surrounding a young woman, equally rectangular, Edvard places a sperm shoal in a race whose objective is interpreted, in the first intimation, as an unbridled pursuit to reach the female belly that always causes so much pleasure to those little fish maddened by reaching the ovum.
—Marilyn, how do women feel? —asked Paulette.
—That's precisely what I was about to tell you now. In a second speculation, we infer a desperate call from the female womb to seize those budding fish that, when they bite into the egg, turn into fertility to preserve our continuity. That is why Munch placed the foetus in the composition where the sperm shoal begins, interpreted by some, especially men, as a diabolical entity women create to make themselves desired by a man.
Astonishment exclamations and wows... Because young people were fascinated with stories, the area around the bar feels it.
—How bad men are, —sighed Paulette.
—You, —responded the men's chorus.
From the other side of the bar, one bartender commented to one patron:
—What a trip this aunt has put us in, with a lack of fluids in the head that doesn't drive us crazy like the court ones.
Imminent farewell
From speakers you could hear: Gloria, Gloria, Gloria, you're missing in air, your presence is missing... Missing warm innocence in my mouth that inadvertently names you, and I'll write my story with the word gloria...
All euphoric, trendy songs provoked amongst hundreds of young people trying to become a fashionable couple: Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta. Song closed that September night's reel. Like chorus lyrics, air and blood oxygenation were needed in the bodies of Alexandra's citizens.
—Marilyn... Marilyn... Marilyn... —Ann-Charlotte called the elegant lady huddled in her bar corner.
—We're leaving, Marilyn...
—We're leaving...
Marilyn, more than ever, couldn't move from her place, despite Ann-Charlotte's insistent call.
Ann-Charlotte decides to search for her. She approaches and takes her arm. Karin, almost collapsing from hard alcohol intake, approaches the exit door to catch up with the group.
First dawn light can be timidly perceived at five in the morning. Leisure fatigue invades the group's bodies. Present sleep invites rest.
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Chapter XII: The Seat 500 and Philosopher
Civil Guard Group approaches Capote Fuerte's father's tiny, battered Seat 500. The car is parked near the sea. Capote fuerte hurries to leave and takes a few steps ahead of his friends. He searches for car keys in his pocket and prepares to open the car's left door.
The door opening process is slow, given the hour's ravages and constant consumption of some divinities that had arisen during early morning. Group, very close to Capote fuerte, attentively observes his movements. They, too, are impatient and anxious to be in the vehicle.
Capote fuerte raises right hand. Shows keys to Alexandra's citizens. Then, they place them in a lock. Gives the necessary pull to open the door. Unexpectedly, he's left with a handle in hand. Unable to open it.
This unexpected situation confuses Capote fuerte. He raises his hand high to show friends, who look worried. Provokes the group's laughter to the hilt in such a situation.
Diego, in quick reaction, tells Capote Fuerte:
—Open the car through the other door.
These Seat 500s only have two doors.
Capote Fuerte, opening arms in bewilderment, responds that the other door is broken.
Inherited fear
Concern takes hold of the group. The event goes from comic to tragicomic. Everyone bows their heads trying to find a solution to the mishap on Mallorcan soil.
Diego tries to take control of the situation and prepares to try opening the car. He raises his head and finds himself with a tricorn figure of three civil guards.
Panic invades Diego. He thinks: I don't have a passport. He feels trapped by the police. Locked in jail. Involved in mess he doesn't know how he'll get out of.
It's his generation's genetic fear. Fear of the Civil Guard they've inherited from parents, who inherited it from grandparents. Forty years of dictatorship aren't erased in two years of democracy.
For Diego, tricorns represent everything Spain is trying to leave behind: repression, authoritarianism, uniform fear.
Young people from abroad don't understand that tension. For them, they're simply police. For Diego, they're heirs of those who for decades repressed any expression of freedom.
Historical surprise
Unexpectedly, a civil guard's voice is heard among three policemen.
—Lad, I'm a good thief. Let me open the car.
Alexandra's citizens, incredulous to whom they're listening, don't believe anything. They're frightened by such an unusual event.
But Diego is paralysed for different reasons. The civil guard confessed to being a thief. In public. Naturally. As if it were the most normal thing in the world.
It's a perfect symbol of the new Spain being born. Spain, where even order representatives can confess their imperfections without fear. Spain, where honesty replaces official hypocrisy.
Civil Guard approaches the driver's door and begins manipulating it until he manages to open it with the skill of someone who, effectively, knows what he's doing.
—Come on, get in now... And go sleep...
Spain that confesses
Group members, distrustful, thank the guard and begin trying to accommodate eight bodies within that cubic metre of space, which is tiny, as the Seat 500s are.
Nobody explains how, but finally, everyone finds themselves inside a car. Fright had enhanced alcohol levels in the body. So everyone felt a disconnection between brain impulses and delayed reactions in motor action.
Clumsiness at that hour was prominent among the friend group. With countless hands fighting for the steering wheel, they say good morning to the guards and begin their journey to the hostel area.
Diego drives, thinking about what he's just witnessed. Not only the conversation between Capote and Marilyn, but that surreal moment with the civil guard.
It's as if the entire night had been a metaphor for the Spanish transformation. Body liberation on the beach, sexual freedom in a discotheque, brutal honesty in a conversation between two geniuses, and finally, a civil guard confessing to being a thief.
Spain is learning to tell the truth.
Mediterranean dawn
On the other side of the Mediterranean, the first call to prayer is heard from Tangier's Great Mosque. They remind Felipe González about how, in such a short time, Spanish society had changed so much.
He wonders, from his golden exile in Morocco, whilst preparing an electoral strategy: What will become of those Panama documents arriving decades later?
Felipe doesn't know that in forty years, Spain will have to face corruption scandals that would make the transition secrets seem innocent. He doesn't know that honest Spain they're building will have to deal with even more complex truths about money, power and institutional lies.
Whilst Seat takes the highway towards extinct Duques de Palma avenue.
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Chapter XIII: Exodus to Sand
Truth Under Moon At four in the morning, when alcohol had dissolved the last inhibitions and Moroccan chocolate had liberated the final mental bonds, it was inevitable.
Nocturnal migration
Young people began abandoning Magaluf's Alexandra in waves. Not coordinated, but obeying primitive instinct telling them it was time to complete what had begun on the dance floor.
Diego observed the exodus from the bar where Capote and Marilyn continued their existential conversation. He saw how couples and groups headed towards exits, carrying discreetly stolen alcohol bottles from the bar, hashish cigarettes hidden in pockets, and that sexual urgency characterising those who've understood life is finite.
—Do you know where they're going? —Marilyn asked Truman.
—To do what we can no longer do, —he replied—. To believe love is eternal whilst it lasts five hours.
Beach as existential cathedral
Magaluf beach became an open-air cathedral where the only remaining sacrament in disbelieving Spain was celebrated: the encounter of two bodies affirming their existence through pleasure.
Ann-Charlotte and the young Catalan she'd met that night spread a towel on the sand still warm from the day. He whispered to her in Catalan, which she didn't understand, but which excited her precisely for its incomprehensibility. She responded in French, converting seduction into a corporeal translation exercise.
They kissed whilst Mediterranean waves marked the rhythm of their caresses. Their hands explored skin territories day's sun had bronzed and the moon now converted into silvered landscapes.
Free tits under stars
Marie had found Jamaican DJ Winston after he finished his set. Now they lay on sand, she with naked breasts reflecting moonlight, he caressing that white European skin contrasting with his black Caribbean hands.
—In Jamaica, we say when a woman removes clothes under the moon, she's praying, —Winston whispered.
—And what does she ask in her prayer? —asked Marie.
—That time stops. That moon be witness. That someone remembers her exactly as she is in this moment.
Her breasts moved to the rhythm of accelerated breathing. No shame existed. No sin. Only two humans affirming their right to exist entirely in a world that had taught them pleasure was guilt.
Sex as resistance
Cindy and Capote Fuerte had found a more private cove, away from the main couples' bustle. He knew she'd return to Scotland in a week. She knew he'd stay in Mallorca forever. That certainty of imminent separation converted every caress into an act of resistance against time.
They made love with desperation of one knowing they're living something unrepeatable. Capote fuerte spoke to her in Mallorcan, a dialect unique to the island, as if wanting to mark her with sounds she could never hear anywhere else in the world.
—Ets la meva vida, —he told her whilst penetrating slowly, savouring every second.
—I don't understand, but I feel it, —she responded, letting unknown words become music.
Moon as the only god
Dozens of couples populated Magaluf beach that dawn. Spaniards with Germans, French with Catalans, English with Andalusians, Italians with Basques. Europe reconciled with itself on Mediterranean sand.
Full moon observed them like only god they could still believe in. God that didn't judge, didn't condemn, simply illuminated moving bodies as if they were pagan offering to life itself.
Diego had followed couples to the beach, not as a voyeur but as a chronicler. He understood he was witnessing the exact moment when Spain stopped being Catholic and became Mediterranean.
Existential message
Whilst observing those intertwined bodies under the moon, Diego understood the message he'd been seeking all night:
Life is a mental illness that can only be cured with more life.
Marilyn Monroe had died from having too much life for a single body. Truman Capote was dying from having too much lucidity for single mind. Marilyn Zetterlund survived having too much pain for a single heart.
But these young people on the sand had found a temporary cure: sex as affirmation, alcohol as disinhibitor, tits as freedom declaration, theft of forbidden moments, chocolate of bronzed skin under the moon.
Authenticity is the only imperative.
On Magaluf beach, under the summer '79 moon, Spain learnt its most important lesson:
Only authenticity saves. Only confession liberates. Only honesty redeems.
A civil guard confessing to being a thief is more moral than a saint hiding sins.
A writer betraying friends for the truth is more valuable than a courtier protecting elegant lies.
Mother confessing sometimes hating dead daughter is more human than one pretending perfect grief.
Sartrean ending
Couples on the sand weren't making love. They were choosing to exist. They were refusing nothingness. They were shouting at death, it wasn't their time yet.
Because that's what Sartre never said, but '79 Spain discovered: freedom isn't a burden, it's a privilege. Existential anguish isn't a curse, it's the price of being alive.
And being alive, with all its contradictions, lies, betrayals, mental illnesses, moral thefts and forbidden chocolates, is infinitely better than the alternative.
On Magaluf sand, whilst waves whispered secrets in ancestral Arabic and moon-blessed bodies that had decided to be free, Spain finished being born.
Not as a political concept, but as an existential attitude.
As a country that has learnt honesty, however brutal, is always better than hypocrisy, however elegant.
Final message:
Life is a mental illness that can only be cured by living more intensely.
Spain, 1979: The year we learnt that confessing is more revolutionary than hiding.
The year Magaluf's moon witnessed the naked truth.
End
"Alone like astronauts facing spatial night, but together on Mediterranean sand."
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In December 2023, Energy Central recognized outstanding contributors within the Energy & Sustainability Network during the 'Top Voices' event. The recipients of this honor were highlighted in six articles, showcasing the acknowledgment from the community. The platform facilitates professionals in disseminating their work, engaging with peers, and collaborating with industry influencers. Congratulations are extended to the 2023 Top Voices: David Hunt, Germán Toro Ghio, Schalk Cloete, and Dan Yurman for their exemplary demonstration of expertise. - Matt Chester, Energy Central
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