Aujourd’hui, maman est morte

I always remember reading the first line of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger and feeling a profound sense of despair. Bear in mind, I was 16, studying for my French A Level and an extremely over-emotional “Goth”. My obsession with The Cure had already primed me for considering that the book was a masterpiece and would be my pathway to a profound existential life. Yes, I was a very pretentious teenager.

However, nearly 40 years later, that feeling of loss came to mind when I heard the news of Maricarmen’s death. How is it that we can feel such emotions about somebody we don’t even know? How does a previously anonymous person suddenly become a symbol for so many people? Why do certain stories resonate and affect us more than others?

We have all been witnesses to the difficulties of renting or buying a home in Spain. When I started working in Malaga 30 years ago, most of my colleagues lived within a ten-minute walk of the office and went home for lunch, returning two hours later following a well deserved siesta. Today the majority of my co-workers can’t afford to live in the city and face a 45-minute journey, meaning that lunch is now brought to work in a Tupperware, warmed in a microwave and enjoyed in a room adjacent to their desks. On the Costa del Sol, average wages are between 1,200€ and 1,500€ a month (I know people who earn 800€) and a one-bedroom flat costs more than 1,000€, resulting in the majority of young people living with their parents or being forced to emigrate to inland towns.

Listening to the radio on Thursday morning, the tsunami of emotions expressed by both presenters and listeners alike has been overwhelming. The story of Maricarmen is the apotheosis of the housing crisis in Spain: an 87-year-old woman, who could be anyone’s mother, grandmother or neighbour, evicted by the courts from her home of more than 70 years and carried out onto the street in a stretcher in full sight of the world’s press. Add to this that Maricarmen earned a reasonably decent pension, had religiously paid her landlord over the years and was being ousted from her house by an anonymous “vulture fund”, with the complicity of the Spanish law courts, who had previously nearly quadrupled her monthly rent and you have the perfect ingredients for a national media maelstrom.

During the two weeks that Maricarmen has remained in hospital, main squares across Spain have filled with hastily erected campsites filled with protesters, marches have covered cities, two emergency government bills have been rejected in parliament and finally national elections have been called on the wave of indignation generated by one elderly lady’s plight.

RIP Maricarmen.