A LONG TEXT BY THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER
ELIZABETH DUVAL ABOUT THE BEATING MURDER OF SAMUEL LUIZ MUÑIZ, A TWENTY FOUR YEARS OLD GAY BOY, IN THE GALICIAN TOWN OF A CORUÑA.
The first illness is called doubt. It enters the body through a sublime and functional legal system, the best that we have been able to give ourselves among all, sustenance and base of Western civilization, irreproachable totem, hornet’s nest; it inscribes words such as “presumed” or “apparent” on the skin, symbols of shuffled evidence and respect for information codes. The official version that arrives later, when the doubt disappears, will in no case be an absolute truth, valid until the end of days, a substitute for the doubt that prevailed until nothing else was known: the official versions have ideologies, names , surnames, weapons, alibis and arms that administer and execute, hands that fall. We have chosen that the executions be carried out by some and not others, that justice is administered by ordination and not by mob: this is called by some the alleged or apparent distinction between the barbarian and the civilized; the barbarian, we will have to remember, was the foreign.
We are going to place ourselves outside of that framework, so as not to violate the deontological codes of a profession – journalism – that is not even mine. When I speak here of facts, I will not be speaking of events that have occurred that someone, with a time machine, can go to verify; I will talk, as everyone does, about fictions and speeches, stories about what happened and what did not happen. If I pronounce names, it cannot be interpreted that I speak of living, dead or murdered people, but of figures that only exist in this text. If I speak of a society whose members are capable of hitting someone’s body, motivated by intense and irrational rejection, repulsion, hatred, the disease of doubt will continue to hover over us, because of this society I only say a few words ” presumed “or” apparent “; claiming that such a world was ours would be too painful for anyone. To accept the story here, we would have to assume that in our society there are individuals who are killed for being who they are or loving those they love. Denying that this is the motive for their murders is what for some constitutes the difference between civilization and barbarism, the denial leaning more towards the former.
We have already said that this text does not intend to describe an inaccessible reality, nor to speak of people who exist beyond the lines, nor to narrate facts that can be verified. Thus, then: Samuel, at night, made a video call, or defended his friend. A young boy was the first to point at her body as a target. Between seven and thirteen men – how difficult to delimit the number in the imagination – approached to take it as a punching bag. We can visualize all these guys taking turns, playing to see who hits the fastest and who yells the loudest “fag”; We can think that the body and its sections were divided to burst them all with greater skill and dexterity. When it was enough they left the body to its fate. The heart stopped beating.
It turns out that in Spain there are attacks on the LGTBI collective more or less constantly; In recent years, they have also been on the rise. I do not assume that everything has necessarily gotten worse in recent years: we have at the same time greater freedom and awareness of what an assault is – which leads to an increase in reported assaults, but perhaps less so – with a genuinely more hostile climate, linked to the irruption of certain speeches in the public debate. We hear about the beatings of the collective every few days. Aggressors usually stop before killing, fearing the consequences, but that someone does not stop seems imaginable. It’s possible. It just happened.
Imagine, now, that the father of the murdered declared that in his house the victim “never spoke about his sexual condition”. That he said that “what one is or ceases to be is up to each one”, that the most intimate identity of his son had no social dimension; that no flag or ideology should be raised in the face of this crime, and that his son should not be a “symbol of anything.”
There are children, adolescents and adults who at home “will never talk about their sexual condition”, for fear that they are not complete strangers who will give them the beating that ends their lives, but their own parents. Killing someone with blows, shooting them down, is not the only way to assassinate them: there are also those who throw their children into the street and into the cold, leaving them to their fate like someone who disposes of garbage. When someone can be killed shouting “fag”, what one is or ceases to be can never again be a matter of each one. We are not the ones who choose a corrective violence that aspires to suppress us from the social order: those who install these blows and the instinctive reaction to them, the suppression, the straight spine or the bowed head, the shiver, are always the others.
Hide, the murderers said to their victim — a matter of kinesics. Because each one, with his sexual orientation – Vox’s words in Huesca – at home and in his bed. Neither participate in this denigrating caricature, nor raise your voice: preventively censor every word that is outraged by your death. Respect the wishes of the biological family and ignore those of the chosen one. From now on, then, do not show yourself, lest they kill you —because they always kill because of what they have seen, because of what we have looked like, because of their interpretation of things—; If the person you are is too obvious, you will always have in your head the memory of that poor boy who, as a homosexual, thirteen people beat to death.
I was born in Alcalá de Henares, but as a teenager I was “prohibited” from going to local festivals. Questions of tacit admission: Nazis live or dominate there, and fear of beating — or death — may outweigh the will to live. It is their conquered territory and you cannot enter enemy territory. Sometimes, with my partner, on the street, it may happen that we separate slightly at night, so that no man approaches two women who walk too close together; and, above all, so that it does not go further, so that it never goes further, so that it does not escalate. Anyone in the group, before hearing Samuel’s story, has already been afraid of dying like this; Any woman, almost before seeing the news, has already been invaded by that instinctive fear, with its rituals -the first illness, doubt, inoculated-, with the need to send a message when arriving home, accompanying oneself so as not to walk too alone for the world. Some of us are lucky to have only been afraid; so many other friends cannot say the same. Someone insisted on breaking a body long ago and the world believed that already wounded bodies weren’t broken enough.
Imagine that a father understands better those who kill his son than who dies. Let us imagine that the rage of those who kill is cleared after the confession, exonerated; Let’s imagine a world that tells us that we must be understanding, magnanimous, fair before them. Imagine the desolation of those who die, even though they are still alive despite everything.
It is easy to get carried away by a punitive temptation, of retributive justice: a broken bone corresponds to a broken bone. Today there are victims who imagine themselves as executioners, breaking the soul and the ribs of those who have dared to end the life of an innocent. Also some, well-meaning, request life imprisonment for the murderers. What hides behind is the same will that justice be administered and exercised, to distinguish between the barbarian and the civilized. And any of these impulses must be resisted.
A breaking justice has to be administered through transformation. There are loves, like terrible angels, who do not choose to hide their wings in their bosoms; Cernuda also wrote about how, on mutilated adolescents, “hands rain, / light hands, selfish hands, obscene hands”. Not only must it have been one physical blow after another: someone says, and we imagine, that they did not stop calling him a fag while they did it. Words rain, pierce, kill.
We will not stop until we have transformed the world into something habitable, until we dissipate any judge who demands that we silence what we neither can nor want to hide. At the rallies for Samuel’s death, banners of politicization sprout from each person, as if they were flowers, but politicization is not revenge; We will no longer be able to repair the supervening death, but we can point out the aggressors and shout, loudly, that justice is demanded and that they have already administered theirs enough. His world, that of those who kill, is the past that must be extinguished; ours, that of those who die, germinates from and among all wounds. Samuel is a symbol, as Sonia Rescalvo Zafra was in her day, a trans woman killed in another brutal beating for the mere fact of being one. We cannot allow more hearts to stop beating, nor that every night thousands of others accelerate out of fear. No more lives will be cut, no more stalks will die; justice for Samuel, in the world of fictional texts or in any of the possible and imaginable worlds in which these atrocities may still be conceivable.