For Marina

 

Not knowing the poet Marina Tsvetaieva had caused Agata deep sorrow. It was impossible to explain it, totally unheard of at a time and in a milieu where this name no longer evoked anything. Agata had kept this pain to herself, as no one could understand it. The young Spaniard could not do much about it, her time was vulgar, democratic, leveling. Agata, herself, could seem vulgar, levelled.

Here, for example, she was dressed in a ridiculous red hooded outfit that couldn't find a way to cover her cleavage. She was angrily firing a machine gun at people she didn't know. They seemed just as determined to stop her and her comrades from taking 67 people hostage, including schoolchildren. It was, above all, a 2.4 billion euro issue for the Spanish state. For her, paradoxically, it was a question of attitude towards death.

It is true that Madrid, since the launch of the Movida even before Agata's birth, had been one of the most dynamic cultural places in Europe. The artists' collectives and the Madrid scene had actively campaigned to destroy all moral, traditional, and ultimately Catholic references.

In Madrid, Agata lived openly as a homosexual, consuming all kinds of psychotropic drugs on a daily basis, not giving up any opportunity to get high. She had blossomed in the "pasotas", the alternative circles of the capital that formed one of the most extremist post-punk groups in Europe. Although Franco's heirs were still lurking, the alternative circles of the 21st century were swimming in post-modernity.

But something was missing. Nothing, absolutely nothing in Agata's life came close to the absolute perfection of the life chosen by a woman like Marina Tsvetaieva. Unlike the Russian poetess, born to a mother of noble origin, who had grown up in an environment of refined, polyglot intellectuals, the gypsy neighborhood that had passively witnessed Agata's birth had dragged her there, into the shit.

Agata was obsessed with Marina Tsvetaieva. Even there, in the midst of the din of weapons, the screams and the dying, she couldn't help but think that her fate would have been different if she had met, touched, spoken to, been, Tsvetaeva.

In a way, the Movida was the eternal struggle of the Ancients against the Moderns. Pedro Almodóvar's aesthetics, his choices, his intransigence, were nothing but the continuation of the dada, hippie, punk movements. Agata had studied all the counterculture movements, she had been adopted by one of the most radical alternative circles in the West. But she knew that, in all its excesses of sex, drugs or violence, nothing came close to the absolute commitment of Marina Tsvétaïeva.

There, inside those buildings of the Royal Mint, Agata tried to live one of the most absolute adventures that her time allowed her. In an age of conformism, of aesthetically documented rebellions, her deepest reasons for agreeing to participate in this robbery were not related to the expected loot. She knew, unlike the others, that it was an impossible mission; at least not within the reach of amateurs like her and her friends. But Agata didn't give a damn about the money, she had made a decision. Agata Jimenez had wanted to lock herself up with the others to go to the end of her ideas. She wanted to live a commitment, the one she could afford, marked by bullets, sweat and blood; Agata, like Marina Tsvetaieva, wanted to put her skin on the line. She could not help it if her time and her environment offered her only a bank robbery.

What else could Agata have done in this world without reference points? Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ossip Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova were born Russian and intellectuals in a world that promised struggles and a brighter tomorrow.

Marina Tsvetaeva was Agata's role model because she had fought all her life to maintain a passionate intellectual commitment. Marina had gone through the October Revolution of 1917, the debacle of the White Army, the misunderstanding and rejection of her peers without ever giving up her literary ambition. Ostracized, plunged into misery rather than into the compromise of authorized artistic and literary circles, crushed by the Soviet steamroller, she chose to lose everything, including her life, to live up to her ideal.

Agata had been born into a soulless world, ruled by accountants and civil servants, without any transcendence. So she looked for height and eventually came across Marina Tsvetaeva. She had read all the translated poems of her muse. The truth was that she didn't like them all. It was difficult for a child of the eighties, a reader of punk fanzines like "El Víbora" or "Amor, Amor", to fully appreciate the subtlety of the stanzas of a Russian intellectual of the early twentieth century. But Agata loved everything about Tsvetaeva's biography, who despised money, honors and esprit de corps.

She was obsessed with it. How many times had Agata thought of Marina, even while fucking in La Emboscada, La Ingobernable or any of the squats in Madrid.

The group to which Agata belonged, even if marginal, was a protection. It had its vocabulary, its dogmas, its certainties. One felt stronger there.

Marina Tsvetaieva did not seek the comfort of the group. She had remained alone, unprotected, uncompromising, without changing her words for anyone.

Agata had been shot by an M16 bullet fired by a member of the security forces who had come to defend the government's treasury. But, she had managed to survive to have time to study more thoroughly the life and work of Marina Tsvetaieva.