In 1971, a few months before my wedding, the town of Bélmez de la Moraleda (2000 inhabitants) in the region of Jaen became big news. Mysterious faces suddenly began to appear on the kitchen floor of one of the houses there. When the first face emerged, the lady of the household (In the time-honored tradition of Spanish housewivery) tried to scrub it away with bleach.
When this did not work, her husband and son, who favored more rough-and-ready methods, proceeded to obliterate it with a pickaxe and then lay new concrete. However, the persistent face resurfaced a week later. The family was on the verge of attacking it again when the mayor intervened and ordered them not to because the floor was to be excavated.
At a depth of about nine feet, two headless skeletons and a jumbled mass of other human bones were found. As it turned out, the site of their kitchen had been a Roman, then Arab, and then Catholic graveyard for over a thousand years before the house had been built. The remains were thus carted away and given a more satisfactory burial. The assumption was that this action would appease the restless spirits.
However, contrary to all reasonable expectation, the removal of the skeletons only intensified the facial apparitions. This time the faces appeared and disappeared quickly, sometimes within a time span of a couple of hours.
This allegedly paranormal phenomenon became an important tourist attraction, and people travelled to Bélmez from all over Spain to see the faces. Since Jaén is not far from Granada, my husband and I took a day trip there and paid a small fee to go in and look at the rooms where the faces intermittently appeared.
When I entered the house, the paranormal activity was unfortunately experiencing a certain lull. There was only one face on the kitchen wall, but it was in the process of fading though no one quite knew why. Apparently, this strange activity had its ups and downs, and it was impossible to predict when a face would surface. Faces could be of either gender, and those that consistently reappeared were even given names such as pava [silly woman], fraile [monk], pelao [bald man], etc.
This phenomenon was the focus of a great deal of research. Ghostbusters even came from other countries, such as Germany, to study it. Some people wondered if the faces were a hoax whereas others believed that they represented people that were trying to send a message from beyond the grave.
Although no one really knew why this was happening, there were a lot of crazy theories. It was sort of like when Covid-19 first appeared on the scene. Everyone had his/her own explanation and cure. Like the Faces of Bélmez, Covid-19 also materialized as mysteriously as an unpleasant face on the wall. Many people also thought that it was a hoax and tried to strenuously bleach it away (both externally and internally). They also tried to destroy it by chiselling it out and isolating it. However, like the Faces of Bélmez, the virus has stubbornly kept returning though in different guises.
The first face of Bélmez surfaced on the kitchen floor, followed by a second face on the kitchen wall. In Spain, the first wave of the coronavirus surfaced in Madrid in March. Recently, it has been followed by a second appearance (possibly a wave) in the region of Catalonia, where infections have suddenly quadrupled.
Just as no Bélmez face is exactly the same, there is now a slightly different version of the virus. In this second wave, fewer people are dying though this is perhaps because the most vulnerable have already been creamed off. Even though younger patients have a higher survival rate, in Lerida (which is part of Catalonia), the hospital system is beginning to crash and patients must now be sent elsewhere.
The Spanish government does not know quite what to do because it had erroneously relegated the coronavirus to the category of issues that had been satisfactorily dealt with. Spain now has other fish to fry. President Pedro Sánchez is currently attending an important EU reunion in an effort to obtain unlimited (no-strings-attached) funding for economic recovery. Quite understandably, more frugal countries such as Denmark, Austria, and Holland don’t think that this is such a good idea.
That is at least one of the reasons why President Sanchez does not want to hear about disagreeable topics such as the infection or mortality rate. There are already too many dead, both counted and uncounted. He does not want any uncomfortable resurrections now that all of the coffins in the skating rinks and subterranean parking lots have been buried and put to rest.
However, sometimes the dead begin to talk. Apparently, they did in Bélmez. At least two famous Spanish parapsychologists hooked up hyper-sensitive microphones to pick up electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) from under the famous kitchen floor. The microphones detected an array of mysterious voices. Although many of the sounds were inarticulate cries, groans and whispers, some very clear phrases were picked up, such as the following:
§ I am still buried. [An evident observation.]
§ She carries on with all the men. [Is there sex after death?]
§ Hell begins here. [Proof that someone did not lead a saintly life.]
§ Bitch! [Death clearly does not improve one’s mood or language.]
§ Fuck yourself! [ An anatomical impossibility, which indicates a need for post mortem anger management.]
If it were possible to use EVP to recover the words of the 28,500 (really 45,000) Covid-19 victims in Spain, It would be interesting to hear what they had to say. Most of them died alone in hospitals and nursing homes. Would their phrases convey the same level of anger and despair as those of the anonymous skeletons buried under the kitchen floor in Bélmez?
If life were indeed fair (which it is is not), the faces of the coronavirus dead would intermittently materialize on the walls and floors of government buildings, offices, and agencies. They would appear at judicious intervals to haunt our leaders. At the very least, the faces would be a permanent reminder of their lack of foresight, callousness, and ignorance.
