Paquita Sauquillo is a woman with white hair long before the age of gray hair. It’s hard for her to remember that one day she wasn’t, perhaps because of the habit of our looks, too made for women not to be-don’t let them be-until old age itself. Francisca Sauquillo Pérez del Arco (Madrid, 1943) received yesterday, touched by her blue-white hair emblem, the III Rojana Award (Cantabrian noun that describes a ray of sun that breaks through the clouds) from the Felipe González Foundation, an award that celebrates the memory of the Cantabrian Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba (1951-2019) –who surely would have liked to comb gray hair– and, therefore, celebrates the commitment, insight, sophistication and professionalism –in the best sense– of the institutional policy, since all of them were virtues that accompanied the former minister of Felipe González and vice president of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Under the pleasant shade of the Paseo de los Poplars of the Madrid Student Residence, the afternoon fell when Sauquillo –with a proven activist career, from the anti-Franco militancy of the university and his commitment to the underprivileged to the European forums– thanked the award with a slight protest, underlining the handling of the memory of Rubalcaba, today a reference for the same rights that “made him suffer so much.” Gregorio Martínez, a former collaborator of his and today a member of the advisory council for the Legacy of Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba at the Felipe González Foundation, had said it minutes before.
As it happened, yesterday Rodríguez Zapatero also had an angry intervention on Cadena Cope, demanding for the Socialists – almost for the first time – the end of ETA, achieved under the political downpour of an inclement PP that even tried the lawfare against Rubalcaba . None of this was said out loud yesterday under the poplars, before the snowy skulls of Felipe González and many other classics of socialism, but it passed like a silver arrow through those graying heads, while the sun was declining. A luminous and rectilinear certainty, a rojana.
