Last week an illustrious Barcelonian died. We should say that an illustrious resident of Barcelona street died. Miquel Fuster. Cartoonist, mainly. A man who lived on the street, too. Fifteen years. From forty-four to fifty-nine. From 1988 to 2003. I take for granted that, sometime, our paths coincided and, surely, sometime we crossed paths on the street. He did everything he could to meet people. Fifteen years, twenty-four hours on the street. In contrast, so many people and so much loneliness. So many hours on the street and so invisible.
The issue of loneliness and invisibility is something he explained throughout his life starting in 2003, when he began to recover thanks to the Arrels Foundation; a unique example of rescuing homeless people in Barcelona. They helped him quit alcoholism and gave him a room where he could start to regain confidence and continue painting. From there came some illustrated books where he explained life on the street and three ideas that he has spread as much as he could in the nineteen years he has lived under a roof after being exposed to the elements: that living on the street is not normal, that the homeless are invisible people to the rest, and that we are all a couple or three circumstances, of bad luck or bad decisions, away from ending up like him and so many others.
Barcelona would do well to recognize his survival on its streets, his recovery, and his subsequent dissemination. And the ultimate success of his life: dying at home. Paradoxically, when more people die in hospitals, he, who for so many years had none, died at home. The four walls where we spend good and bad moments, and between which we would like to exhale our last breath. He dressed them with his drawings, the walls. He had them everywhere because he never, not even when he was on the street, stopped drawing his story, that of Barcelona seen from the street.