The life of a news story is capricious, especially if it is not news. On October 28 at 10:40 a.m., an email reached the Pontevedra media offices. It was a call for the presentation of the collection of poems From mariño to poet by Manel Monteagudo, pseudonym of José Manuel Blanco Castro. The event took place on the 29th in the O Sanatorio space, a cultural space whose name was appropriate, because in the biography provided in the message it was explained that Monteagudo, after a serious accident on a ship in which he worked as a young man, it had remained “practically vegetal” for 35 years. That same day, but in the morning, Radio Pontevedra interviewed him as a preview of the presentation. He told there how his wife, when he woke up in 2014 after being “in a coma” in 1979, “would lie on top of me crying and crying, and I didn’t even know who he was.” Once the introductions were made, Manel Monteagudo had a bigger surprise in store for him: two daughters appeared in his room, one of them pregnant. That story, that of a man who wakes up in 2014 suddenly after 35 years in a coma, and has a wife and two daughters, and does not know what the internet is and cries in front of the mirror shouting “that is not me, that is not I ”, without the declaration of a single doctor who had treated the patient, has occupied national televisions, radios and newspapers this week. First as a tragedy, then as a farce.
Monteagudo’s story was not new. It circulated intermittently through local media, but more smoothly, each time a book was featured. In such a way that in some previous of his presentations his 35 years were dispatched in a “practically” vegetative state as a secondary aspect. It was a story, yes, changing. The oldest interview that remains on the internet is one conducted by The voice of Galicia in 2019 in which Monteagudo denies the Monteagudo of 2021: he was not 35 years in a coma, but 64 days, although later he was battered and with repeated episodes of amnesia. In 2020, in the literary magazine Terra de Outes, Manel Monteagudo stretches. He says that, after a three-month coma, he spent 14 more months in bed “in a semi-statonic state, until, in a moment of lucidity, I married my girlfriend (…) Over time, I regained mobility and speech, but only episodically, as fainting continued to cause frequent states of unconsciousness that could last for days and, what is worse, total memory loss ”. The neurologist who treated him, said in that interview, withdrew and the new one canceled the medication (11 pills) that left him stunned; in 2014 he regained autonomy, fluent speech and memory. “A few months later I was discharged and from that moment I read and wrote again, to which my wife had to teach me again,” he said in that publication.
In statements to the journalist Manuel Rey, of the newspaper Galicia ScienceXoán Mariño, a friend from Monteagudo’s adolescence, tells how he met him once in Outes (Noia, A Coruña) in 2001 or 2002 “and he told me about his accident and what he was still suffering from. He could not be alone, because at any moment he would lose consciousness and fall, pass out and return to the comatose state. And so on for many years ”. Later, according to Mariño’s testimony, “he began to receive a treatment that kept him like a zombie; He was awake, he was on his feet, but it was the same as if you hadn’t spoken to him, he didn’t know anything, until his medication was changed and that change allowed him to regain consciousness completely. From that moment it was as if he had risen. He began to be able to talk to everyone, to remember, to understand… “.
Two months ago, on the occasion of his latest collection of poems, The voice of Galicia covered the presentation in Noia, where he announced a 15-year contract (for a collection of poems per year) with a publishing house, Medulia, with which this newspaper has not been able to contact. But it was the Pontevedra presentation, weeks later, that lit an unpredictable fuse. From the local media of the Galician city, Manel Monteagudo jumped to TVG, the regional television. And the piece dedicated to him, posted on social networks, began to gain strength. The local phenomenon of the 35-year-old man in a coma was beginning to dissolve in a perfect storm that had its origin on November 11 on TVE, when Monteagudo told his story (without nuances: no 64 days in a coma, no catatonic episodes, no brief states of lucidity) in the program The Hour of the 1. From there, and pushed by the networks, the story was transferred to dry land as it arrived from one medium to another, and from one television to another until it became the news of the day and, instantly, into a major scandal that It compromised journalism more than the fake: hadn’t anyone even done the math with the years he was in a coma and the ages of his daughters?
After being in the news for 48 hours, and seeing its incongruities in the story pointed out, especially scientific ones, on Friday Monteagudo addressed the media, which by then were already dedicating the time and resources to dismantle a published story for which there was no time and resources to contrast before publishing, and said in despair that his lie had “gotten out of hand.” “I admit and assume all the guilt, I accept everything they tell me. The one who said it wrong was me and that’s it, ”he commented in reference to his narration, which was not so extraordinary at the beginning, in 2019, and that over time it grew until it became a nonsense from which he could not get out, so So the news was not that he was 35 years in a coma, but that someone believed it, and tried to make others believe it.
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