Escucha el silencio — habla más alto que las palabras.

Rain, snow or shine, the square is always full of them. Fifteen, sometimes twenty, scattered across the benches, on the steps of the fountain or simply parked in the mobility scooters that already seem like extensions of their tired bodies.
The clothes are always the same, wrinkled, stained, smelling of days without a shower. There are young people with eyes far too red for that time of the morning, open beer bottles, marijuana smoke perfuming the air at seven, hollow laughter that does not match life. Women with missing front teeth, smoking for free at the expense of old men who can barely hold the pack.
A life reduced to survival, to immobility, to aimless waiting. A shared space, but not truly lived together. The square is a single place, but it shelters parallel universes that never touch; everyone occupies the same square meter, but there is no dialogue.
It is coexistence without real co-living.

And, in the middle of it all, her. The preacher. She shouts at every person who crosses the square, like a clock marking the hour with a “Good morning! Jesus loves you!” that echoes and gets lost in the air. She is neither a villain nor a heroine — she is part of the machinery, the repeated “good morning, Jesus loves you” was just more noise. Sometimes she brings her daughter along, and lately the neighbor has started to show up too — she does not shout, does not smile, does not wish anyone a good morning — she just hands out leaflets that almost nobody takes, but she keeps going, as if it were a mission. These are gestures emptied of meaning by repetition and by the lack of real connection. They are monologues disguised as dialogue, just the raw portrait of a microcosm where poverty, loneliness, addiction and performative faith coexist in a melancholic equilibrium.

On the opposite side, a singer with an electric guitar insists on playing, maybe for himself. Nobody listens. The old men remain motionless, the women keep drinking, the young people keep smoking and laughing at nothing. And passersby do not look. There is no pity, no surprise, no anger. The scene seems far too natural, as if the square had been born that way: a warehouse of forgotten people, with background music and free sermons for whoever wants to believe.

The square is, deep down, a mirror of how many communities learn to deal with social fracture: not by repairing it, but by making it invisible through familiarity.
No one feels anger or pity because the pain there has already lost its status as an event; it has become routine.
Each person there, in that square, is an island surrounded on all sides by mental noise.

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