The wordless front page of El Periódico claimed as much on November 12, Day 3 after 9N. Taking up nearly half the page was a photo of the façade of the Palacio de la Moncloa, shut down, empty, as if the occupants had gone on holiday with no warning, in haste, not even locking the front door. "Let someone else do it", they might have thought.

This image embodies not just the absence of the building's main tenant, the Prime Minister of Spain, but the absence of the country he represents, in whose name we only hear the talking heads on TV, droning a lesson that they stopped believing a long time ago. As if they followed the philosophical maxim whereby "anything that exists does not need to prove its own existence", they hide behind a concept that they probably regard as eternal as Spain itself: the law. But, being as they are very educated but uncultured, they should have understood --as Fernando Ónega wrote in La Vanguardia-- that "legality holds the edifice together for as long as the people want to. If, one day, the people decide to break the law and they are summoned to do so, no police force will uphold it".

Above all, Spain has suffocated to death because they didn't know to give it air when necessary; because it has always lived inside a glass display full of moths that have eaten it away, little by little; because every time someone has opened the small door, they have caused a terrible catastrophe; because it has been marched on by too many military boots and has heard too many martial shouts; because it has always wanted to be as self-sufficient as Great Britain, except it didn't have Britain's talent and resources; because Madrid has never wanted to follow or hear what the forward people dictated. Instead, Madrid preferred to slow the country down and have it follow the heavy, sluggish pace of the capital. "Madrid is killing Spain", says a character (a priest, actually) in Hemingway's "The Capital of the World", a short story he wrote in June 1936, a month before the Spanish nationalists would stage an armed uprising to enjoy the monopoly of nationalism.

For a long time we have heard Basques, Catalans and Galicians being accused of wanting to break up Spain, to destroy it, as if it were so simple. The crusade against the alleged "separatism" has never been but a crusade against progress, against a periphery that always supported a centrifuge force that opposed the notion of a radial, centralised Spain. This periphery didn't intend to run away, but to open the doors to the outside world, to a world that always knocked on a door that Madrid has kept shut with every available lock. Spain hasn't died just now: it began to die with the constant bickering between Isabella and Ferdinand, with the disastrous handling of the expansion in America, with such notorious kings as Ferdinand VII --who, unbelievably, was known as "The Desired"--, with absurd dynasties and a Civil War that today is still the foundational myth of Madrid's right, with the appearance of neofascists such as Aznar and nihilists like Rajoy. The two Republics were a useless mirage, as were the terms of presidents Adolfo Suárez and Felipe González, when many doors were opened but, alas!, not wide enough for the draught to take away the rancid stench of dead bodies. The Transition was the last Spanish national project that everyone believed in. Aznar's Post-Transition was, indeed, a complete social breakdown. Zapatero tried to patch up the ragged country he inherited from the direct heirs of General Franco.

Spain has died by default and it seems that Catalonia has begun to fend for itself. Apart from the percentage of votes, of abstention, regardless of whether everyone got to vote, one thing is clear: independence is the only project on offer that is up to scratch. It doesn't look good when Pedro Sánchez "pays a visit" to his Catalan socialist partners after 9N. His pseudoproject is overwhelmingly pseudovague. Nobody knows what the third, fourth and fifth ways are any more, and Oriol Junqueras --who learned on La Sexta that his project can't be marketed outside Catalonia-- is the one who has the best-defined and most specific road map. In 1937 César Vallejo wrote to the children of the world that "if Spain falls, go get it!" But this is no longer necessary. It fell and it rose again. But its so-called defenders have administered the coup de grâce. Don't talk to us about separatism, stop going on about how we are breaking up Spain. Spain is dead because its rulers have abandoned it. RIP. What a pity that we haven't got a modern-day Larra to write the eulogy.