When Iván Menéndez passes by in his vehicle, people cross themselves. "And that the bar in Ibiza to get attention is very high," says this 44-year-old Gijon, who has been driving around the island in his dream car, a funeral one. The stickers doubt the authenticity of the service. The word "Life" painted in green in the rearview mirror, and let's not say the Marilyn chased by bats screaming on a wheel. "Zombies are people too," he puts on the license plate.
" The best thing is the Civil Guard, they stare at you in the control and do not give them time to react, freak out, and they don't stop you ... well, just once," he recalls. When he appeared in Asturias to show it to his mother "he did not want to get on, but not because he gave it a bad feeling but because it is a small town, why they will say, but in the end he ended up climbing, if she already knows me."
Ivan lies in the space designed for the coffin. "Come on, I didn't take naps here," he says, running the curtains. Then pretend corpse, with the hands on the nape of the neck. From the trunk, one with dilators, gray beard, cap and, every inch of skin visible, tattooed. Skulls, crows, blood, daggers are distinguished, Jack Nicholson , a female cat, the bad guy from 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' with a bug that says, "If he loves you, he will hug you from behind," a shitty Hitler . In his neck, Norman Bates tries to stab Marion Grane .
The car looks like the icing on this guitarist and Punk singer of a group that calls itself 'The widow Manolete' , with the body of the bullfighter as a profile picture of Facebook. He arrived on the island ten years ago to work as a waiter, and finished as a mailman. "But not in the hearse, uh, can you imagine?", He comments as if he had always dedicated himself to delivering only good news.
The little ceiling lights and the worn velvet reveal the age of this Renault 18 GTD, "a car, like all those who have always had funeral homes," he says. More than 1986 it seems taken from a film by Béla Lugosi , also present, and about to take a bite on another sticker, just behind the driver's seat, upholstered in leopard to Ivan's taste.
"I've always liked classic horror and suspense movies, Hitchcock freaks out," he explains, although it has nothing to do with his attraction to the 'funer', as he affectionately calls her. That comes to him as a child, when on the beach of San Lorenzo, in the heart of Gijón, he saw a guy take surfboards from one. "I do paddle surfing now and it's very comfortable for me," and he draws an emphasis on the rollers that used to slide coffins in Catalonia.
Ivan searched for a while on the internet, until the 'funer' appeared in the town of Lleida, abandoned on a ship by the family that ran the funeral home . "It was love at first sight, it was freshly painted and with all the past revisions," he explains. It had just 60,000 kilometers, which has almost doubled in its transfer through the beaches of the island.
"I explained that it was good for me to surf and it made them very funny, in fact I keep in touch with the children of the owners and from time to time I send them photos of the 'funer '," he says as if it were an adopted child .
Now the 'funer' moves back to Asturias because Iván leaves the island where he has lived the last decade. Attend this interview at the wheel and on the way to the ferry. Driving very slowly, or maybe everything that reaches the Renault 18. "It's that I got tired of stress," he said shifting gears on a zombie hand .
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