Selected short stories
Index
Bar 404
It is exactly a quarter to nine in the morning, and I’m sitting in one of the cafés at the airport of this bewilderingly neurotic country, with the travel journal that by now was supposed to be full of information lying on the table, but which has amounted to nothing more than a scrawny notebook of entries. And, not so much to condense everything related to the project that has brought me here (or that I have brought here) as to fill the blank pages left in the notebook, I have decided to recount my trip.
A cup of double coffee is not quite enough to keep me properly awake, which may result in a clumsy, halting account, riddled with digressions. At least the drowsiness forced upon me by the strike of the local airline’s employees—my departure was scheduled for five hours ago—dulls the impression I currently have of my situation. In this way I manage, with relative success, to avoid unfairly scolding myself for having made the wrong decision and come waste my time in a distant country looking for something that does not exist.
Well, something that might not exist—a doubt easy to harbor, due, at first glance, to two reasons: the first, that the fact that something cannot be observed does not mean it does not exist; the second, that not everything inhabiting the world of abstractions projects itself into the physical world. (Note that neither reason excludes the other.) Now then, in my case, this “something” that might not exist is a bar.
One idle afternoon seven months ago, I read an article online about a bar in this city that could not be found if one went looking for it, and which could only be reached unintentionally; that is, one could only come across it. Yes, incredible as it sounds, no one knew where it was. There was no registered address on any map or directory. Yet the bar existed; it was real, according to the testimonies of several people who claimed to have been there. In all documented cases—informally, and online—, those people had stumbled upon the bar by chance, in a location that varied from case to case, and then, when passing again through that same place, the bar had already vanished. Curiously or suspiciously—depending on one’s stance regarding the existence of such a place—, everyone who had visited the bar forgot its name once they left it. For this reason, we researchers had to give the establishment a name—or rather a nickname. For most, it is the “Ghost Bar,” a denomination that, in my personal judgment, is the most fitting. I think, between two prudently spaced nods, that I would have given it the same name. Another scholar of this urban legend, who also happened to be a computer enthusiast, christened it “Bar 404,” that is, “bar not found”; the few skeptics who have analyzed the case enough to form an impartial opinion, for their part, prefer to refer to the place as “the bar that does not exist.”
But the curiosities of the mysterious bar did not end there, not by a long shot. Once inside—always according to the alleged patrons—, aside from the drinks one normally finds in such establishments, odd, even bizarre drinks and dishes were offered. One customer claimed to have seen written on a chalkboard hanging on an unplastered brick wall in the middle of the hall a two-for-one offer on “pasteurized liquid fried egg.” Another recalled, on the other side of the counter, framed as if it were a historical photograph, an advertisement for golden mushroom gelatin. There are also recorded references to saltless beer, distilled turnip perfume, snail essence with vodka, wood-marinated meringue coffee seasoned with blackout syrup, and something they called “pizza wine.” And, as if all that weren’t enough, one witness described the use of conical “ecological” glasses made of newspaper, in which beer could be served without the glass getting wet and falling apart, spilling the precious liquid. The same witness also stated that he had asked a waiter how it was possible for the glass to maintain its physical integrity, to which he was given an answer that he later “forgot,” though in my opinion it must have been nothing more mysterious than a simple magic trick. Untimely memory lapses like the one just mentioned, and other equally convenient inconveniences, were the fuel that fed the widespread skepticism of those who learned of the legend, not to mention, of course, the utterly inconceivable and unreal nature of the bar—more befitting a fantastic tale created by the mind of someone with an imagination as plentiful as it is questionable (it may be that the idea of a “Bar 404” occurred to someone while riding a bus, and that from that idea they began to weave a story to justify it, like a spider weaving a silky trap for some unwary soul), or, naturally, of a dark and little-known urban legend from a city large enough for such things to happen or for one of its inhabitants to invent them and offer them to their peers, letting them spread slowly, unhurriedly.
Tangent hypotheses aside, the matter captured my attention. Perhaps as a pastime, the first thing I did upon leaving the computer was to sketch out or casually propose possible explanations for the case. But the more I racked my brains, the less convincing my conjectures seemed. I spent that entire afternoon in this way, and it was in the evening that I dissolved my last thoughts on the matter in beer. However, the next day I returned to them, so alluring in their abstruseness the mystery seemed to me. I explored all possible angles of the matter, even attempting to put myself in the shoes of one of the “witnesses.” I asked myself what it would be like to calmly walk down the street, suddenly run into a bar whose façade was not necessarily particularly eye-catching, and, on a hunch or perhaps simply a spontaneous whim, step inside to give the establishment a chance —and be served an unforgettable and surreal experience in the form of visions altered by extravagant lighting, of blackout syrup or other drinks whose very names invite only the bravely unconscious to drink, and of inexplicable dishes, conceived perhaps by the fevered imagination of a madman.
I returned to the computer, in search of any idea, any clue. Before I realized it, I had already combed through the blogs and websites where the few existing testimonies had been recorded—half-compiled by pioneering researchers, and commented on by them as well—and extended my search into the realm of social networks, fishing for comments or discussions about the mysterious bar, gathering those that seemed relevant. Naturally, I had to rely on an online translator as a bridge toward the testimonies I found on the web, imperfect as the translations may have been, for they did not by themselves give me a sense of the mental or emotional state in which such testimonies had been written unless I molded them in the manner of a philologist. And let us not forget my relative lack of knowledge of the language, particularly its urban slang, and the unhelpfully lax grammar and spelling of most people. But I chose to imagine that no one could leave the mysterious bar indifferent or unshaken, that a visit to “Bar 404” marked a before and after in each patron’s life, for better or worse. And that the experience, being so unique and unrepeatable, was in fact not repeated, so that when they tried to return, the witnesses had been unable to recognize the bar's façade. And this made me conclude that it was precisely in that fact that the exceptional nature of the case resided: in becoming aware that one will not be granted the chance to relive the experience. And I thought, insistently: what would go through the mind of a former customer as they made their way to the place where they believed they remembered the bar had been, only to not find it? Their first reaction would be to walk up and down the block, slowly, scanning for the bar’s front, and, failing to spot it, wonder whether they might be mistaken, whether memory had suffered a small lapse. And one is usually humble enough to consider the possibility of a small lapse in memory, so they would decide to walk just as slowly through the neighboring blocks, for the bar cannot be far from where they began looking. But it would not appear, even if they stopped now and then to examine closely the façades of each business, and this is what would unsettle anyone. The questions would pile up in their mind in no time: “How can this be? Where is the bar? I was here just a couple of nights ago. Have I forgotten where it is?” Someone might easily hypothesize that the bar had closed from one day to the next, but commercial establishments do not usually disappear without leaving a trace: for a time the ruins of the business remain visible, generally the sign; moreover, on occasion, the departing owner does not bother papering over the windows, and thus through them one can see the empty, dark hall, dusty and silent. And at this point—when a broader search yields no results, when the bar shows tenacity in its resistance to being found—is where the patron’s attitude takes one of two paths: either they forget the matter and meekly resign themselves to continue with their life, knowing they will make do with some other bar of the many that abound excessively in this city, or they become obsessed with the case and begin to formulate more or less formal or serious hypotheses (“How long would it take before people began to doubt their sanity?” I would often wonder). These latter individuals were the ones who, possibly still under the influence of the emotion of the memory, recounted what they had lived (“supposedly lived,” some would say, let us not forget), and who made it possible for me to learn of the mystery and, in what I have at times of despair called “a fit of unconsciousness” or “the work of a whim,” decide to investigate it.
But, overall, after sending emails to the owners of the blogs and replying to comments on forums and websites—generally asking a question or requesting more details about whatever a user had recounted—none of the meager responses I received was remotely satisfactory. In fact, someone told me to go do something better with my life instead of asking questions that “make no sense” or something like that; again, poorly written messages are usually not easy to translate.
Clearly, I paid no attention to that individual, nor did I pay attention to the fact that the most recent information available had already been resting on the internet for more than two years. Regarding this last point, I merely hypothesized that there had simply been no noteworthy developments in the case, or that those interested in it had probably resigned themselves to submitting to the bar’s caprice in choosing its visitors, and I did not want to think that the bar might have closed, even though there were countless possible causes for anyone who might wish to propose them… In any case, had I considered the possibility that the bar no longer existed—I mean, that it had closed its doors, which would neatly explain the investigators’ silence, though now I think that I might have thought at the time that the bar’s inexistence could have been proven without my knowledge—I would have tried to make myself change my mind, telling myself that a bar with such supernatural characteristics, if it existed, must be resistant to the economic crises that, as is well known, constantly affect this country, or that no mountain of taxes—of which merchants and entrepreneurs here complain—could crush it, or that its owners had enjoyed two quiet years, free of problems that might have prevented them from keeping the bar operating.
At any rate, continuing with my account: exactly four months ago I came to this country and to this city to investigate the phenomenon on my own (a little earlier I arrogantly included myself among the “researchers”). And I know I should let some time pass before drawing conclusions, but I also know—while I feel myself slowly sliding into extreme impatience with the airline’s staff, always bent with sleepiness and staring at the empty cup where a meager remnant of coffee, which in defiance of physical laws has not made its way to my mouth, draws an innocent smile from the bottom—that at that moment I believed myself prepared to find answers when reality was otherwise. With a command of the language limited to butchering it when trying to pronounce its peculiar consonants—though able to understand it moderately well in writing, provided I did not have to deal with its extensive and intricate system of conjugations, but who am I to criticize the grammar of foreign languages—without having a contact or acquaintance in the city who could give me advice or a healthy warning, and, once here, with no idea how or where to begin searching… it all sounds like the work of a whim. And perhaps it was: exactly four months ago I found myself at a point in my life where I was ready and willing to go in search of an adventure; I didn’t think too much about it and simply came to this country to investigate, on my lonely own, a mystery by experiencing it myself, and through that very experience to solve it—just as anyone (and not only in my country) decides to go to some distant and unfamiliar place on vacation. But I longed for much more than going abroad to wander through unique or unusual landscapes, take photographs, soak in local customs as much as time and interest would allow, and after a previously established period return with pleasant memories in my suitcase and my camera. All this is due to the fact that I possess a temperament somewhat different from that of my compatriots. For, to begin with, and most notably, I am not a cold or hot-tempered man, nor someone extremely practical, as my parents expected me to be. Quite the contrary: even as a young man I manifested an abnormal sensitivity to certain aspects of life, removed to varying degrees from the purely rational, and because of that my parents are disappointed in me, although my fantastic inclinations have not led me far from the course of an ordinary practical life. But—returning to the subject—perhaps I had not chosen my destination entirely well; perhaps I should have chosen another unsolved mystery, not necessarily one well-known, but more… “mundane,” so to speak; that is, one not of such an incredible nature, not such a great challenge to the understanding of a simple individual from across the ocean (who, nevertheless, has referred to himself as a “researcher”…); a puzzle before which one can properly arm oneself with methodical experiments and studies, with a carefully elaborated methodology. But I did not, and to be honest, I had not even considered it; in my choice, I must admit, there may have been a combination of excessive confidence and an underestimation of the work to be done, for if the solution to the mystery had been easy to obtain, should it not have been proposed and accepted before I decided to travel? All of this could happen to anyone, and for that reason I half-conclude that I should not be so hard on myself.
So I came, and once I had arrived in this country, and after finding lodging, my first step was to try to contact those who claimed to have been in “Bar 404,” so that they would once again testify to what they had experienced and so that I could personally ask them questions—thus enriching myself with details and information that might prove useful to my investigation. I had even already prepared some of the questions I imagined might arise. What were you doing when you came across the bar? Were you alone or accompanied? Where did you find it? At what time of day did it happen? How long were you there? How many other people were in the place? Did you recognize anyone, whether customer or employee? Did you return to the bar after that time? Did you try to? Has anyone you know been there as well? Do you have any physical proof that you were there, such as a ticket or a leaflet? A photograph, perhaps? Did you feel anything unusual while inside? Did you see anything unusual—even paranormal—before, during, or after your stay in the bar? What was it that most caught your attention about that place?
With that list on the first page of this very travel notebook, I set out to investigate, thirsty for answers. I was aware that, if I walked the city’s bustling and chaotic streets, the chances of a stroke of luck and suddenly finding myself in front of the bar would increase over time, or that sooner or later I would come across people who knew about the phenomenon and who would be willing to talk about it, just as I was aware that this would be a true search for a needle in a haystack. I began by heading toward the small, timeworn bars typical of the city center, which I believed were the places where strange stories tended to accumulate (the gloomier or darker the establishment, the better I deemed it for my purposes). As I walked the streets, I kept carefully scanning the signs of the places I passed, searching for some anomaly that might reveal itself to my eyes, though part of me feared I would not be capable of recognizing it. Taking advantage of my expertise in the consumption of alcoholic beverages—something in which I had never betrayed the national character—during the first few days I visited every bar I could, especially at night, after long aimless walks guided by my scrutinizing eyes; I always began by casually surveying the interior of the chosen establishment, and then sitting at the counter to try to strike up a conversation with the barman, or else taking a seat as close as possible to some group of people who looked as though they might know stories about their city. In either case, I could easily establish a conversation and made every effort to steer it skillfully in the direction that interested me, occasionally feigning an attentive and interested attitude toward my interlocutors of the moment, especially when—as often happened—I did not understand what they were saying to me. It was a task that involved much strategy… and a touch of contingent analysis, something that here, I believe, they call “emotion”: entering an unfamiliar place each time, instantly savoring its physiognomy, gathering and testing with my eyes one by one the details that made up its identity, predicting whether it would be a good place to investigate or whether, on the contrary, it would be far from offering me any answers or even clues. And then, of course, tasting the house specialties, unable to avoid making comparisons with what I already knew; finding savory surprises or bland disappointments bubbling in a glass that reflected my always enigmatically expectant face.
It didn’t take long for me to lose heart due to the lack of results. Among those who frequented the bars and taverns I visited, those who did not wince at the mention of the accursed bar because they had never heard of it laughed in my face. “Do you really believe that story?” the latter would say. That happened to me about three times.
Nonetheless, though I was somewhat discouraged by the poor start to my investigation, I did not give up. “The first clues shouldn’t take long to appear,” I told myself every night upon returning to the tiny apartment I was renting, clinging to a not insignificant optimism. On a couple of occasions, I even thought I dreamed about the accursed bar, but even in my dreams it remained elusive: I saw myself in chambers that—aside from dreamlike or surreal details—seemed to be the bar, but in them I saw nothing truly strange, nothing that did not quite fit with reality. Soon after, having meditated on it properly in a tavern frequented by sons of immigrants, aided by a hearty lunch, I decided to move to a more economical place in a residential neighborhood. With this measure I hoped to save money—since it was clear my stay would last longer than expected, and there were very inexpensive places, such as private homes, where for a couple of merkels one is generously given shelter and food—change my environment, and expand my search, taking it to other corners of the city. And so I came to occupy a room in the house of a woman who already had other lodgers under her roof. I barely got to know them.
The first night I spent in the woman’s house, I opened my travel notebook—of which I had not yet filled even three pages—and sat down to seriously reformulate my strategy and make calculations. The city was far too large to walk all its streets with their endless turns, and going into every bar was financially unfeasible as long as I did not generate my own income, even if it were possible to do so with all the necessary time. In the meantime, until an innovative idea emerged from my mind, with the passing of days I became one with the neighborhood, having voraciously consumed the details that made up the whole of its landscape and its inhabitants. I thought that if I managed to notice an anomaly or a discontinuity in reality, it would lead me to a clue—or would itself constitute a clue. Day and night I walked the neighborhood’s streets, exploring them as my ancestors did distant and then-unknown continents many centuries ago, led this way or that by what my eyes allowed me to see, pursuing the strange and the dark if my mood was carelessly adventurous, or with the caution of a hunter or a witness in the middle of a forest if I did not feel safe somewhere—but generally with an innate impassiveness and an optimism hidden behind the blind conviction that whoever seeks eventually finds, a lesson branded into my mind since childhood, and trying to guide myself by a compass of intuition. And I did not stop frequenting bars and similar establishments: having finished my cycle of visits in the center, I continued my search in other areas where such places accumulated.
However, the days went by and nothing memorable for my project occurred. I did meet many people and many different things happened to me; I was welcomed and nearly thrown out of places, listened to with utmost attention and ignored blatantly, taken for wise and for stupid, for good and for an idiot, warmly thanked and insulted with horrible words strung together in the moment. The people here are very gentle and peaceful, but also impatient and nervous; they run from one point to another or walk sparingly, moving only their legs and keeping the rest of their bodies still; they are sensitive and compassionate toward their smallest fellow beings or are blinded by selfishness, trampling over others; they are expressive, original, and witty, like artists—perhaps everyone here is one, each in their own way; they are cheerful, expansive, cynical, and coarse—but above all, anxious—and they tend to confuse reserve with malice and vehemence with sincerity. And so, by interacting with sweet people of good heart and with authentic bipedal beasts who spoke the language worse than I did, I continued learning how to communicate and navigate the city. And I also learned how to travel from one point to another, to know which corners to enter and which to avoid, whom to speak with and whom not to. All of this was very useful to me, and I imagine it is the goal of anyone who decides to spend a relatively long time abroad.
And once, I heard someone on the street say, “These things always happen when you least expect them.” I turned my gaze toward the source of that remark and saw that she was speaking to the person walking beside her, but she might just as well have said it to me. Later that day, as I pondered the non-progress of my project, what I had heard came to mind, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was approaching the matter the wrong way. If that person was right, I had been doing everything backwards. But if that was true, how was I to turn the strategy right-side up?
Just then, the landlady of the house where I was staying knocked softly on the door, but that was enough to make my thoughts vanish into thin air without leaving a trace, while my ears bristled in fright. I abandoned my comfortable posture to open the door and allow her to ask me to turn off the light—it was two in the morning and I was still awake, meditating.
I don’t know whether it was the darkness that helped me sharpen my focus on the object of my reflections, but soon I remembered that all the supposed customers claimed to have stumbled upon the bar “by chance,” and that, when trying to return to it, they had been unable to find it. That meant the bar could not be found if one actively sought it, and I concluded that, therefore, the only way to find it was to look for it without looking for it—that is, to not-look for it. Because although it is true that whoever seeks finds, it is also true that sometimes one does not find what does not wish to be found.
That would be a very strange property for a bar to have, but why couldn’t it be true? Only because it sounded too unusual, or because nothing like it was known? And wasn’t the whole affair far too unusual anyway, and nothing like it known?
That night I decided that, from then on, I would try to not-look for the bar, mostly because I no longer saw any alternatives, because everything else had failed, and because one must cling to a last hope; as long as something could be attempted, it had to be attempted. And besides—even though I had not yet realized it—I was beginning to grow fond of certain things in this country…
Before setting my plan in motion, however, an obvious question arose: how does one search without searching? The simplest answer was that I should wander the city without thinking about the bar or anything about this new plan, and that, sooner or later, I would run into it. But although, at that point in my stay, I had already stopped paying close attention to everything around me (in any case, one can never see everything at once), allowing my mind to relax during my walks, putting my new strategy into practice proved far more difficult than planning it—infinitely more difficult. At first, I could not stop thinking about what I was not supposed to think about. Thus, a part of myself seemed to interfere with my plan on purpose. I had to learn to detach myself during my aimless strolls for brief moments, seeing without seeing where I was going, ignoring anything that might absorb my attention (unless it could be important, like a traffic light or people screaming and running). I also stopped going to bars, and even began avoiding restaurants, and started preparing my own meals more often. But every time I returned to the room I was renting, I had to acknowledge that nothing had changed—in other words, nothing had happened, the plan was bearing no fruit. After a couple of weeks without any results, I felt my energy draining away. The lady of the house, moreover, was beginning to grow suspicious of me; she must have asked herself who that foreigner was who had come to the country to do off-season tourism for an excessively long time, who spent almost the whole day outside, who returned very late at night—occasionally, at first, riding a cloud of alcohol—and who, during the little time he spent in the house, remained secluded in his room, making no sound at all, as if he did not exist.
I used to think of myself as someone who finishes what he starts, who does not rest until achieving his goal, but the bar’s eagerness to always flee from me was already defeating me; I could already see more clearly the face of failure, and on it a mocking, cruel smirk was growing ever sharper…
And, to make matters worse, my pockets were growing dangerously thin. I asked my father for money, but he, not understanding what I was still doing in this country, quickly voiced his reservations. I did not give in so easily, and we ended up negotiating: after a long telephone discussion I managed to get him to send me enough to sustain myself for one more month (rent and food), and in exchange I promised to use the money I had left to book the return flight.
As soon as my father hung up the phone, I lay down on the bed and tried to devise one last plan to catch the elusive bar. Searching for it hadn’t worked; not-searching for it hadn’t either; no one had been able—or had wanted—to help with the search… Only one thing remained to be done.
I jumped out of bed and booked the first available flight back to my country.
That happened just yesterday.
And that is how I have come to this situation, in which I ought now to be in the middle of my journey back home, but I have been unable to board because of the airline employees’ strike preventing the planes from taking off. All that remains is to wait until those workers grow tired of protesting and return to their tasks.
But suddenly, in the cloudy and blurry space that briefly and variably opens and closes between my drowsy eyelids, I think I notice an idea sketching itself in the depths of the cup—an enigmatic and colorful idea whose meaning I cannot consciously decipher, and which I can only understand by seeing it. As soon as its meaning becomes evident to me, a desperate desire to seize that elusive idea and bring it into conscious reality overwhelms me; my limbs begin to tremble, and then I feel my entire body shaking; my mouth has frozen, preventing me from uttering any sound—which is good in that it keeps me from attracting people’s attention, but also bad in that it keeps me from expressing the deep emotion I am experiencing—and I think my eyes are closed, yet I see, I see things. I see a gray dirt path that cuts through bright green shrubs all the way to the horizon, which my brain decodes as the avenue I took to the airport. Yes, my mind has disconnected from my senses—this must be an epiphany, like the ones that, from time to time, many centuries ago, the peaceful, simple, and deeply religious rural inhabitants of my country used to have! Then my vision takes me to a certain street in the city. I have passed through it several times during my long afternoon walks, when the mildness of the weather and my exploratory urges masked my disappointment at not having been finding clues. On that street I mentioned, there is a dark wall—brownish or perhaps smoke-colored—and two doors of a watery green, without handles and always closed… except for one occasion when I saw them slightly ajar. And that time I didn’t put my eye to them; I didn’t think to peek inside that place; how could it be that the idea never occurred to me? And now I rise abruptly; I must go to that place; my epiphany tells me so without words; I must go there before the airline strike ends and my flight finally departs.
I reach the place in question, panting, sweaty. I stop facing the sea-green doors, on either side of which stretch square meters of windowless wall, painted unevenly—a fact one notices upon looking closely. The narrow doors seem closed, but there is a space between them just wide enough for an eye to peer through, and complete darkness on the other side. Without wasting time, I insert the fingers of one hand into the crack and pull one of the doors toward me, and then, with the other hand, pull the other. I begin to understand everything; I feel I knew it all even before coming to this country. “What kind of person paints their doors sea-green and their walls the color of burnt earth?”, I think. It was such a simple sign that I would be feeling like an imbecile were I not preparing myself to savor the indescribable ecstasy that usually accompanies epiphanies. Meanwhile, as the doors open, the morning light rushes into the darkness of the room before me, gives it the shape of a cloud, and finally dissolves it. Then the sun withdraws from the sky, and powerful blue lights switch on in the mysterious room. I fall to my knees, amazed, enraptured; I stretch out my arms completely and devote myself to the göttliche Barmherzigkeit—as my father says—and to the spiritedness of the place.
“And who says a bar has to have a sign? Can’t secret or clandestine bars exist?” something thinks within my mind, which I no longer feel is mine, perhaps because I have abandoned the need for a mind—now all that remains is to feel the moment.
After a solitary second, I stand up and step triumphantly into the place. The blue and white beams rising from the corners cut through the gloom that would otherwise be absolute. Very quickly my eyes grow accustomed to the peculiar visibility conditions, and so I begin to make out, one by one, human-shaped silhouettes, straight legs, and panels forming tables and chairs… and in the back, an extremely long counter—the bar, without a doubt. It is the happiest moment of my life. My arduous labor has finally borne fruit, even if it took quite a while to appear, but everything I’ve lived through these past four months has been worth it, and every peso spent has served to purchase this instant of supreme bliss, and I regret nothing. I advance slowly through the hall, letting more details of the environment materialize: the Christmas lights around the tables, the mist hugging the floor, a menu suspended from a transparent thread, the atmosphere thick with aromas strangely familiar yet not entirely recognizable—the syrup of blackout, “pizza wine,” the essence of snail floating briefly in front of me. A strange music plays, its notes melting upon contact with the air and drifting lethargically from here to there. It feels like the inside of a spaceship; I can almost see the extraterrestrials behind the counter preparing cocktails from another world; in this way and only in this way would I accept being abducted by them.
I sit at the only free table—a small, square, rustic wooden table where someone has left an empty coffee cup. I pull a napkin from the dispenser: printed on it is the phrase “Bar 404” in black letters. Immediately, a pale hand with long fingers appears before my eyes, gracefully holding a saucer with a conical object, silvery, smooth, and shiny, which it gently sets down before me. I turn slightly and find a young woman dressed in white and brown.
“What is this?” I ask her.
The waitress smiles at me.
“This is a lunar squid,” she replies kindly, in my language.
“But—”
Guessing my thought, the young woman says:
“It’s on the house.”
Deeply moved, all I manage to say is:
“Thank you, thank you so much.”
“We’re the ones who are grateful.”
I take the little spoon left beside the coffee cup and plunge it into the plate, and with a measured, curved movement of my wrist I tear off a piece of what must be the lunar squid’s innards: a cluster of blackish gelatinous lumps. Very slowly I raise the spoon, to prevent the food from falling, and open my mouth, hungry for answers.
“You have a flight, don’t you?” the waitress suddenly asks, who has remained by my side—I thought to hear my opinion of the food.
I remember the flight, mortified. The squid innards fall with a dry tap onto the little table. I have desired this so much, my purpose has been so inexplicable, I have done so many things to get here, I have traveled so many kilometers and bothered so many people, that the fact I must leave prematurely, without a chance to gorge myself on the establishment’s peculiar specialties or to swell with satisfaction at living a supernatural experience denied to the vast majority of mortals, strikes me as the greatest injustice of all time and of life.
“Yes,” I reply sadly. “It’s getting late.”
The waitress looks toward some distant point.
“Passengers are boarding already,” she observes.
Her words plunge me into a blend of panic and despair. The ecstasy has abandoned me far too quickly, all at once.
“No, please—” and I stand up to speak to the young woman face to face. “Just one more minute.”
But the humanoid silhouettes begin to blur hastily, and the light beams go out one by one.
“Sir, it’s getting late and you’ll miss your flight.”
“No,” I insist; my legs buckle so much I nearly fall to my knees; instead, I grab hold of her apron and then her long uniform sleeves; then I cast a quick glance to the side, at the people heading relieved and indignant alike toward the terminals. “Just a little while longer, I don’t want to leave yet, please, göttliche Barmherzigkeit, just a little longer—”
A Strange Couple
“If you fear solitude, don’t get married.”
(From Chekhov’s notebooks)
I
I met Méndez at a scientific conference held in the city of R* last year. At first, I ran into him a couple of times in the hallways, without paying him much attention. Later that day, I saw him again in the auditorium where the day’s lectures were taking place. In fact, he gave one of the talks.
Not even when he stepped onto the stage, washed in the glare of the spotlights, did he stand out. His calm, peaceful nature was obvious a mile away. I think he could be summed up in a single word: sober. Yes, that was it. He dressed simply and neatly: a white shirt with its collar poking out from under a plain sweater, dress pants, and sneakers, all in discreet colors. His hair was carefully combed and he was clean-shaven. He spoke in a steady tone, never needing to raise his voice, which didn’t tremble either; he didn’t accompany his explanations with exaggerated gestures nor did he stay rooted to the floor like a statue. Even his height was average, and his complexion slightly toned. Everything about him was moderation, balance.
His research topic had points in common with my own, and so his talk interested me more than the others. After the lectures, I waited for him in the hallway. When I saw him coming, I felt tempted to intercept him with a “Great work,” words I never say. In the end, habit prevailed and I caught his attention with: “Doctor, pleasure to meet you.”
Without realizing it, I had stepped into his path to the coffee table.
The brief conversation we had confirmed my impression from the auditorium, and his friendly tone neither bored nor tired me. He avoided sophisticated vocabulary; instead, he chose simple, precise words. He certainly didn’t show the restlessness of someone who feels the need to justify his work, nor the agitation of one “married” to his project. And he was so approachable and kind that he ended up inviting me to stay in touch with him, and even to visit him at his workplace.
That very evening, the conference attendees were treated to dinner at a restaurant in the city. I pushed my way through a crowd for whom there seemed to be no seating; at one end of the dining room, just when I feared I’d have to choose between waiting for a table to free up or eating elsewhere, I spotted him. He saw me at the same time and gestured to me.
“Please, grab a chair,” he said cheerfully. “There’s room for one more.”
Indeed, thanks to the kindness of two diners, they made room for me at the table. Four colleagues were seated with Méndez. I soon noticed that they didn’t know him, and that they had all ended up at the same table by chance, as it were. And after breaking the ice with them, I also noticed that Méndez went completely unnoticed. He didn’t join in the conversation, nor did our colleagues address him. Yet, when I included him, he spoke with total ease, as if taking part or not made no difference to him.
“He doesn’t seem to have an ounce of pride,” I thought, and I wasn’t wrong.
He seemed to be at once in his own world and in ours, or able to switch from one to the other instantly, without effort. He listened to everything we said with great attention, but kept a certain peacefully silent distance. I think it was then that I noticed something on his hand glinting intermittently—though, truth be told, I had half-noticed it in the auditorium. It was a golden ring.
“Of course,” I told myself. “He’s a happy man or, more than happy, content. He’s content with life and needs nothing more.” The awareness of this fact threw into relief, before my eyes, those little things that keep me from being content with my own life; still, the wine with which we accompanied dinner drowned out any further thoughts I might have had on the matter.
After dinner, as each of us made our way back to our respective lodgings, Méndez repeated his kind invitation. Feeling closer to him now, I convinced myself to plan a project we could work on side by side.
Some time passed, a couple of months. With the mental rush of our profession—added to the frantic pace of life in the city—I neither visited Méndez nor drafted a project to collaborate with him on. We only exchanged a few emails and even the odd text message. We wrote to each other like two friends who occasionally meet and catch up on the events of their lives. And nothing more.
Until I ran into him again. I was leaving the Institute where I work; in the lobby, I recognized him. He was leaving too, just like me, only in his own way: unhurried and undistracted.
“Doctor! How are you?”
“Oh, it’s you!”
I must say we didn’t usually address each other formally; in fact, right after those words, we switched to informal speech.
“What were you up to?”
“I came to a talk they gave on the first floor. So-and-so invited me, do you know him?”
“Oh, yes, yes… And hey, would you like to grab a beer? Do you have time?”
“Yes…” the doctor hesitated. “Actually, I was already heading home.”
It was barely four in the afternoon, and I told him so.
“That’s true, but… I like getting home early.”
After a second of silence, he added:
“Why don’t you come home with me and we’ll have something there?”
“Of course!”
A short bus ride would take us close to Dr. Méndez’s house. Watching how people flooded the sidewalks, dodging each other and running across the middle of the street, I connected the dots, which led me to tease him good-naturedly:
“Does your wife give you hell if you get home past a certain time? Ha, ha…”
“No, not at all,” he replied, forming a smile. Then he glanced at his wristwatch and added, “She’s usually back by this time too.”
I asked a few typical questions: what she did for a living, how long they’d been married, how long they’d known each other… To all my questions he responded, again, with just the right words: neither excessive nor lacking, neither curt nor long-winded; he didn’t stray beyond the scope of each question nor did he change his tone from one answer to the next.
The ride went by quickly despite the hour, and before I knew it we were heading down a narrow, nearly deserted street. We stopped in front of a large, single-story house, one of the few that remained unchanged in that neighborhood full of apartment buildings and their shadows. Between the gray fence that marked the front of the property and the house lay a well-kept little garden, with scattered, varied plant species. A rosebush bloomed timidly on one side, and the windowsills overflowed with flowerpots.
“We want to buy this house,” he told me as he opened the iron gate. “I chose it for her.”
“Oh, well, you must be very much in love,” I said, letting out a harmless chuckle that he answered with a smile.
During the seven or eight steps it took me to cross the front garden, I wondered what this woman—whom my host evidently adored—might be like, and made no effort to imagine or expect anything, since I would soon see her with my own eyes. A cat watched me attentively from behind one of the windows.
Inside, the house was elegant and… sober, without any of that vain display of unnecessary ornaments. The light in the foyer was dim and warm. Perhaps it reminded me of the house where I spent my childhood. Another cat came out to meet us; it stepped in front of us and fixed its gleaming yellow eyes on us. It didn’t flinch when I extended a friendly hand toward it; however, it reacted to the doctor’s greeting by bolting away.
“How many cats do you have?” I asked, just as a third animal peeked out from a doorway.
“Three.”
My host guided me down the hallway. The sound of our footsteps was swallowed by the thickness of the plush carpet. We passed by the kitchen; out of the corner of my eye I caught the silhouette of the first cat against the window looking out to the garden. I wondered whether the doctor and his wife were actually the tenants of the house.
We emerged into a spacious, elongated room with a west-facing window; white curtains filtered the afternoon glare. On this side, a round little table with a sofa and two armchairs, and facing them, a television turned off. Beyond that, a modestly sized bookcase crammed with colorful, slender volumes, and a large table with four chairs.
The doctor walked forward slowly, perhaps with some unease.
Just then, someone entered from the side, stopping short upon noticing our presence. Her surprise was plainly reflected in the way her round little eyes fixed first on the doctor’s, then on mine. A very brief, piercing look, devoid of hostility. With great interest, I took in her appearance in a second: a somewhat plump woman, wearing a red wool sweater that contradicted the afternoon heat and accentuated the paleness of her skin while darkening her chestnut hair, which—as I later observed—fell in ringlets beneath a bulky clasp. She had a small, pointy nose and fleshy, flushed cheeks; thin lips, a faded rose color; a pointed chin, almost no jawline; her expression was one of utmost seriousness. In her hands she carried a steaming cup. Two of the cats planted themselves at her feet and stared at us fixedly, almost accusingly.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “Clau, this is my friend, Dr. A*.”
II
The professor stopped reading abruptly and immediately lifted his eyes from the notebook toward me—something I barely perceived, given that the shame consuming me forced me to keep my gaze down. Even so, through a few furtive glances I watched with dread and horror the effect my story had produced on the class: everyone’s eyes had darted toward a desk in the front row. Claudia’s cheeks must have been not merely “flushed,” but “glowing like embers.” I had described her far too well; no one could have missed who the plump woman with the curly hair and the clasp, the pointy little nose… and the cats, the cats! And, as if to make sure even the most clueless would catch on, I had used the same diminutive! Unbelievable! What kind of schoolboy would think to put a classmate into a story set in the future?
Then I felt more than a few eyes fall on me and on Rovira, my desk mate. And even so, I think what most disturbed me then was the sepulchral silence that filled the classroom. A silence that was not merely the result of the interrupted reading, but that came loaded with stupefaction, with others’ unspoken impressions. What an uncomfortable silence! Even now, remembering that episode vividly, I seem to hear it at full volume. And behind the silence, no less unbearable, the faint vibration of whispers hanging in the air.
But above all I feared that the appearance in the story of this “Clau” had exposed before the class the identity behind Dr. Méndez—given that he was in that very classroom!
“Well,” said the professor, and cast a glance at the class, one that lingered significantly on me, “shall I continue reading?”
I felt—and I feel it again right now—my eyes shrinking and pressing into their sockets, as if trying to crawl back into my skull, my entire face frozen in a pleading expression; that was all the answer I gave him.
But most of the class exclaimed, “Yes, yes!” Nosy, morbid people! You want to see how the story ends, don’t you?
The professor had no choice but to go on. And he did not do so reluctantly.
“Clau, this is my friend, Dr. A*.”
And to me he said:
“My dear wife, Claudelina.”
I extended my hand to her and smiled warmly. She shot me another brief glance.
“Hello,” she said dryly, quickly, in a half-voice.
She shook my hand briefly and weakly.
“I invited him over for tea,” Méndez explained to her. “All right?”
“Yes,” this Clau replied with indifference, and stepped away from us. She took her cup to the table, always followed by the cats.
I wondered whether she was upset or simply cold by nature, while at the same time feeling disappointed about this “having tea.” In fact, the doctor asked me:
“Would you like tea? Or coffee?”
“Coffee is fine.”
“Is there still hot water?” the host asked the lady of the house, with a pinch of sugar in his voice.
“Yes,” she said, without looking at him.
And thus went my hopes of wetting my whistle.
Méndez left through the doorway without a door through which his wife had entered. I followed him; on the other side of the hallway I glimpsed a narrow bed in a bedroom.
“I’ll bring it right away,” he told me as he left his backpack in an unseen corner.
I didn’t follow him into the kitchen; honestly, I wanted to snoop around the house—so spacious and spotless—besides the fact that my curiosity about my friend’s wife remained unsatisfied. I should add that I wanted to check whether my presence bothered the lady of the house. I strolled carelessly around the living room, let my eyes scan the book spines; Claudelina sat at the table, moved her lips barely opening them, and took the first sip of her tea. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye; she paid no attention to me.
“With the heat outside, I think today calls more for a cold beer,” I said with a smile.
Clau’s shoulders trembled almost imperceptibly as her mouth curved for a second.
“I don’t drink alcohol. It makes me sick,” she replied, without lifting her eyes from the bread she tore apart heedlessly.
“That’s a pity.”
And I meant to say something else, but just then I realized that Clau’s fingers were full of rings—some silver, others black. I saw them on a little finger, a couple on a middle finger, another on an index finger… but none on her ring finger. I glanced with indifference at the green stone she displayed on one hand, and the violet one on the other, for wasn’t the most important ring missing?
For the moment, I said nothing, but I was encouraged by Clau’s apparent not-bad disposition toward me. My curiosity had just increased.
“Could it be that he is married to her, but she is not married to him?” I wondered. And how could that be? “Or is someone here lying to me?”
In the middle of the bookcase, on the shelf beneath a glass panel, I discovered, half covered by a paperweight, a couple of magazines. The top one had a drawing of a bearded man with some children; from the one below protruded the phrase: “If you died today, where would your soul spend eternity?”
Méndez returned with two cups and a little basket of biscuits, which he set on the table before sitting down beside his wife. At his request, I sat across from the two of them.
“I’ll have some red tea,” he somewhat cheerfully told his wife.
Claudelina barely glanced sideways at him, then at me. Her bare finger rose and then lowered before my eyes over the course of a long sip.
“I must say, what a lovely house. And it’s big.”
Méndez nodded, pleased, but his wife didn’t react. She only darted a couple of lightning-fast glances at me, with bright eyes like her cats. Otherwise, both of them struck me as similar: meek, neat, not at all expansive, one foot in their inner world and the other in reality. I exchanged a few more phrases with Claudelina, but nothing more. She finished her tea and bread very quickly and stood up. She disappeared with the cats through the exit at the far end of the room; the cup and saucer clinked, and then muffled footsteps sounded down the hallway. A distant door closed.
Méndez let out a deep sigh and pushed his cup away. I was thinking about Claudelina. I wanted to believe she was one of those women who are cold toward their beloved in public but extremely loving and affectionate in private, safe from the gaze of others. Yet not for a second did I find that plausible. That didn’t explain her husband’s elbows on the table, nor the slump of his bowed head. Was she angry with him? Had my friend committed some fault? Or, on the contrary, had the relationship worn down, and I had become an involuntary witness to its desperate agony? But they hadn’t been married for that long, or so Méndez had told me. What was certain was that little remained of that well-groomed man, in perfect control of himself. Now he looked at me with tired eyes, his hair slightly disheveled, and wrinkles had appeared on his shirt.
“I always loved her,” he said then, breaking that uncomfortable silence. “Ever since we were in school, I— I don’t know, I always loved her. No one understood it, but what do I care? For a time I said nothing—maybe I thought it would pass, or that she felt nothing for me. But I never stopped loving her! I always adored her! I did everything for her; what haven’t I done for her? And what do I not still do—?”
“And so?”
“So what?”
“Is there some kind of problem?”
“No, no,” he replied, hesitating; his lips trembled, and two furrows formed on either side of his nose. “I know that, at first, when we were two naïve schoolkids, I saw her as some superior being, even as someone unattainable, you understand? An example of how one ought to be—mature, strong-willed, disciplined; a paragon… in certain respects. Because as I got to know her better—we became friends—I discarded those vain illusions, those youthful fantasies, and saw her for what she is: a human being, and I love her as such. A more or less ordinary woman. I recognized her imperfections and resolved to complement them with the closest thing to virtues that I possess, and that she might do the same with me. It’s also true I didn’t want to crawl before her like a worm, nor be the doormat on which she wipes her boots. No relationship can thrive if there isn’t a certain degree of equality between both parties, if there isn’t a minimum of respect. Because she wouldn’t respect me if I gave up my dignity entirely. She—who is the very personification of human dignity!”
“And that’s how you ended up married.”
“Yes, but… what kind of marriage is this? I know her inside and out, and maybe she knows me, but we live in one and in two different houses at the same time. We wouldn’t be any farther apart if we lived on separate planets. I mean, we talk, we interact every day as any ordinary married couple would, except that—how to explain it?—the things she says, I don’t feel she says them to me, but to an image of me, or to something that is not me. And what I say or do dissolves into thin air… And the thing is, she—she doesn’t love me!”
“Well,” I cut in, trying to stop him from adding any more pitiful remarks, “that remains to be seen. From what I can tell, she also loves—” and I pointed upward with my index finger.
“Eh, I don’t know about that. If she did, she’d obey Him more. The Holy Scriptures say, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ but notice that” and he lowered his voice, “I’ve never touched her…”
He covered half his face with one hand.
“Anyway,” I said, “every relationship is its own world… Besides, after all, I don’t think you have that much to complain about: you have a wife, a house, you're respected for your work, a long career in science… From the start I noticed you were a happy man. Aren’t you happy?”
Two glassy, wide-open eyes fixed on me.
“Yes, I am,” he replied, and, grabbing the sleeves of my shirt, insisted, “Of course I’m happy.”
A decisive push made the small iron gate give a faint squeak. Méndez was once again the composed fellow he had always been.
“Thank you for visiting our humble home. And forgive me if I said something I shouldn’t have.”
“Not at all. It was a pleasure. Goodbye.”
I walked away seeing nothing but his calm gesture of farewell; the cats didn’t watch me leave. Before turning the corner I was already wondering how it was possible that those two had ended up together. Did the woman have a heart of stone? How does one conquer it (information of interest)? Did she even have a heart to begin with, or was it off-limits to men? Are all marriages the same, or why does this one seem special to me, unlike the others? Being single—not even divorced—I have the added difficulty of trying to formulate a hypothesis that satisfies me. Perhaps this Méndez did something extraordinary to somehow win over his beloved. Or he won her… and lost her soon after. Surely he had some merit, and surely he had not bought his wife—had not turned a monetary debt into a debt of love. Nor had he led her to the altar under threat: I imagine her sufficiently insensitive not to flinch at my friend’s suicide, or to accept docilely her own death if that were to be the consequence of refusing to marry him. I had wanted to ask Méndez about it, but had not found the right moment, and now it was too late.
III
The teacher summoned me after class. Lounging in his seat, hands clasped on the desk, thumbs fidgeting, his head slightly tilted, he observed me impassively. For the first time in my life I sat at a desk in the front row. And I wasn’t so much intimidated as restless.
“Let’s see,” he finally said; in situations like this he gave his voice a tone of false pedantry, and that’s the best way I can describe it.
But he didn’t know how to continue.
This was something like an “extraordinary case,” so to speak.
“Let’s see, I want to understand the point of your story.”
The point of my story? The point was for you to read it silently and say nothing, not to read it aloud to the entire class.
But I didn’t say that.
“Or let’s start at the beginning—did you two write that story yourselves?”
“Yes.”
“Because it’s very well written for someone your age. Did someone help you?”
“No, it’s all original.”
“Well. I don’t doubt that you could have written the story in question without help, but as for Rovira—” He seemed to remember something. “Because there’s something very important here: whether or not you received help, you clearly ignored the assignment topic. You were supposed to write a story about what your life would be like in the future. And I’m not overlooking” he added after a very brief pause “the possible veiled references to two of your classmates.”
I mumbled something unintelligible; I think I wanted to argue that the narration could have taken place in that distant future.
“Eh? Your story doesn’t mention the year, or anything that would suggest you’re in the future.”
“Maybe the bus the narrator and his friend took… flew.”
I blushed.
“No—” I tried to correct myself. “I didn’t say it flew because in the future that would be common and there’d be no need to mention it.”
There are no camels in the Quran, reader.
The teacher kept looking at me. My blush didn’t fade beyond a warm, intense pink.
“In fact… In fact… I wanted… we wanted to show what relationships will be like in the future; the degradation of the institution of marriage, reduced to a contract. Loneliness within marriage… A weak man who submits to his own fantasy, whom ‘love’ turns into a little dog,” (I should have said “worm” or “doormat”) “capable of admitting a Third into his marriage; the friend is single, and a woman who— ah, I thought that—”
I couldn’t go on once I noticed, on the teacher’s clasped hands, a golden ring. I don’t know if I had copied that ring to give it to Méndez, or if I’m inventing a memory. I couldn’t breathe.
“All right, I think I understand,” the teacher said curtly, placing his hands under the desk. “Truth be told, I should make you rewrite the story, you and Rovira. But since it’s very well written and doesn’t require many corrections, I’m going to pass you. Not so with Rovira; he will have to write a story of his own. I don’t trust that he took part.”
“But he did.”
“How?”
“It was his idea.”
The teacher’s face was transformed.
“Just that?”
“No, he also contributed to the story… by giving me his opinion.”
Perhaps restraining the urge to throw me out the window, the teacher muttered, almost growled:
“Leave.”
Upon leaving school, I ran into several classmates who had stayed on the sidewalk chatting. In a second they formed a circle around me, laughing and exclaiming. “Your story is so bizarre,” “Are you saying they’re going to get married?” and so on. Rovira, satisfied, amused, looked at me with a goofy, crooked smile. Poor thing! I couldn’t save you, and now you’re going to have to invent something and write it yourself. Behind my classmates I thought I saw Menéndez in profile, watching me out of the corner of his eye, then uncertainly pulling back his shirt and his neatly side-parted hair.
The next day he did speak to me:
“I don’t know if your intention was to make fun of me,” he said, without hostility—calmly, rather—“but, beyond that, your story gives me… hope. Yes, I admit it. I don’t believe Claudia is ‘unattainable.’ In any case, I have to find that ‘something extraordinary’ from your story that will allow me to win her over.” He brought his hand to his chin and lowered his gaze. Then he asked me, “Have you come up with what it might have been?”
I shook my head by way of answer and walked away.
Menéndez… Did you know that Méndez was almost going to be named Mendoza? Because it’s not about you.
Claudia, for her part, never said anything to me about it. As if she hadn’t noticed anything peculiar in the story, nor heard the rumors circulating in the classroom. For a time, though, she was a bit less friendly with me, as if she had harbored a fleeting suspicion of something. Or had she understood everything, even what wasn’t written? I can’t know; perhaps my paranoia made me see shapes where there were only incidental stains. And so I can’t say whether she too had misinterpreted my intention as an author, like the Literature teacher, Menéndez, many other classmates… even Rovira.
And now, before placing the final period, let me give a necessary explanation. Perhaps you already know this, but there is a certain satisfaction in setting one’s fantasies down on paper. And yet, no one who hasn’t done it will understand what it feels like to live on the page, in that other world where everything is possible if it is conceivable by one’s mind, by one’s logos. And, with the courage granted by knowing myself shielded by my (relative?) anonymity, I allow myself to affirm that the teacher and my classmates were mistaken in believing that I had imagined Menéndez and Claudia fifteen or twenty years in the future. No: why would I fantasize about someone else’s relationship? I am Méndez! And Menéndez, poor soul, can be the narrator if he wants. And now you will say: “But that Méndez was, deep down, pathetic in the story.” Yes—and so what? My fantasy was ultimately realistic; I couldn’t paint a rosy future for myself if that meant betraying my own nature, turning myself into someone else in the story, someone who would be “an image of me, something it is not me.” Besides, I used the story to laugh at myself, to satirize my feelings in a mildly masochistic way. Ah, those days; how I loved Claudia in silence, in secret, with furtive glances, ears always sharpened, nostrils fishing for her scent; with dreams in full boil, an eclipse of my intellect, the prostration of my future…
There is a sentence in the draft of the story that I inexplicably removed. It says: “I didn’t want to resign myself to loving her from afar, even though that would have been the healthiest thing to do; nor did I want to crawl at her feet…” Yes, that was me at seventeen. Too honest to reflect myself deceitfully in a champion who has it all figured out, and at the same time too afraid to reveal the depths of my soul to someone who wasn’t ready to receive them. And, of course, unable to escape that old truth that “there are things a man fears to reveal to himself,” and so on.
AC-Man
Once upon a time—not too long ago, to be honest—I met a very peculiar man. He's as normal as any man in his thirties can be, and as ordinary as the people you see on the street... except for one small detail, a small but very significant one.
I once thought that his destiny was marked from the very moment of his conception, which, as I will explain later, might be shrouded in a disturbing mystery. However, if this is not the case, that is, if we are not born destined for a particular task, then one might think—and I have considered it myself—that perhaps our protagonist's luck was decided in a somewhat ironic way at the very moment he was registered as a person.
His parents named him Ace. Ace Connor is his full name; they didn't give him a middle name, which, as you know, is not the most common thing.
AC-e, with an A and a C, and his initials are A.C. (A plus C as well).
Our friend spent his early childhood just like any child born into a middle-class family in this city, or so he says, and I believe him. And again, according to him, it was like this until the day he discovered something about himself that made him different from everyone else.
Only he knows exactly how it happened. What I can convey to you is that one afternoon, on the side of spring where temperatures were definitely rising, reminding one of the approaching summer, sheltering the sensitive from the cold, our friend observed the diligent scurrying of ants in the backyard when he noticed he was thirsty, and his tongue started to be covered with patches of foam, while his pale skin took on a pinkish hue. Without feeling overwhelmed or suffocated, young Ace exhaled a volume of air through his nose, directed onto one of his forearms. What he felt was a clear refreshing cloud settling on his skin, caressing it. It was a pleasant surprise for him: when his body was warm, and he expected to release a bit of warm air onto his own arm in a liberating exhalation, he perceived a slight cold that reminded him of the opening of a refrigerator or freezer, or a breath of air expelled by an air conditioning unit. Far from being excited or disturbed by what had just happened to his own body, the boy marveled: how was it possible for cool air to come out from inside him, with the heat he had? Normally the opposite happens, at least in these latitudes: the air one inhales is relatively colder than the one exhaled, even on the most oppressive summer days (typically, the atmosphere is not hotter than the inside of a person); the body quickly raises the temperature of anything that enters it, be it air, water, or food. Our protagonist repeated what he had just done, getting the same result: he was truly capable of emitting cool air. However, the third breath he exhaled was of warm air, as if he had lost his ability in the blink of an eye. Somewhat disappointed, our young protagonist tried to repeat the mysterious miracle without success. In his initial excitement, the idea of running to tell his parents had briefly crossed his mind, but having suddenly lost the ability to produce cold air, he avoided mentioning the fact, and even wondered if it might have been a hallucination.
Over time, however, brief episodes like the one I described above recurred, not necessarily with high frequency, but rather gradually. And after each of those fleeting moments, our friend thought about what was happening to his body, trying to find an explanation or a cause for his strange ability. Eventually, he also told his parents and schoolmates what he was capable of, but the former didn't pay much attention, thinking it was an incomprehensible or convoluted child's joke, and the latter were not willing to believe him without a demonstration in front of their eyes. It took years for our friend to understand what was happening—by then, he was well into adolescence, at which point he already knew his own body, its functioning, and several of its limits, in addition to having to endure the ordeal of some failed exhibitions—and to explain to himself how that phenomenon was possible, although, regarding establishing its cause, he felt completely unable to formulate or even outline a theory.
And this is what happened to our protagonist: in a nutshell, he was able to cool the air that entered his body, especially if he did so through his nose. Basically, he had air conditioning inside him, so to speak.
At first, he could only do this when he was unaware of anything, when his mind was filled with some empty, senseless thought, or the silent and dry remnants of a true idea, and his eyes were absentmindedly fixed on nothingness hiding behind infinity—which implies it, I’d say—with a total absence of activity in his skeletal muscles, or closed, like when one is inadvertently and involuntarily transported out of reality, into the realm of dreams. This is contrary to what some might suppose: that a high level of concentration is needed to perform such a technique. More importantly, he could only do it when there was no one around who could witness the curious phenomenon. However, over time, and very slowly, with perseverance and without faltering, our friend learned to master his unique ability, being able to cool the air in his lungs with a certain degree of consciousness. Still, he couldn't afford too many distractions: if his attention was divided into two different mentally demanding tasks, his chest could automatically turn into what some despicably would call a 'human stove.' So, once he made sure he could subject his power to the almighty will, he was free and happy to show his ability, his gift, to acquaintances.
His parents, naturally, were greatly amazed, but at no point did they wonder how it was possible for a human being to cool the air by inhaling it instead of heating it; they felt no curiosity about it and simply accepted our friend's ability as a modest blessing. He also dared not ask a question about the matter, not only because, as I mentioned earlier, he had no idea about the possible origin of his power, but also because, perhaps, deep down, that wasn't the important part—not as much as the use he could make of his ability. And I didn't want to give him ideas that would invite reflection, fearing that it would mean delving into the deep and dark waters of the oldest childhood memories, as misunderstood as they were nebulous, or going back to the time before his very conception and discovering a secret that perhaps doesn't really concern him, or that for his own good, he shouldn't uncover.
For it is a known case of a woman who became pregnant, as they say, without having had relations but through the analog vibrations of an old TV in her house. But mind you, I'm not implying anything!
In school, on the other hand, young Ace immediately became popular. His ability was a sensation, especially when spring came, and daytime temperatures began to rise, making it convenient to have a breeze of fresh air at hand.
Initially, whenever our protagonist was asked to 'show his trick,' he willingly accepted, even happy to feel required and useful and, therefore, important. This feeling was heightened by the helpful, sensitive, benevolent, and candid personality of our friend, and complemented by the dazzled gratitude of those to whom he offered his gift. His parents kindly requested it—softly and with a sweet smile, almost like trying to persuade someone to do something they might refuse in some circumstances, almost like an invitation—whenever they were bored and felt like witnessing the mysterious phenomenon again. His school friends surrounded him during breaks or stood next to him in the leisure moments that fill the sometimes unbearable hours of class, with wide-open eyes and an expression of deep interest, asking for a new demonstration or urging him to do it. And he smiled with pleasure before proceeding to take a deep breath, inhaling through his nose, holding the air for a brief moment, and exhaling it as a refreshing, light, and extremely pleasant stream that, however, was fleeting, as it soon dissipated in the warmth of the surrounding atmosphere, inevitably leading to the need for the technique to be repeated. During this youthful period, they began to call him 'A.C,' after the initials of his name and because he was already known as 'the Air Conditioning Man,' a nickname with which he couldn't be displeased, as he didn't consider it something bad, but neither did he particularly like it. In his innermost self, he knew that, despite all the attention he received and the esteem he enjoyed, neither he nor his ability were indispensable... although it was equally true that no one else could do what he could. However, more and more often, he felt somewhat forced to interrupt a family meal to blow a bit of fresh air at the table, and in gatherings with friends, he had to take valuable time pauses to cool the atmosphere, unable to drink, eat, study, or anything, just look at the relieved and—above all—pleased faces of his friends on those hot and stifling days. Sometimes a compassionate soul would turn on the fan or the real air conditioning, but quite often, someone preferred to avoid the noise or the annoying wind of the fan, which hindered work or study at home, or save energy by leaving the air conditioning off or set at a temperature not as low as desired. And so, our protagonist didn't take too long to become disillusioned about the possibilities of using his ability to help others. In fact, he not only became disillusioned but also wanted to disown his power and deny his ability. Even more so after his ears caught what so-called gurus of distant philosophies say, who don't understand the true meaning of the phrases they put in their pseudo-spiritualistic pamphlets: "Be useless, so no one can take advantage of you." He had begun to feel his help as a job, as a burden, even as a hateful obligation, hateful precisely because it was forced, not spontaneously arising from his kindness, having to attend to the requests of his loved ones, even if only for a few minutes. Even if he wasn't busy when someone approached him and said kindly and friendly, "Can't you turn on the ‘air’ a little bit?" he would get upset. He also noticed the fake interest of those around him, selfish people who were more friends of his ability than of him, who only remembered him when they needed 'his trick' (a terrible and harsh truth that he had to accept, although somewhat exaggerated, it must be said), and who had stolen the name his parents had given him to replace it with a nickname more fitting for an appliance than a person: 'A.C. Man,' and if he expressed being very tired or busy to blow cold air, they got angry with him or started to ignore him.
"Now I understand the geniuses," he told me during one of our last conversations; to be honest, we've only talked about five times, but the foundations of our relationship, built on mutual respect, trust, and, above all, positive first impressions, have been established very quickly. "Those with an IQ of one hundred eighty or more. They spend their days locked up, reading or studying, without seeing anyone, and people think that's a waste, that they should use their intelligence for the benefit of humanity, inventing things, improving their living conditions, or something like that. But of course, they actually want to sit comfortably and wait for the geniuses to bring them their marvelous inventions, just to keep them to themselves without giving anything in return. And I wonder, why would a genius use their gifts to create inventions that make life easier for a bunch of ungrateful strangers, who won't understand what it implies to create them—the beautiful wonders that are perhaps necessary, even indispensable, parts of the process—and, moreover, when no one asked them for it? Are they not human, no matter how strange they are? Don't they have feelings?"
He told me all that as if he finally felt free to express his sincere opinion—and I understood, as he had a very valid point, and come on, you don't have to be an 'air conditioning man' to feel (and be!) used—... It’s just that his last pair of rhetorical questions came out with bitterness. The bitterness of knowing he was used, even exploited, considering himself seen as a tool or a machine—devoid of its own will, in any case—more than as a fellow human being... The disappointment of being taken to a TV studio to perform in front of an expectant and curious audience, like a creature from a postmodern, decadent circus, to sit him in a chilly set that a breath of normal temperature couldn't warm in a thousand years, and after the recording, having to hear his parents talk backstage with the show host and its producers, saying, "We came from far away and spent a lot on tickets, couldn't you at least give us some money to return?". The impertinent glares from the neighbors, pouring down on him from all directions when he left his house, once became famous, that bothered him—mute as they were—to the point of disturbing him, making him forget the reason for being outside in the first place, and their constant murmurs—although, in practice, generally tacit, and very probably malicious or ill-intentioned, perhaps even inquisitorial—about his strange ability.
So the years following his high school graduation, our friend spent them having a normal life, almost without mentioning his ability, or showing it off, except on exceptional occasions, requiring him to reveal himself as someone different from the others, to impress the boss or some influential or high-ranking colleague, attract a woman by impressing her, or secretly relieve a overheated elderly person he felt compassion for. But, although he allowed himself to use his ability in the aforementioned situations, he refused to provide details when asked, and he always gave unsatisfactory answers, all to discreetly guard his wonderful capability. Today, he has a wife and children, and every now and then, on warm late spring nights or hot summer days, he blows a little fresh air on their faces... And he has never stopped liking the feeling of being useful or knowing that he is doing something good for others. After all, who doesn't like that?
Not wanting to cause him any inconvenience, avoiding guilt, I never asked him to show me his ability. He only showed it to me the day we met, sighing a bit of fresh air on my face, and I immediately believed him. But, who knows, he could well have tricked me by chewing a mint gum that day in that waiting room...
Someone
Dawn breaks, and it finds them awake—they are the only thing awake in this city of ours which, though said to never sleep, is in truth like a beautiful woman without eyelids, incapable of closing her eyes even if she wished to.
They wander through the cold, misty winter streets, and through the bright, windy summer boulevards lined with lindens or plane trees, with no interest whatsoever in entering a home, shop, or public building. No one is expecting them anywhere, just as it should be; they belong to none of those places. They are always passing through, never stopping; they cross bridges in silence and watch, from the heights of balconies and terraces, busy beings in constant motion like ants in a terrarium, absorbed in their routine labors and duties, so distant and diminished that it would be no different if they were observing them from a cloud.
They are someone (though the word is inaccurate) who goes unseen; perhaps it is not possible to see them, perhaps no one is capable of it. Yet a kind of presence can be felt in the labyrinthine alleys and the wide avenues of our city—this is undeniable—no matter how impossible it is for people to realize that someone has passed by. For wherever they go they leave no physical trace of themselves, and they are perceptible only to those who know how to pay attention.
Thus, for example, when you go downtown on a weekday for your inevitable, unavoidable, unbearable bureaucratic errands, and you walk along the narrow sidewalks at rush hour, when the streets are packed with pedestrians and you must push through the crowd to make progress, searching for the next gap, dodging people, you dodge them as well—they are even harder to see than the rest. And they dodge you, or, at best, politely give you passage, indicating (that is, letting you find) where you should go. But you do not see them, for they have no face, no body, make no noise, and cast no shadow, for they are—perhaps—a shadow themselves, hiding behind the backs of the passersby and slipping among vehicles without ever being run over by them.
If one thinks they have caught sight of them, they dissolve his trail as soon as the first corner is turned, or they vanish behind the first person walking in the opposite direction, never allowing themselves to be trapped within one’s field of vision nor fixed upon one’s retinas.
If their footsteps make any sound, or if they utter any word, any vibration of the air melts into the caresses of the wind, is wrapped in the rustling of autumn leaves or the crowns of springtime trees, or in the timid murmuring of the river, or drowned out by the unconscious voices of the sleepwalkers who wander to and fro, or by the noise of vehicles moving just as somnolently as the pedestrians—without any final destination, but faster, more impatient, and noisier than they.
They usually manifest, nonetheless, through a particular sensation, comparable to the feeling one has when sensing a ghostly yet uncertain presence, when believing someone stands behind you—always sudden and unexpected—although at other times they are perceived as a faint, almost sinister, shiver, especially when one is alone and silent, calm, relaxed.
Moreover, they are capable of appearing in dreams, or in incomprehensible visions that last fractions of a second and are forgotten as soon as one realizes they have occurred—something that usually makes one wish they had paid more attention. They may not reveal themselves as they are, but borrow a form, a vague, ambiguous appearance so that they may be seen in some way. And they not only melt into the inextricable dream-fog, but also hide in the gaps of one’s memory: when you cannot recall who did something, whom you saw that time, from whom you heard that very important thing—it was always them, that “someone” as indeterminate as they are elusively omnipresent. It happened to a friend of mine once: she awoke one morning, and immediately an odd sort of recollection struck her. Some part of her was convinced she had spent the night with a certain man, who must have been her lover, yet she could not remember who he was, nor even be sure the man had ever existed in the first place. She wanted to believe he did exist, and that she knew him; however, her supposed amnesia insisted on hiding the identity of that hypothetical lover and, to make matters worse, she found no trace whatsoever of any man’s presence: no imprint of a body in the folds of the bedsheet, no fading scent of his cologne lingering in the air of the closed room, no forgotten object left behind after slipping away—perhaps forever (every single thing she found before her eyes belonged to her; that is, nothing that wasn’t hers existed in her house)—and definitely no message on her phone. My friend came to believe she might have hallucinated the nocturnal encounter, or dreamed of that man but without being able to recall the dream. And—who knows?—perhaps one of those two scenarios was indeed the case.
They are the one who appears—always invisible, I insist—whenever someone lifts their eyes to the sky and prays to God, to Allah, or to whichever deity or spirit they call upon. They are the executing arm of them all, to grant or to refuse, to do, undo, or leave undone. One could say they have their own will, or free will, like any of us, but in such moments it is set aside, for it becomes unnecessary, dispensable. And it could not be otherwise: it is not their place to stand in the way of a superior will, nor to replace it in its duty.
They are also the one who makes phone calls in which, when someone answers, all they hear is a faint—almost inaudible—breathing; that breathing is their voice delivering a message of utmost importance: the fainter the sound, the more important what they say. No one understands it.
Furthermore, from time to time they visit people who have memory problems and forget where they leave things, and then complain bitterly that someone moved their belongings when in truth they themselves left the items somewhere they now cannot remember. Well, they are the one who moves those things, so that their complaints are not always unjustified—so that, from time to time, they are right.
And when you are alone, in a dwelling that does not feel like home, or in a workplace that ceases to feel like one in the late hours of the night, and you begin to hear strange, unsettling noises whose origin is unknown… it is not them who produce those noises, but they are, on occasion, the one who chooses the instruments that generate them, and who administers the silences between them—perhaps so that you become aware that you are not alone, that someone you cannot see keeps you company… or that, in truth, it is you who keeps company to that “someone”…
They are aware, however, of their limitation: they can only move through the weave that covers what is manifested, the superficial, the visible… the material, if you will. They are incapable of permeating what lies beneath our feet, just as they cannot even dream of crossing the firmament and discovering what lies beyond it. Instead, they must content themselves—at most—with occupying the arcane interstices that fill reality wherever our eyes are not looking, crossing paths with other “existential shadows,” suspended in the ether that permeates everything, unknowing of the relentless tyranny of the clock’s hands that others must endure…
And if I dare to assert all these things about that “someone,” it is because I have personally followed their trail. I began by seeing them in the mirror (seeing them as one might see someone of their nature), observing me in their own way from the universe that stretches out behind the mirror’s clear, crystalline surface, only to vanish a moment later. Then I noticed that they listened to my phone conversations, no matter how little they might interest them—through them they would get to know me no better than any of my neighbors—and that there was nothing I could do about it, so I suspect they interfere in communications simply because they have the ability, or the will, or the opportunity to do so. And since they have not affected me in any way—or none that I have perceived—I have done nothing and thus let them listen in peace. But it is also true that I would not know how to establish direct contact with them… I thought of writing them a note and leaving it somewhere, like on the dresser, but would they know it was addressed to them when they do not even have a name? I could not call out to them by referring to their appearance or distinguishing traits even if I wanted to, for they have no appearance, no defined form. Should I say, “Hey, nebulous shadow, come over here,” or “Diaphanous thing, what are you?” I would rather not offend someone I do not know… It is not as if they come around often—they visit my home no more than my friends do. Should I, then, plaster the city with messages like: “It’s fine if you listen to my phone calls, but don’t be planning anything against me”? Again: would they be interested in reading them? And if they condescended to read them, would they heed them? And more importantly, do impersonal shadows read, listen, see? I mean, the fact that they interact—in their own way—with our reality, does it necessarily imply that they possess, or are, a consciousness? Or are they rather a kind of phenomenon that simply occurs and nothing more? I could continue formulating questions of this kind and inventing speculations as fanciful as they are unnecessary, but so as not to stray from the subject I will limit myself to saying that only because I do not know their name have I refrained from attempting contact—not even speaking aloud to them the moment their passing becomes evident to me. I repeat: his half-appearances are fleeting, they do not usually pass through my home, I have not perceived them in the hallways of the building where I live, and I will not go about talking to or calling out to someone of doubtful presence in the middle of the street. But I have learned to detect their ethereal traces, to know when they appear, when they manifest, where they are about to put their hand, and for what purpose. I can admit it has taken me an immense amount of time to come to know them—or to believe I know them—but I refuse, I resist, to say how much time; just thinking of it wounds my pride, for I have spent far too much time and energy completing—as far as I have—the undertaking that no one asked me to pursue. Yet soon I shed any negative feeling, for I am accountable to no one; no one needs to know all I have done to draw near to that mysterious being…
And how many times have I reflected on every aspect of this matter… I do not think of that “absent presence” as I would think of another person; I do not even think of it as a “person” at all. It is something different, whose possible designation lies beyond the limits of language. For that reason I have not given it a proper name. Perhaps if the grammar of our language were more complex-complete—sufficient to encompass the possibility of this kind of “entity”—one could at least assign it a pronoun of a fourth person. (I know the concept of a “fourth grammatical person” is not new, and that some people group impersonal pronouns under it, such as the ones I have been using here, with little success in offering a fluidly readable text.) For now, all we can do—so long as our intent to transcend established conventions permits—is approach as closely as possible a more correct way of describing that which can barely be described at all.
For the moment, I have renounced all effort or hope of drawing any nearer to this mystery. In my innermost self I content myself with noting that no aspect of my life has been negatively affected, which, on the other hand, has led me to take for granted a series of suppositions, many of which can be read above. Nevertheless, I continue to watch the street attentively, searching for anomalous reflections in mirrors and pricking up my ears when everything falls silent, and I speak very little over the phone—always trying to be clear and concise when I am the one initiating a conversation, and laconic when responding to questions, offering an opinion, or greeting someone, all without showing acrimony or annoyance. I am probably going to unnecessary trouble in doing these things, when they must operate on another level, without necessarily taking any interest in my life—that is, perhaps they only feigns making themselves present in it by chance, unintentionally, observing me through the window of time mechanically, the way one looks at the scenery on the other side of a car window. Perhaps they are traveling to the place to which we must all return sooner or later: nothingness, with one foot in being and the other in non-being, leaving footprints in the blind spots of our consciousness.
But even if that were the case, it does not stop me from wondering now and then whether they are the one who inflates the census figures, or whether they took a sip from the glass of beer left on the table when no one was looking, or whether they buy the books that ran out before I could purchase them, or whether they make things that must be lost vanish and preserve what must be preserved… Or whether I myself might be the “someone” who goes unseen, who speaks unheard, who acts without leaving a trace, who exists without being noticed.
A Dream
I had a dream in which I drowned and perished.
The cabin I was in suddenly began to list, and in one corner a furious torrent of water burst in.
At first I tried to keep calm, trusting I would be able to escape the situation if I acted quickly. And so I did: I made for the hatch, though to reach it I had to brace myself against the bulkhead, given the tilt of the whole structure, which already made it impossible for me to remain upright. Meanwhile, the water did not cease pouring in, flooding the cramped cabin.
With great effort I managed to open the hatch that led to the deck passageway, but no sooner had I done so than another current of water rushed in, slamming the heavy hatch onto me, knocking me off balance and sending me falling backwards, my nape striking a blunt object. I writhed in pain, flailing clumsily in the water as I tried—despite the agonizing sensation throbbing through my head after that terrible blow—to get back up and escape once and for all, all while swallowing some of that salty water, fouled with oil and saturated with the iron scraping off the ship that had soaked me and now seemed intent on imprisoning me.
I managed, though barely, to get to my feet; the water was already up to my knees. With one hand braced against the bulkhead, coughing and gasping, I realized my mistake: I had not considered that the outside was more flooded than the cabin, and opening the hatch between them had only caused more water to enter the latter. Fortunately, there was still a chance to escape—through a hatch that led to the upper deck.
Then, as I looked around for something that would let me reach the hatch, everything shook with enough violence to make me stagger, though not quite fall. A few seconds later, just as I was preparing to climb the tilted bulkhead, the lights went out, smothering the place in near-total darkness.
The water, which could be seen as an enemy to my will to survive, now lifted me toward the blessed hatch. I stretched out an arm, groping blindly, waving it about until at last I found the handle, and I clung to it with all my soul. My abdomen felt constricted by the pressure of the water, and my lungs could barely obtain any air, which in any case was growing scarcer.
Beginning to give in to despair, I tried to turn the handle, but it was shut tight—perhaps even jammed for some unfortunate reason, or so I feared when I found myself unable to open the hatch. My arms were exhausted, and I no longer felt my feet on the floor. I tried to shout for help, but my lungs and throat refused to respond; immediately afterward I made one last supreme effort to turn the handle, and it was no use: it resisted once more, denying me the longed-for salvation. Then the structure shook again; it seemed to me that the seawater was coming in faster and faster. Soon it filled the last free corner, mercilessly, submerging me completely. I gulped down the little remaining air in a strained, agonizing gasp. I held my breath for as long as I could while clinging stubbornly to the handle and trying once more to turn it using the weight of my whole body. But my attempts ceased when the oxygen ran out, and my body had to surrender; the last bubbles of air inside me escaped in a muffled cry of indescribable horror…
I opened my eyes, and all I found was darkness and desolation. A feeling of unending sadness, of indescribable hopelessness and, above all, of abysmal loneliness such as I had never experienced.
I felt that I had lost my soul.
Moreover, I no longer felt a body, as if my existence as a person had ended and all that remained of me was an infinitely tortured consciousness, trapped in an inexplicable nightmare. I could not even be sure whether I was truly in a place of absolute darkness or had simply lost my sight along with the rest of my senses.
Eventually, after a period I am utterly unable to determine—which could just as well have been a minute as a century—somehow, as if by imagination or perhaps simply by an act of will, I began to dissipate those mysterious shadows, realizing as I did that they were in fact an ominous black mist that had enveloped me, clinging to the surface of the consciousness which I was certain was all that remained of me.
As I separated myself from the dark substance, the feelings of deep misery also diminished, which made me understand what relief—and above all freedom—really are, concepts I discovered to be far beyond anything I had imagined in all my life.
In addition, what gradually replaced the darkness was a peaceful and radiant vision, almost a happy one: a beach of fine, whitish sand, a gentle salty breeze moving alongside me, filling my lungs instead of the merciless water mixed with blood and fire; in the distance, where my sight could barely reach, almost lost behind the horizon, I could make out a bustling coastal city.
However, the aftermath of that experience is far from having left me.
Sitting on the shore, I still believe I glimpse, from time to time at night, the imposing and shadowy silhouette of a ship that slowly heels over amid violent yet sporadic tremors and sinks forever into the sea. Its anguished metallic groans drown within a restless swell, and a column of dense smoke rising from its bowels merges into the blackness of the night.
I close my eyes for what I think is a moment, and when I open them again I feel I awaken to another vision; I no longer know whether what I find before me is the reality of wakefulness or another dream, nor do I know whether the horrific dream on the ship has become my new reality, nor do I know what reality is.
Sometimes that involuntary, inevitable blink—without eyelids—takes me back to the state of semi-eternal darkness, where I once again fall prey to the most unheard-of torments, joined by the pain of being conscious of my inability to escape them, of recognizing myself as defenseless before an ineluctable fate. In that state, I lose all notion of time to the point of convincing myself that time does not truly exist, or that it can stop, imprisoning me cruelly and impassively between two ticks of the clock's second hand.
But then, somehow, I leave that place of indescribable agony—sometimes slowly, gradually, like someone waking in the morning; other times rather abruptly, without realizing it, like in the dreams I used to have before the ship’s sinking, those normal dreams in which the scenes unfolded with whimsically confusing, sudden, unplanned transitions.
Quite often I return to the second year of the war, when I embarked as a volunteer on a mission, though not as a combatant. The last stretch of the long journey took place at night, since under cover of darkness it was assumed we would be less likely to be found by warships ordered to sink anything passing through the conflict zone. At the end of a meal—frugal at the insistence of an inexplicable nervousness that afflicted me despite the gentle optimism shared by the crew—I went to one of the cabins, and there I rested… until a dull, powerful boom reached my ears, making me jump. Immediately afterward I felt the ship shudder. For a steel colossus of such dimensions to shake like that, the matter must undoubtedly have been serious…
Then, the same as always: watching in horror as the cabin where I had chosen to rest filled with water, racing uselessly against the clock and against the sea to save myself through the jammed hatch, clinging to it with the desperation that can only be felt when death is right on one’s heels… But I never managed to escape, and inevitably the circumstances overcame me, leaving me no possibility of salvation…
But by far the worst is finding myself each time in the agonizing void of nothingness, in that same endless abyss, without end, without light, without hope, swallowed by the darkness, deprived of my senses—and, therefore, of all contact with reality—alone with my thoughts, to the point that my thoughts become all that I am—the only thing I am—thinking until I go mad, in absolute solitude, for periods “that cannot be measured,” but that make me at some point begin to feel myself turning hollow, merging with the void and ceasing to be “me,” waiting with infinite longing for the moment when the light will rescue me, even if only to replace that vision with another, even if it be nothing more than a harmless hallucination or a meaningless dream (merely seeing the faintest ray of light in that place of perdition always brings me the greatest joy imaginable). The torments are so unbearable that even reliving the night of the sinking—with everything it entails for my soul (which is by no means little)—though not desirable, suddenly becomes preferable to remaining in the abyss a second longer.
The sensations I experience, or believe I experience, are too real for me to consider them part of a nightmare, yet at the same time I find it impossible to believe in the physical existence of such a place, just as I cannot comprehend that this abyss must necessarily exist at all. And even more inconceivable is that I should fall into it, remain in it, return to it—I! Why me?
Could I have done something—unaware, unable to remember it—that made me deserving of these infernal torments?
Persistent thoughts about the situation I describe are only a tiny part of the torture I must endure. I have found myself thinking of it while drowning, amid the murmur of water churning restlessly in the cabin, my eyes open in the darkness caused by the blackout, yet almost seeing pass before me—perceiving the whirlwind stirred by its motion—a torpedo seeking its mark…
And the absence of any answer my consciousness can produce plunges me each time into a state of desperate madness. The very nature of the matter exceeds by far my capacity to understand. Perhaps only the god conspicuous by its absence could comprehend it.
The questions and reproaches with no determined recipient lead me through vague reflections and ideas that only end up confusing me. Invariably, I find myself asking, in the depths of the void, stripped of my soul (I am only aware I have one when I feel its absence), whether I truly am the volunteer who embarked during the second year of the war and whose ship was torpedoed in the middle of the night, or whether I am—as I assumed from the very beginning, perhaps long ago—someone who dreamed he was that unfortunate sailor and who, for some absurd reason, keeps having the same nightmare again and again. But I remember nothing about who I would be otherwise. I think I may have forgotten it upon drowning for the first time, or while in the incomprehensible abyss, lost amid my affliction, or in one of the many visions presented to me, yet I cannot help wondering whether I might be a sailor dreaming he has embarked as a volunteer. At other times it occurs to me that perhaps I am simply the protagonist of the nightmare, an illusion that seems to exist only in the vivid dream of someone else, for in none of the visions I witness do I perceive a body of my own, as if I had never ceased being my own consciousness or, why not, an invisible specter trapped in the materiality of a city by the sea. Perhaps—I think consequently—I am not the only one who is sent to the abyss, that there must be others like me, who one night went to bed as usual and suddenly found themselves in a nightmare, and awoke in the place of total darkness, turned into soulless entities, or trapped in a cycle of dreamlike visions from which they do not know how to escape. And that in turn leads me to wonder who they might be, those who go through the same situation as I do, those who are trapped like me, yet whom I cannot see nor know. Might they wander the same streets of the seaside city, turned into absent presences, made into fragments of wind with a consciousness momentarily relieved of an infinite spiritual torment? And, no less important: is there someone searching for us, or someone waiting somewhere, waiting for us to awaken? Or is what, for me, is a succession of eternities in a dark corner of the vast cosmos actually taking place during the brief minutes of an ordinary person’s sleep—something no one around us, not even we ourselves, are aware of, and which implies that eventually we must awaken to everyday reality?
Who thinks of the people who suffer every day? And who thinks of those who went to bed and died in their sleep, and who now only exist—not "live"—in the visions of others or in the dreadful depths of an unfathomable, infinite void?
Often I lament my inability to change the course of events. When I recognize the cabin where I am to seek rest to dispel the tension that has taken hold of me, I am overwhelmed with terror, knowing exactly what will happen next. It may have been a cruel ambush set by one of the belligerents, a nocturnal trap into which we were skillfully led by a hunter of the night and of the deep, or it may have been nothing more than an unfortunate twist of circumstances that placed us before the ruthless enemy—but I know how it will end. This has led me time and again to resign myself as I soar over the coastal city or sit contemplating the sunset on its white sandy beaches, knowing that next time it will be the same, that I cannot avoid going to sleep with an uneasy stomach and a grim premonition in my chest, closing my eyes, conquered by the fatigue of a long day at sea. A boom awakens me. Startled, I try to stand up quickly, but dizziness hinders such a simple action, not so much due to the sudden return to wakefulness as to the cabin tilting—something I soon notice; moreover, in one corner a torrent of water bursts forth. A shudder of the ship makes me briefly lose balance. I quickly understand that something has happened—whether the impact of a torpedo or a shell, an accidental explosion or a collision, if our luck is even worse—and the structure of the vessel has been compromised. I intend to act swiftly, as such situations require; my first thought is to flee. However, I stop myself before opening the hatch that leads to the deck passageway. I realize that, judging by the way the ship is listing, the passageway must be more flooded than the cabin. So I open the hatch at once, stepping aside immediately to avoid being struck by it. Outside the cabin, I look toward the upper hatch and understand that it is a safer, more sensible escape route. Taking advantage of the ship’s partial tilt, which turns the bulkhead into a ramp, I approach the handle, and though doing so forces my body into a most uncomfortable posture, I cling to the handle with all my strength and try to turn it. But as always, it’s no use. Beginning to feel desperation, with seawater gushing without pause, splashing me with salty foam and oily droplets, I manage to shout. I shout until I nearly deafen myself, until I feel the painful vibration in my eardrums, until my throat is raw. And then, with the water already reaching my waist, I see with my eyes open wide the timid rotation of the hatch’s handle. Disbelieving, I feel a tear well up, relieved and joyful. The lights suddenly go out, plunging the place into nearly absolute darkness, but the hatch now seems like a skylight, with a being leaning down, finding me, exhausted and half forsaken; that being has white, radiant skin: a true “being of light”…
The being extends its arm downward; I push myself upward somehow, toward it, toward salvation. I rise with the help of the luminous figure and, as I pass through the hatch, a brilliance dazzles me, blinds me…
I open my eyes.
It was another dream…
The Cynics
When the office door opened that morning and Nardo walked in, an involuntary and uncomfortable silence fell. Once again, he was the last of the employees to arrive—something that had become common in recent times, and which now caused no surprise, just as his somewhat rigid stride, his slightly stiff air, his motionless eyes that looked at no one, caused none. One of the employees, upon noticing a terrible expression on his face, sensed that something was about to happen… but she wasn’t surprised. Nardo crossed the office and entered the next room, where his desk was.
At first glance, despite what has been suggested, there was nothing special about Nardo’s appearance. He dressed simply and carelessly, in worn jeans and T-shirt, and that morning an old, fraying hoodie. He had few distinguishing features; he despised all ornament as superfluous. He was a bit taller than average, though he lost a couple of centimeters by slouching. He didn’t comb his hair, and he shaved every four or five days. But by far the most expressive trait Nardo had—perhaps the only one—was his eyes. They were large, the color of almonds; under certain lighting conditions they shone enigmatically; they were sharp by default, and scorching when Nardo was annoyed. His thick eyebrows, his somewhat wide mouth, his roughened nose, his small teeth existed only to reinforce whatever his eyes were saying. So when one of the office employees said of him, some time later, that “there was always something strange in the expression on his face,” she was actually referring to the expression in his eyes.
And those expressive eyes scanned his desk with a single glance from the doorway he had just crossed. Again a brief silence interrupted the flow of life in the second office. Someone timidly greeted Nardo, and he barely acknowledged it. He was looking for something missing from his desk, already barren of objects as it was. “I hope they haven’t stolen my pen again,” he told himself, “or, as they say, ‘borrowed’ it.” But everything was in its place.
Once he had confirmed this, Nardo cast a quick look around. The silence had dissolved into the murmur of keyboards, into trivial, sporadic remarks, into the unmistakable sound of hot water being sucked in. The disturbance in the atmosphere caused by the cold and mute shadow embodied in the newcomer had dissipated.
Turning on his computer, Nardo thought: “The beasts are pleased… Of course, they come first, first the mate and the pastries, and only afterward comes the work—if they even bother to work.” His gaze was now fixed on the screen; nevertheless, far from concentrating on his tasks, a kind of fog soaked through his mind. Lost in himself, he simultaneously muttered, deep within, sharp criticisms of his colleagues. On days like that, Nardo saw them almost as abstract concepts, at best as false images.
“It’s obvious to anyone who wants to see it. It’s not that I’m a genius; I’m simply an observer.”
He took pleasure in referring to himself with that term: “observer,” and seized every opportunity to do so. But I must point out that his claims stemmed—biases aside—less from an admirable capacity for “observation” than from having shared countless years in the office with his colleagues.
Slowly and mechanically, he began reviewing his tasks for the day.
However, his attention fluctuated capriciously. A horn blaring from the street, the beeps and screeches of the printer, and above all the banal chatter of his coworkers assaulted the mental agility and clarity of Nardo. Truth be told, it was irritation—resentful disdain for his peers—that affected his work performance. Those “abstract concepts” he had turned them into certainly knew how to interfere with the reality of his mind.
Someone from the adjacent office came in to ask for yerba.
“We gave you some yesterday,” they said jokingly. “You’re going to have to buy us a bag.”
“It’s just that it’s the end of the month… Our budget’s tight.”
“Yeah, I can’t wait to get paid…”
“Me neither. I really need it.”
And so on.
Nardo twisted his mouth and eyes in a mute, sarcastic grimace without looking away from the screen. The conversation he had just heard struck him as a tasteless joke.
Practically every day he heard similar things—remarks whose origin was clearly—for an “observer” like him—in the “illness of progress,” in abundance, or, if you prefer, in the lack of pressing worries.
“There they go again. They say they earn too little, that it’s hard to make it to the end of the month, yet they barely come to work. They leave early, and then what? Give in to vice… That’s it: vice and idleness. Idleness breeds vice; it’s the root of it. Or maybe it’s boredom. Senseless, purposeless idleness becomes boredom, and boredom breeds all kinds of vices. They do nothing productive, nothing edifying.”
He was distracted by that powerful glow that mysteriously brightens and pierces the clouds of an overcast sky. It wasn’t hard, with the window diagonal to his seat.
“They complain about everything, especially trivialities, but deep down they’re satisfied; they lack nothing and still want more. They don’t know hunger or hardship. They’re oblivious—they don’t realize that many out there would love to be in their position. How many workers would like to earn what we do? Not to mention the unemployed! But they’re privileged. In any case, if they want to earn more, if they’re so dissatisfied, why don’t they get another job? Because they’re not only oblivious—they’re also cynics. They’re all a bunch of cynics.”
Again he felt satisfied with his reflection. He had found the perfect word, the one that perfectly described those oblivious people: “cynics.” He puffed out his chest and cast a defiant look that no one saw, almost savoring the miserable delight of hurling at someone he despised an insult doubly injurious: offensive in its meaning and accurate in its aim.
How many times had he imagined himself standing before his coworkers, voicing his “sharp” reflections aloud, humiliating them masterfully! How he longed, on days like that, to berate them! He dreamed of overwhelming them, crushing them with his indisputable intellectual and moral superiority. He was absolutely certain that if he were allowed to say everything he thought of them, he would make them cry.
The excitement of that strange kind of future triumph made him take a walk around the office. The steps he took were identical to those in his fantasies.
“They live in a bubble, isolated from reality, from the miseries around us. Or if they do see them, they take them as something unrelated to themselves. They only care about themselves. I, on the other hand, am an honest man. I try not to harm anyone and to give meaning to my life. I show up and do my work; working doesn’t bother me. Them, on the other hand…”
He glanced sideways behind him. The voices had quieted almost completely, giving way to the mechanical tapping of keyboards and the loud, intermittent clicks. He went back to sit down.
He barely managed to get anything done before a timid voice suddenly broke his concentration. From the far end of the office, the lyrics of a trendy song drifted out without ever quite rising in volume. From the adjacent seat came a choppy whistle accompanying it.
“And there they go again. What do they want by making noise—drowning out the silence or their own thoughts? Because that’s how they pursue happiness: focusing on themselves, forgetting their fellow human beings, who suffer out there, who are victims of every kind of injustice. No, they must avoid seeing any problem, because then they’d have to do something to fix it, right? And no one wants to do that; it’s easier to squeak their chair and sing. And yet, more than once you see that one, the one at the end, for example, slumped in his seat like a rag, with no desire to be here or to live. In the end, you can’t ignore reality. And that’s where their cynicism comes from. Insignificant people; they don’t even provoke anger, just pity…”
A tap on his shoulder suddenly pulled him back to reality. Laura was standing beside him.
“Are you feeling okay?”
Then Nardo realized that his fingers were clenched into claws, and that he had been staring into nothing through his eyebrows, so deeply had he furrowed his brow.
“Yes, thanks,” he muttered, loosening his jaw, his arms, and his neck.
“All right,” the young woman said, sliding the fingers of one hand across his shoulder with feminine delicacy as she stepped away.
All at once, Nardo felt weak, though not from tiredness. His dim gaze crawled across the desk. A reproach rising from some bottomless depth stuck in his throat. Were his coworkers really so awful? Were they really all “cynics”? Laura’s disarming touch might well contradict his claims. Yet behind that touch he had glimpsed a condescending look. And how he hated condescending looks! How they pierced him with pain! What a cold nakedness they made him feel!
“What a shame,” thought Laura, “that he’s become like this. Everything was fine between us before, we were such good friends. Did we offend him without realizing it?”
No one knows how much further Nardo progressed in his tasks before he got up again. Nor is the reason known. He simply walked to the next office, where the main attraction was the pair of employees chatting in the middle of the row of desks. One was Vera, whom we heard absentmindedly whistling moments earlier. The other was a young man with a beard that wasn’t very thick, woolly, uniformly black, and with small, kind brown eyes. Because of these traits and his gentle disposition, Nardo referred to him inwardly as “Little Lamb,” though not without a dose of added sarcasm. For Nardo saw in the “Little Lamb’s” appearance a disguise concealing a young hungry wolf who went around with a lovely smile and sweet words on the tip of his tongue to win the ladies’ favor. Vera first among them: she often visited the “Little Lamb’s” desk and chatted animatedly with him in full view of everyone; they also greeted each other warmly in the mornings and quite often left together. And the fact that both had partners did nothing to stop the knowing comments and complicit glances at work; on the contrary, it seemed to encourage them, by pushing the matter into scandalous terrain.
“Yesterday I went with my girlfriend to such-and-such place,” Little Lamb would say.
“Tonight I’ve got plans with my boyfriend,” Vera would say.
And the rest, whether they listened to the conversation or not, remained silent in their presence. In the other office, Laura murmured through her pearly teeth:
“They talk about ‘my boyfriend’ and ‘my girlfriend,’ and they’re the real lovebirds!”
To which Nardo would have said with absolute certainty:
“It’s because they’re cynics.”
“They like that game. It’s a game—the same old game of flirtation, the one Eve invented. Show me one woman who doesn’t enjoy it! And it’s not that Vera is completely shameless; it’s that she wants to show she doesn’t care what we think of her. As if there were something heroic in the way she behaves; as if she were throwing in our faces her contempt for our fake puritanism, we ‘respectable citizens,’ etc., etc. Honestly, people invent wild stories out of nothing. But I don’t care, nor does it bother me; there’s nothing they can throw in my face. Why should they? I don’t judge them—I’m simply an observer; I observe what’s in front of me, and they put themselves in front of me without my asking. Cynics who use their partners as cover for the attraction they feel for each other.”
He returned to his seat.
“And what about him? Maybe he enjoys the game more than she does… as long as he doesn’t have serious intentions. For now, it lets him puff up his chest and go around ever so proud of himself. Others, like me, are entirely different. I am an honest man; when I was a kid, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t stick your nose into a lovebirds’ nest.’ And I obeyed.”
Allow me to say, in the interest of truth, that no one had ever said such a phrase to him; Nardo had invented it for his imaginary audience.
Meanwhile, a shadow crossed his face.
“How sad it would be,” he told himself bitterly, though a venomous undertone poisoned the word “sad,” “if he really did have serious intentions toward her, if he got confused. She would surely reject him.”
A sudden burst of laughter exploded. Nardo would have shot them a glare like a caged beast, but he miraculously restrained himself.
“Happy, aren’t you, beasts? Happy, despite everything going on in the world. How peaceful life is inside your bubbles, isn’t it? How pleasant to live in the comfort and abundance you cling to so desperately, safe from reality. And I’m not talking about ignoring wars in far-off countries—I mean what we see every day on the street! Beggars, drunks, thieves of all kinds… But you—you look away, you cover your ears, and you hurry home. You care about nothing but yourselves. And as if that weren’t enough, you have the nerve to talk about your insignificant problems, about struggling to make it to the end of the month, etc., etc., as if they were serious, as if there weren’t poor souls in situations a thousand times worse! For you, the worst thing that can happen is a shop assistant looking at you the wrong way, or your phone battery dying!”
“Cynics! Don’t talk to me about empathy when you’re incapable of noticing the misery around us. And don’t disrespect those who suffer by pretending to be sufferers yourselves. You don’t know what true suffering is!”
“You want to rub your ill-gotten happiness in my face. But I won’t give you the satisfaction of hearing me complain, or seeing me express my disapproval of your attitude.”
And he almost let it slip aloud:
“And what right do you have to that happiness?”
Another shadow crossed his face. Nardo was one of those people who don’t believe in happiness, who see in it nothing more than a carrot one ties in front of oneself, calling oneself a donkey. Vera passed behind him.
“As long as your friend keeps taking it as a game, you’ll go on cheerful and happy, won’t you? But if he slips up and makes a wrong move, then the laughter will end.”
“Careful, Little Lamb! Don’t take the bait. And besides, some people might even rejoice if you did slip—like the boss, eh? That old fox who’s crazy about Vera, the pervert!”
He smiled bitterly, or rather twisted his lips into a grimace of spite.
“But what if Vera does reciprocate?” whispered an intrusive voice in his head with startling clarity.
He tried to shove away that uncomfortable, unpleasant thought; nevertheless, it was already spreading inside him like a poison that had been injected.
“Could he really be so lucky? Could she really let herself be tempted… by him? No, no—that can’t be!”
His own words brought him no comfort.
More laughter erupted. Nardo held his breath and clenched his teeth.
“And you—you’re so happy! But what a false happiness!”
“And you don’t notice anything!” he muttered—and unfortunately, he already had his eyes fixed, without meaning to, on the little group to his left, chatting cheerfully.
“What is it?” they asked.
“What don’t we notice?”
A tremor ran through Nardo’s body and mind. He barely managed to stand up and, gripping the back of his chair, say:
“That you do things the wrong way. You laugh, hee-hee, ha-ha, but living is no laughing matter. You spend your time so calm and cheerful, without thinking of how many people out there are suffering. How can you be happy when there’s so much misery in the world?”
“Well, and what’s that got to do with anything? Why are you criticizing us?”
“It’s not my fault that others have problems, or that they live badly, like you say.”
“Of course not!” Nardo exclaimed sarcastically, and continued, agitated, his eyes blazing, his cheeks flushed, spitting tiny drops of saliva: “Meanwhile, look at how you live: wasting your lives in dehumanizing work just because you don’t know how to do anything else and don’t want to learn; you’re not interested in learning anything, only in getting your paycheck and not bothering anyone. You don’t even dare make any change in your lives that might improve things—”
His coworkers’ astonishment shifted into indignation.
“But you work here too.”
“Well then, according to you, how should we live, Mr. Knows-It-All?”
“You could at least do something for others, you who are so selfish. Help the poor, or—”
“And since when do you care about the poor?”
“Do you help the poor, that you come here to criticize us?”
If this tense dialogue had taken place in his imagination, Nardo would have answered yes—that after work he devoted himself to carrying out “humanitarian labors.” But in real life that was not true. Nardo only very occasionally fantasized about being a hero for the needy, about devoting his energies selflessly to alleviating their suffering in all sorts of ways, about earning a heaven in which he didn’t believe.
“It’s not about me. It’s about unfortunate people whom you ignore.”
“So what? It’s my problem if I ignore them.”
That simple answer silenced Nardo. Never—in any of his imagined scenarios—had he contemplated the possibility of being confronted with those words, which contained no argument. He simply held his grave gaze for a moment in the eyes of Vera, offended and fearful at once, before noticing someone behind him. Laura was watching the scene from the doorway.
The fire in Nardo’s eyes went out all at once, almost at the same time that he found in the girl a look of pity.
He withdrew quickly and silently, like a specter with bowed head. Without lifting it, he was met by the condescending look of Celina. And again pain—bitter, burning pain. What an unbearable look that was that dark night!
“Celina! You didn’t have to leave.”
Who knows in what mixture of feelings he found himself then: guilt, pain, anger, shame? And toward whom: himself or Celina, or perhaps toward a third impersonal figure—imaginary and therefore a convenient scapegoat? Because one thing was certain: he had given some ambiguous hint to Laura some time ago—he had, to use his own expressions, “taken the bait” from Celina, made “the wrong move,” become “the object of her flirtations.”
Is the scream that cannot be voiced, that dies in a sudden upward glance, in an abnormal movement of the jaw, or in a strange gesture, more painful—or, on the contrary, is it less genuine if it can’t break through physical barriers?
He went out into the street without stopping, without looking where he was going, and much less with any particular destination in mind. He simply turned the first corner and set off along one of those streets so typical of certain neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, lined by tall buildings—some centuries old, others newer—but all six stories or more, forming a sombre corridor. On those streets, the sidewalks seem narrower if you pay attention; the buildings lean forward, leaving a horizon as narrow as a needle. One could barely make out a canopy of leaden clouds, from which stubborn warm rain dripped. But Nardo perceived none of this. In fact, it may have been coincidental that he did not step on the homeless man who slept on a cardboard box right around the corner. For that man, the balcony of a building served as a makeshift roof, preventing the rain from interrupting his sleep.
“Celina walked these streets. She lived just five blocks away.”
Today, as far as is known, Celina lives in Spain.
He remembered, completely out of context, a commercial gallery on Triunvirato Avenue—the “Paseo Urquiza”—which he had passed several times. What struck him most about it was seeing, from across the street, that above the gallery stood a lonely and huge apartment building. That kind of contrast never escapes an “observer.”
“What would happen if, suddenly, one day, that building collapsed to one side and crushed the houses on the block?”
Halfway down the block, two homeless men sat on the steps of an ATM, watching time pass. One was younger and more muscular, though no more clean than the other; in a hoarse voice he pronounced:
“The one who’s dumb is dumb, you see?”
But Nardo didn’t hear them, nor did he even notice their presence. It could not be said that his senses failed to pick up stimuli to which they were sensitive; yet everything became distorted the moment his mind tried to interpret them. Thus the hum of cars sounded like drowned echoes, the dampness of clothing felt like something soft settling upon his head and limbs, and the grayish light falling from the sky… was nothing but an illusion. Everyone the world placed before him was a fiction—while what he saw in short videos and images was de facto reality. With his senses dulled and his mind occupied by thoughts of an abstract world, he could not pay attention to his surroundings.
“Cynics. Where does cynicism come from? From knowing what is wrong and yet doing nothing about it. Actually, it’s worse than doing nothing: it’s getting used to the evil, treating it as something natural. And how does one get used to that? That is—why not do something about it? Out of laziness. It’s very simple in fact. Laziness, the search for comfort, idleness produced by progress has done this to us. Locked inside ourselves, clinging to the most mediocre aspirations. ‘As long as it doesn’t affect me, I guess I can tolerate it,’ right? What an absurd thought! Only small, pitiful souls can want to live like that—in mean resignation, making excuses for their fear and their cowardice! That’s why we hate our employers, yet we never miss a day of work; and why we also vote without fail for our oppressors. We know we consume poison, but we wouldn’t change it for anything. And we dull whatever wit we have left with our little screen—we even bring it with us to the bathroom!”
“But you might say: ‘How can one fight evil when it’s so widespread, when any effort I make won’t amount to anything, won’t change anything in the end; when, in any case, even if I do my part, others won’t do theirs?’ Better choose, among all evils, the lesser one, and just get by ‘as best you can,’ right?”
“Because, moreover, no one likes to think that what they do—especially if it’s what they enjoy doing, or what has become a habit and now they do out of unthinking inertia—might hurt others, or have negative consequences. Taken to the extreme, one could say that the mere fact of existing implies harming others. Because we are part of a system that necessarily has to oppress someone, that always has to do harm. We are cogs whose movement is transmitted to other, more distant cogs. Deep down, there is no possibility that every single one of us can be happy. What one wants collides with what others want, or with what is best for others.”
“But then, how does one live knowing that the mere fact of existing implies the suffering of others? Well—there are only two options: one is to pretend with all one’s might to ignore this fact, to close eyes and heart; the other is… to become a cynic. To live knowing that one’s existence results in harm to others, and yet unwilling to do anything to remedy it.”
He stopped dead. He was on a corner; a cloud had torn open and a warm beam of sunlight cut through the thick humidity. He stood dazed, out of himself in a sense. He was soaked—the rain had let up, but not ceased.
A voice slid like velvet through his thoughts.
“Excuse me—are you all right? It’s raining and you’re drenched.”
Amid the sticky haze took shape, at a safe distance, a young woman dressed in a coat and high boots; thick chestnut waves and a scarf tied around her neck framed her fresh, concerned face. With both hands she held an umbrella.
Nardo wanted to say to her: “It’s my problem if I get wet because it is raining, as you say, or if I just stand still.” But he was no longer irritable—and besides, a better answer grew inside him. And that better answer, as if it had come alive on its own, tried to surface verbally on its own.
“No—I can’t tell you ‘it’s my problem.’ Nothing ever concerns only oneself. When you say ‘it’s my problem,’ you forget that everything one does, even the most insignificant thing, has repercussions on the surroundings, on others,” he would have explained. He did not speak because he knew, even in his state, that unfortunately the young woman would not understand—and he was also too lazy to bother providing the necessary context to someone he didn’t know and who couldn’t be supposed to care about the details of his situation.
So he said nothing; perhaps he forced a vague grimace meant to resemble a sad smile, and started walking again.
The woman watched him with a compassionate gaze and soon resumed her own way.
Nardo walked on with a pensive attitude, but he was no longer really thinking; his reasoning and reflections had hit an unexpected limit. And in his mind, like a hall filled with a riotous crowd, the most diverse voices struggled to be heard, to prevail over the rest. As one might expect, no idea emerged clearly until the crowd finally calmed. By then, Nardo had walked an entire block, stopping by chance at another corner. With what remained of lucidity, he tried to pick up the thread of his thoughts.
And when he finally managed to do so—though not entirely successfully—he inhaled noisily, looked around… and slowly retraced his steps, back toward work.
And here we will draw the line; it is not necessary to prolong this story further. Only, to finish, let me assert that even though it is true that the purpose of life—far from being the eager pursuit of happiness—is to seek the truth, this is not something that everyone can do. For those who understand this, it becomes a duty to contract the responsibility to act accordingly by following the voice of conscience—that is, in a few words, “to do what must be done.” And not everyone is capable of doing that. It is not enough to thirst for answers or realize that “something is wrong”; without a suitable spiritual disposition one will get nowhere. I leave it to “you—you,” as our friend would say, to reflect on this point if you wish; for my part, as narrator, I have wanted to add these words so that our kind readers are not left with a single opinion or point of view.