I’m sitting on a bench on the street, or in a station, or a waiting room, and someone sits next to me and tells me what’s on their mind. I was hanging out on Paseo de Recoletos, making time to go to a meal, and a man carrying several plastic bags full of things in his hands and a backpack on his back stopped in front of me and stared at me. with his eyes dwarfed by antique glass-bottomed glasses. He told me that he had an illness with a technical name that I don’t remember now, but that the doctors refused to recognize it, “due to dark interests.” Revealing analyzes had been lost without a trace. He had traveled to London in the hope that the doctors there were not part of that obvious conspiracy, and at first everything had gone well, but little by little he realized what they were up to, and he was able to escape in time. “Write about it,” he told me, always standing, without leaving his bags on the ground, with a vehemence that caught the attention of some people passing by. “If you can, tell me what is happening to me.” The journalists he had addressed were as cowardly as the doctors. He lobby of vaccines controlled everything. A lawyer he wanted to hire backed out at the last minute.
I am unable to interrupt whoever is speaking to me. That man did not stop, at times affable, then suspicious, looking from one side to the other, with his tiny, myopic eyes behind his glasses. My date’s restaurant wasn’t far, but I was already starting to get late. That man was alone against the world and he was beginning to suspect me too. But he didn’t stop talking with his nervous gesticulations, nor did I stop paying attention to him or get up from the bench. When he was going to do it he passed me because the nearby traffic light had turned green and without saying goodbye he walked away among the people crossing the street.
I was sitting one day in New York, waiting my turn in a mobile phone store, and a large, bald man, very pale, with several days’ worth of beard, although not with the air of a homeless man, noticed the book he was reading, a an anthology of poems by William Carlos Williams that I had bought a while earlier at one of the second-hand stalls on the sidewalks of upper Broadway. He asked me if I really liked poetry. He told me that he was also a poet. He must have seen an involuntary gesture of disbelief in me and he told me that he would very much like to give me one of his books. Absurdly, I told him that he could send it to my house by mail, even drop it off at that same neighborhood store. Better yet, he told me, he could give it to me right away. It wasn’t that he went around carrying his books to give to people. He lived just a stone’s throw away, around the corner, in one of those severe buildings on the Upper West Side. Why didn’t I go up to his apartment with him, so he could give me the dedicated book? Didn’t I like poetry that much?
I don’t know if it is patience or curiosity or just a lack of character that prevents me from getting rid of these situations with ease. The big guy’s house wasn’t that close. You had to cross to the other side of West End Avenue. He walked briskly in black shoes and a faded black coat, talking to me about the books he had published, without anyone paying attention, without the mercenary critics of The New York Times They will take note of its existence. Standing next to him in the huge elevator he was quite a bit taller than me. She opened a door and let me through. I found myself in the messiest, dirtiest apartment I’ve ever been in. There were piles of books and papers strewn everywhere, black garbage bags, takeout containers on the tables, on the shelves, on the floor, with varying degrees of deterioration and bad odors. There were narrow gorges between the mountains of books and things. She emerged from one of them with his volume of poems as if she had found a valuable object in a landfill. Everything took a long time, or so it seemed to me. It had taken a while to find the book and now it took me a while to search through the many pockets of my coat and pants for a pen with which to dedicate it to me. When I left there, with both relief and irritation with myself, walking up the wide, crowded sidewalk of Broadway, I looked at the dedication, written in an erratic handwriting, as unintelligible as the verbose and poorly printed poems, like those of a TS Eliot imitator. that he would have lost his mind.
My wife says there is something in me that allows them to identify me. I was in one of the few seats at the Chamartín station, in the midst of the chaos of travelers and the announcements over the public address system of delayed trains, and a man in his seventies, pushing a cart with several suitcases, asked me if I was free the seat next to me. “I’ve had surgery and I have to sit down.” He took out a wallet, and from it a kind of health card: “Look, I’m not lying to you, my disability is explained here.” I told him it wasn’t necessary, and I even moved to the side so he had more room. “It’s so she doesn’t think I’m capricious,” he told me, collapsing next to me. And then he started his monologue, aggravated because he was getting too close to me. “No sir. I am not like those capricious people who vote for Dog Sanchez. Capricious, capricious and whimsical. All sons of bitches and traitors. Cervantes already says it in his book, and Cervantes was not exactly stupid. They call Sancho Panza a traitor and Don Quixote stands up for him and says that the traitors are the others. He Dog He wants to be a leader. In Spain the leaders have always had very bad temper, like Don Paco. If Don Paco didn’t silence me, neither are these sons of bitches going to silence me, with their historical memory, sucking dead people’s bones. The communist mayor of my town shot two hundred people in the war. Aren’t those skeletons looking for you? He shot two hundred and took them in trucks outside the municipal area so that others could bury them. And what do you tell me about García Lorca? Hasn’t the family already said that they don’t want them to continue searching for the bones? They killed him for a thousand pesetas. The person who killed him received a thousand pesetas. You didn’t know that? And the Dog looking for bones of dead people and wanting to deceive the voters and the voters and the votesand Begoña stealing what is hers, another daughter of a bitch…”
I would have liked to hear it like someone who hears rain, but that voice so close, the mouth moving in front of me, disturbed me. I was lucky that they announced his train over the loudspeakers and he left as quickly as he could, limping, pushing suitcases, hunched over, muttering his always repeated interjections, sons of bitches, traitors, Dog Sanchez, the Dogcapricious, voters, alone and festering among the disorder of the people, possessed by a hatred in which there was a physical intensity more aggressive than the very words with which he formulated it, words borrowed from political anger, from the buzz of wasps in the ferocious gatherings of the extremist radio and the sinkholes of social networks, with their claustrophobia of hermetic bubbles as rarefied as this man’s mind, in which ideological delirium and mental disorder seemed to be confused. I thought about the responsibility of those who speak or write in public: about the toxicity of an atmosphere in which there is no respite for verbal violence, slander, insult, sarcasm towards those who stopped being adversaries and are now only enemies. I also thought that maybe he should not sit alone on the street benches or waiting rooms anymore.
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