The mystery of the five days

Every now and then I immerse myself in WakefieldEdit, that story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that in just a few pages confronts you with a mystery that deepens as you get older. Wakefield is an ordinary man, but he likes to captivate a mysterious aura that makes him feel interesting. One day Wakefield tells his wife that he is going to the country and that he should not worry if it takes him more than three days to return. In reality, our man has rented an apartment across from his home to savor the effects of his disappearance. Her wife, visited in the first months by doctors who alleviated her despair, finally accepts that her husband will not return from that strange beyond that engulfed him and reappears in society embodying a very dignified widowhood. Wakefield, the missing person, goes out into the street from time to time and, mingling with the crowd, observes this process of forgetting that erases his figure until it becomes non-existent even in the memory of his people. One winter night he stops before the illuminated window of his house. It is raining, the man is cold, he imagines himself in front of the fire, sheltered by the warmth of the hearth and then he decides to go in: he goes up the steps with the clumsy gait of an old man and prepares to act as if nothing had happened. And so ends this prodigious story that leaves the reader ruminating with what gestures and words the husband will justify this absence of years. Our particular Wakefield, the president, kept his word and was back after five days, but in life we ​​must be careful that the genre chosen for the story we tell does not get out of hand. At first, the president’s story was a mystery: one could imagine the dejected man walking through the halls of that soulless palace that is the Moncloa, or the man in group therapy, the group being his family, or the man observing the crowd. who was addressing him from the street, standing out among the crowd the fists of the vice president, very Ana Magnani, which seemed to come out of the screen. From there, what had begun as an almost gothic story that called for reflection got out of control in such a way that it ended up transformed into a melodrama with some touches of sitcom such as the one starring the socialist Carmen Romero, ex-wife of former president González, little flag in hand, supporting the president that his ex detests.

In cinematographic terms, almost everything in Spain derives from that genre that is so ours, the Berlanguiano, and that’s how it was. On the third day, at least I got stage fright, not knowing how the president could emerge successfully after having caused such confusion. Hitchcock said, and he knew everything about this, that when the mystery posed in a story is excessively powerful, any outcome will seem pedestrian or insufficient. While in Hawthorne’s story the narrative tension grows precisely by leaving the end of the story in the hands of the reader, in reality the protagonist has to show his face. Who has not dreamed of running away from their life for a while, who has not morbidly fantasized about being missed, about the tears that our absence would cause, about even attending the funeral itself, about reading the obituaries, about the idea of that our disappearance would cause a small or large collapse. Our particular Wakefield needed to feel the warmth of his people because, certainly, the times are unpleasant and prone to a hatred that, in some way, ends up spilling over us all, but the narrators know that the real danger of such an extraordinary challenge is not then leave no one satisfied because nothing changes after your adventure. While one can imagine that Wakefield’s wife, a saint, helped her elderly husband warm up after 20 years of absence, Sánchez’s five days require a better ending. It doesn’t fit here, nothing has happened.