José González Sainz - None So Blind

“You’re such a coward and such a nobody,” he burst out, “that you don’t even have the guts to speak. That’s what you’ve always been, a nobody, an absolute nothing, do you hear me? A fucking dried-out, squashed old turd sitting there in the middle of that stupid road you love so much, a dirt-poor nonentity who has no place in this world and has never had the least idea about anything. Didn’t you come here to talk? So talk, goddammit, say something!”

There were a lot of things he would have liked to say, or perhaps the only thing he could have done would have been to say a lot of things, to explain to him once again, for instance, that each of us sees and thinks in his own way — or at least that’s what he believes — but that that doesn’t change the fact that as much as a person might like what he thinks, or as fond as he may be of what he’s dreamt up, or as confident or convinced as he may be that he’s right or in the right — and you can always convince yourself of whatever you like and for whatever reason — other people aren’t under the least obligation to think like he thinks or want what he wants, nor does that person have the right to any such a thing, much less any kind of right that could be labeled with one of those grand, pretty words that a lot of people use as a mantle to hide those most broken-down of ideas they’re peddling; and that a person can do whatever he wants, of course, but not just whatever he feels like, because then he will have to answer for it personally. And after that, he would have liked to say, or perhaps would have only been able to say, do you understand me? Do you understand me now, my son?

But it was no longer really that, and it no longer had anything really to do with that, nor could it — at this point he couldn’t even nag him — and apart from looking into a pair of eyes and assuring himself of their expression, the only thing he had really come to do was to say to him what have you done. What have you done, my son? Do you understand? Do you understand that you’ve killed someone? That you’ve taken the lives of several men? Do you understand that? Tell me, tell me if you’re capable of actually thinking about what you’ve done, if you have the freedom, that word you all use so much, to be able to truly think about what you’ve done. You’ve taken a man’s life; the thing I raised, the life I produced, has suddenly resolved to take the lives of other people who, for whatever confounded reason, he has decided to consider not as people but as things, burdens, obstacles, abstractions. How could you do it? How is it possible that a son of mine, who is — and let me just say this — flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, or at any rate is at least my handiwork, has been able to go to such lengths of imbecility? Which is what evil is, first and foremost — pure, completely idiotic imbecility. What did I do wrong, tell me, what must I have done wrong? What part of this is my fault?

But he couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, say anything, or rather he wasn’t able to articulate a single word out loud. He just looked at him, looked at him the way you look at an image that you have done nothing but look at with fear your entire life and try to run from, to scare off, to shoo away as you might shoo a horsefly or a persistent, insistent bumblebee. It had seemed to him that if he attempted to speak a word, he wouldn’t know how to pronounce it, that it wouldn’t actually come out, and that even if it did, even if he was, in the end, able to pronounce it and then go on to articulate even whole sentences, even possibly those same sentences he had uttered other times before, he wouldn’t actually be able to make himself understood, because things could no longer be said in the same way, or words no longer meant the same things, they couldn’t be modulated or put together the same way as before, as if something in their relationship, in the way they were strung together or made to follow on one another, or in their way of being stitched or assigned to things, something in their gift for expression, you might go so far as to think, had become so jumbled and muddled that words no longer meant what they said and no longer made of things what they were. They were no longer enough — it seemed to him — neither of them were, because words no longer linked him to things or brought them closer to him, they only snatched things from him and moved them farther away. Something had wormed its way into them and hollowed them out, or wormed its way into our way of saying them, he thought, some central beam had become so utterly rotten that there was no longer any firm surface upon which to stand that wouldn’t have collapsed, and now nothing he might say, assuming he ever managed to be able to say it, could come anywhere close to saying what things were and what it was he felt, or even to simply making himself understood as he would have liked to be. Because on top of it all, words, too, whether we like it or not, have, and always have had, it’s true, their own other side of the glass, and it might be that the only thing that could get there was their mirror image, the empty profile or the hollow shell of their sound, which might now elicit nothing more than mocking or derision from him.

So he got up, he got up from the chair in front of the glass partition that divided the room in half; he was totally exhausted, which was surprising for someone who had done nothing but sit there silently, and after confirming once more, in a final attempt to look at him, that at no point, at no blasted point, not at the beginning, when he first saw him, not for the entire time he had been there — and he couldn’t have said if the time had been long or short, fleeting as the blink of an eye or completely endless — and not even now, when he saw the end was fast approaching, at not a single, blasted, infernal moment had his son even come close to removing that same old expression of smug self-importance and disgusted rancor in his eyes, after confirming once more what there had most likely been no need to confirm, he turned his back to him, looked straight ahead, at the door, and headed slowly for the exit.

“A whole lot of fuss over some fucking pig!” he jumped up and shouted. “Over some fucking chalk pusher, over some two-bit hack just as full of shit as you are, you fucking pussy, you fucking nobody, you’re a nobody and a fascist and you always will be!” And at the same time he was spouting off these words, as if he had never in his life said any other words and nothing had ever meant anything other than what he was saying, he suddenly began, with an intensity of violence accentuated by the suddenness of his outburst, to pound on the glass partition that divided the room in half and through which the image of his father’s back was gradually disappearing.

It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds for his father, impassive, to cover the half dozen yards that separated him from the exit and turn the handle to pull open the metal slab of a door, the same amount of seconds it took the pair of guards posted under the clock to get to his son and subdue him, one on each side, holding to neutralize him. But it was likewise an infinite world of time, with its thick glass in which everything was reflected twofold into a vortex of images, that definitively separated time itself into two and the world into two and perhaps even, if such a thing were possible, the infinite or the definitive into two. Will the same thing happen at the end, will we not know if life has slipped away from us in the blink of an eye or if it dragged on eternally, he would later wonder.

They dragged him away toward the metal door in the middle of the room while he continued shouting at the top of his lungs you piece-of-shit traitor and you fucking piece-of-shit father, crawl back to that shithole of yours you should’ve never come out of in the first place and I hope you rot there more than you’ve ever rotted anywhere in your entire fucking piece-of-shit life.