José González Sainz - None So Blind

A lot of times, he went on, in the full realization of how ridiculous it all must be sounding to his son, I even stay for a while after my shift is over to see all of it and ask other people questions. Understanding, although not necessarily participating, because that’s apparently expecting too much in certain circumstances, makes you feel less rootless, more involved in what you’re doing, even if all you’re doing is making chemical products. If you don’t, you’re just allowing inertia to eat you up, you succumb to sloth and monotony and emptiness, or even aggressiveness. And then, since you’re not doing well, what pisses you off is that the next guy isn’t even worse off, he told him.

What pisses you off, he said, what pisses you off is that the next guy isn’t even more pissed off than you, he hammered home, even though that wasn’t one of his own expressions, but in an attempt to maybe bring himself closer to his son, in a timid, ridiculous way to try to ingratiate himself to him somehow. But he quickly realized he had made it worse, that the words seemed strange coming from his mouth, as if he weren’t pronouncing them exactly right or had given them the wrong tone or degree of effusiveness. He knew that if he had looked his son full in the face at that point, he would have seen in his eyes a narrowed expression of pity mixed with the usual disgust and animosity with which he felt he was normally looked at, and so he didn’t do it. Deep down, he had enjoyed telling him those things.

8

He accompanied him to the factory on other occasions, always at the same time of day, never bothering anymore to ask beforehand if he could come along, as if he’d actually taken the time to learn when he was on the night shift and when he wasn’t, and even to learn some of the things he had shown to him; and then he also saw him from time to time when he left work, not so much as if he had been waiting for him, although he pretended to be, but as if his leaving work had seemed in fact premature or he had interrupted him in some unrelated activity. But he didn’t think it was especially important until the news of the owner’s kidnapping, and in the end, even though he couldn’t help suspecting that something fishy was going on, it made him feel good, flattered even, to see his son there, whatever the reason and however he glared at him.

From the first weeks after the kidnapping, however — and he didn’t really understand why, nor did he need to, he told himself, whether it was that he was trying to rid himself of a niggling suspicion, or perhaps simply for the sake of decency, for the sake of pure decency, which is the answer he gave anyone who asked him, or more like reproached him, about it — he began to head every day at the exact same time to the town square with others of his coworkers in order to silently call for the business man’s release. They went after completing their workday, just about the time of day he had been kidnapped, and they gathered in silence in front of the town hall, holding up a banner with large letters against a white background calling for the man’s immediate release. There weren’t many of them, some of them weren’t so young anymore, and they didn’t even have all that much confidence in the effectiveness of their gesture, but they stuck it out, standing there together steadfastly for half an hour, even while some people insulted them as if they were asking for something evil.

As the months passed, some of them, having become the objects of insults and intimidation of varying degrees of seriousness — you wouldn’t want to end up regretting this, they would say to them, or running into any trouble, I guess we’re just gonna have to wait and see, because more than one of you is really gonna get it, and murderers, too, lousy fucking murderers, and traitors, and above all fascists, lousy fucking fascists — had to gradually stop coming, no matter how unwillingly. I have little kids, they would say by way of excuse, or this is getting us nowhere, or there’s nothing we can do, and he would pat them on the shoulder and say goodbye with the same calm, melancholic smile as if he were seeing something then that he had been seeing ever since his days spent walking his hometown road many years before.

But without ever making any actual decision or, to be honest, even thinking about it, without mulling it over or weighing it up in his mind or taking into account anything that wasn’t what he would call, with words that were most likely a bit grand for him, the absolutely unrenounceable, and giving no excuse whatsoever, he persevered there, as trees and plants persevere, and sometimes, though only sometimes, some people, too. Day after day, no matter the weather, which was pleasant at first but increasingly mired in the inclemency of winter, huddled under an umbrella or sheathed in his greatcoat, and no matter how intense the insults, the disdain, and the lack of understanding became, how widespread the disregard, perhaps more than anything else, that they elicited, he seemed to continue standing there steadfastly in order to remind anyone who cared to listen that some things are fair and some things are unfair; that some things are as they should be and some things are complete madness, no matter which way you slice them; that some things bring about good, even a general good, and other things bring nothing but calamity and atrocity; that some things are true, really and truly true, and not mere acts of exploitation or opportunistic manipulation, and other things are no more than illusions or empty, poisonous hogwash; and some things are lawful and others are clearly unlawful; some things are tolerable and other things are intolerable in every way, like terrorizing, intimidating and offending people, and of course killing people, killing or kidnapping anyone, for any reason whatsoever. And if you refuse to remember that and to keep it in mind in all of your actions, then you are renouncing the unrenounceable, that which makes men deserving of being called men and living among men and makes them capable of truly noble things instead of true, colossal shams, of genuinely free things and not just arrogantly or despicably servile things that sooner or later become counterproductive for everyone. And if it is indeed true that the line of demarcation between them can sometimes be not just confusing and changeable but even skittish, and sometimes it seems it’s in one place and other times it’s in another place, and a lot of the time it gives the impression that it’s neither in the one nor the other, it is also unquestionable that in the end, each and every thing has its dividing line, and for everything there is a limit, and a limit of all limits, the type of limit that if you go beyond it, there will most likely be no going back, no matter what you say or don’t say, and that line is the life and safety of others.

His sullen, taciturn profile, his wide, full face, his uncommonly long, thick mustache, more white now than anything else, the wrinkles that furrowed his brow from one side to the other, the few lone hairs on his head — as Asunción always said, ironically, because it seemed he hadn’t lost a single hair, and at his age, too — had gradually become a kind of unspoken reference point for that small handful of people who, almost without meaning to, had decided to let their silence be heard, so to speak, in the face of the uproar of anger and the clamor of rhetoric.

But one night, when he returned home after a stint in the square and a beer he had had afterward with a few of the others — Asun wasn’t home yet — he was met with a black, plastic bag, like the ones you use to throw out the trash, tied with a knot to the door handle. He found another one the following week, and two weeks later, a dead black cat on the doormat; have it your way, a note said. And a month later, one day after his son Felipe had come home from school so full of cuts and bruises that they’d had to take him to the hospital — it was nothing, he said, some stupid argument that escalated badly — he had barely opened the door to his building when suddenly, without his even having the time to turn on the entryway light, he felt himself being brutally grabbed by two individuals who pushed him into a corner of the vestibule and there, without saying a single word, delivered three or four quick punches to his stomach, knocking him to the ground. As he writhed on the tiled floor — his mouth agape, he gasped for breath, inhaling the filth of the tiles, and his eyes translated the odd angle of light coming in from the street through the glass door and falling across the floor into pain — a deluge of stomping that seemed never-ending, of kicks to his ribs and kidneys and his chest and legs, two or three even finding their way to his face, rained down on him almost before he could understand any of it. And you know who you have to thank that this is as far as it’s gone, you fucking traitor, he heard, or he thought he heard, right before seeing their sneakers disappear with the same grim haste with which they had appeared.