Quim Monzó - Guadalajara

While they set his table, the man waiting at the restaurant bar talks to himself. As a kid he’d heard it said thousands of times: a man who talks to himself is mad. He is now of the opinion that this isn’t true. He is quite aware that talking to himself doesn’t prevent him from being completely sane. He talks quietly. He whispers sentences, in animated, exciting conversation with another person, or several others, who are all invisible, are all him. He’s doing it now, at the bar, and does it driving his car, and at home, and at the office. He talks to himself even when he’s with somebody else. Sometimes this somebody hears him whispering and thinks he’s said something to him and asks him what he’s just said. He says nothing, because in fact he does say nothing (he doesn’t even know exactly what he says; rather it’s the buzz that interests him, the sonorous effect, the blah-blah-blah, the appearance of a conversation), and whatever he does say he’s not saying to the person who’s trying to talk to him but to this other invisible person (or persons) with whom he is conducting an on-going conversation. He can’t remember when he started talking to himself and would find it difficult to establish the frontier between a before, when he still only talked to other people, and an afterwards. He sometimes thinks that, one way or another, he has always talked to himself; the only thing that has changed is that he’s increasingly casual about the whole business and does it quite spontaneously, unthinkingly, quite unaware, never holding himself back. Depending on how you look at it, he sometimes tells himself, these conversations are simply the continuation of the imaginary conversations he pursued when he was a kid, with that friend of his he invented (whose name he can’t remember, curiously) and with whom he experienced adventures full of palm trees and lianas every night in bed. The conversations he has with these non-existing others are as interesting as the ones he engages in with real people, when he has no choice. What does he talk about when he seems to be addressing his glass? About nothing in particular and about everything under the sun. He might be talking about tennis or philosophies of life. He might be rambling, be aspiring to reach sophisticated levels of argument, or be totally vacuous. This is often the case: he’s been debating with himself a good while and realizes that everything he says to this other person is completely vacuous. Then, rather than shut up, he changes the subject.

On the other hand, the man sitting at that restaurant table, surrounded by people deep in animated conversation, says nothing. He’s been imperturbably silent for years. Other people’s views about his silence are, by now, accepting. They all respect the fact that he silently watches how they reason, argue, and refine shades of meaning which are themselves susceptible to refinement. Precisely because he keeps quiet, they don’t know that he thinks what they are discussing is banal, but they assume that must be the case. Generally, they also assume he doesn’t have a particular aversion towards them and that his evaluation of their banality isn’t at all contemptuous but is, in fact, agnostic. Agnostic in relation to others and himself. He’s not against them; he simply passes. He feels he is totally banal and dispensable, and that is precisely why he keeps quiet. He’d find it difficult to judge others for being banal when he himself is guilty of banality. He started to keep quiet the day when, in the midst of a conversation that was drifting into a disquisition on the degree of influence the fandango had exercised on the origins of the huapango , he suddenly found he didn’t know what to do. He knew nothing about the fandango or the huapango ; they were subjects that had never interested him, and consequently, he had absolutely nothing to say. What was he supposed to do, stick his oar in and participate as expected? Invent an opinion on the matter and defend it? Rather than do that, for the first time in his life he preferred to keep quiet. Until that point he had always joined in, even with genuine interest, and forcefully, in all kinds of conversation and arguments. Although the others all looked astonished, he felt he had done no harm by saying nothing. And he didn’t find saying nothing at all unpleasant. The others didn’t act particularly aggressively towards him. He was used to defending entirely unexpected points of view, and he felt a sense of liberation when he allowed himself the luxury of keeping quiet and not saying a word. He saw how the others kept heatedly debating this or that, and now and again they looked his way, hoping to find he’d had a change of heart and would contribute an opinion. They only needed him to play his part in those ritual nightly conversations. The proof was that he could answer, as a matter of form, with a few predictable words. They found that altogether natural. Because they didn’t expect a really genuine or thoughtful response from him: the most formulaic reply sufficed, if it wasn’t out of place. His present silence, however, challenged the others’ chatter, and this was what upset them, much more than his silence in itself. Finally, a few hours and strange looks later, someone addressed him, asking if he had anything to say. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. The others continued their debate, reckoning that everyone has his day of silence. Nevertheless, he didn’t open his mouth in subsequent conversation. From that time on he has said nothing, ever, anywhere. He knows some believe he is being snobbish, that he is putting on airs and being unsociable. He doesn’t see it like that. He has absolutely nothing of interest to say; hence he says nothing and listens to the others’ heated arguments.

Like, for example, the guy at the other end of the table, who talks fifteen to the dozen, the most talkative of all the people sitting there, the one who won’t let the others get a word in edgewise, the one who rushes to speak first, so nobody can beat him to all the clichés available on today’s topic of conversation. He has an opinion on everything and wouldn’t, for all the tea in China, let himself be caught without a pertinent opinion on any issue whatsoever. He knows (or presumes to know) about economics and art, about stockbreeding and basketball. There isn’t a single subject on which he can’t express four pertinent ideas that may, sometimes, even scintillate. Given the wide range of topics he is obliged to hold forth on, his four ideas generally have to be transferable, polyvalent and sufficiently ambiguous to address a variety of issues simultaneously. It is not difficult to grasp that, as they have to be capable of adaptation to every possible issue, the insights and subtleties contained within these four ideas are hardly complex. The world is full of conversations where the man who talks fifteen to the dozen has to stick his oar in. He always has to be on the alert for whatever opportunity presents itself to allow him to say whatever comes into his head. Consequently, from time to time he observes the silent man at the other end of the table with a mixture of fascination and pity. How can he endure that almost vegetative existence, watching life pass by and never advancing his opinions? And there is so much to be said! Moreover, he can’t help thinking that if he keeps silent it is to make himself seem intriguing, to demonstrate the extent to which he despises everyone around him. On the other hand, he doesn’t pity the man he can see seated at the table who is talking to himself, and in fact feels a mixture of envy (because of the self-sufficiency he displays) and respect for what he deems to be a model of perfection.