Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The Winds

I went to the demonstration against the closure of the Cines Ideal at the Plaza de Jacinto Benavente, and no sooner had it begun than I inopportunely broke wind; it’s been happening more and more these days. But no one around me noticed. I regretted going there, because the crowd was negligible and those who did show up were mainly human rubble like myself. No young person in Madrid cares that the last cinemas in the city are vanishing. They have never set foot in them. Since childhood they’ve been used to watching the films devised — if you can use the word film to describe those images that the present generation find amusing — for the screens of their computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

Osorio, in his optimist mode, says that since the cinemas are gone, I will have to get used to seeing films on the small screen. But I won’t get used to them; in this, too, I will remain faithful to my tendencies of old. I have lived too long to care if they call me a fossil, a Luddite, or, as Osorio says to tease me, a “conservative irredentist.” I am all that, and will continue to be so as long as my body holds out (which I doubt will be much longer). I break wind again; but no one has noticed it this time either, to judge by the indifference on people’s faces. 

Osorio must be the last friend I have. We talk on the phone every day, to be sure that we are still alive. “Good morning. What’s up? You still standing?” “Apparently. At least it looks that way.” “Shall we meet for a coffee later?” “Yup.” I don’t remember when we first met; certainly not when we were young. The hazy swamp of my memory tells me that it was twenty or thirty years ago. I know I was a journalist in my youth; Osorio says he taught philosophy in secondary school, but I’m not at all certain that he was a teacher, and even less of philosophy, since he knows little of the profession or the subject. He has never read Pascal, for example, whom I like a lot. Maybe he has forgotten how he made his living, and his memory is as shot as mine. Maybe he is trying to dupe me and himself by inventing a past. And he is well within his rights to do so. We have agreed to call each other every morning to see if one of us has departed this world in his sleep, and to notify the competent authorities to incinerate us, so that we may disappear completely. 

“The last of the cinemas may be closed, but they’ve opened a new bookstore,” Osorio says to lift my spirits once the sorry farewell ceremony for the Ideal has ended. “There are now four in Madrid. I don’t guess you’ll complain. Four bookstores! More than in Paris and London, I assure you. It’s an outright luxury.” 

Another tall tale, the product of Osorio’s pathological optimism. What he calls a “bookstore” is actually a simulacrum, a firefly that lights up at night and dies out almost simultaneously. This so-called bookstore — I dropped by there yesterday or the day before — was the property of an old codger from Malasaña who put his library on sale before retiring to the next world: a motley collection of ragged volumes pawed at, leafed through, and put back on their dusty shelves by the handful of shoppers present when Osorio and I went in to take a look around. I bought a slim tract by Azorín, a compilation of articles on Argentine literature, mainly Martín Fierro. I had never heard of it, and it cost me just a few cents. Naturally, in the shop, amid the old codger’s books, I broke wind again, and there was nothing I could do to cover it up. No one cared, except for Osorio, of course, who smiled one of his devilish smiles and briefly flared the wings of his nose in disgust. 

I didn’t find any of those old-fashioned novels I like nowadays. Since the practice arose of ordering up novels custom-written by computer, I gave up reading any of the ones produced — it would be absurd to say “written” — in our time. When the system was invented, it seemed like another of those diversions that appear in such profusion from day to day, one destined to fade away like any other passing fad. Who can take seriously a novel generated by a computer in accordance with the client’s instructions? “I want a story that takes place in the nineteenth century, with duels, tragic loves, lots of sex, a dwarf, a King Charles spaniel, and a pedophile priest.” The same way you order a hamburger or a hot dog with mustard and extra ketchup. But the fad caught on, then it stuck, and now people — the few people who read at all — read nothing but novels that they order from metal or plastic skeletons. You can’t say there is even such a thing as a novelist anymore; or better said, all of us are novelists now. But that’s not true either. The only novelist on the planet still alive and kicking is the computer. Which is why readers wedded to tradition, to the real novel, the novel of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Woolf, and Faulkner, are left reading dead writers with our backs stiffly turned to the living. 

This so-called bookstore in Malasaña will last as long as it takes to sell the relics piled on its shelves, unless the state succeeds first in its campaign to expropriate printed paper of all kinds, which it plans to incinerate in order to be rid of those allegedly harmful bacteria that the militants of that godforsaken Paper-Free Society! campaign have been yammering about in slogans and on placards for some time now. I think it’s all bunk, regardless of how many scientists — among them more than one Nobel winner — assert that they have proven repeatedly in laboratory tests that the combination of paper and printer’s ink is as harmful as paper and tobacco were back when cigarettes were killing generations of smokers with cancer of the lungs and throat. My sense is this is just the latest craze, something for the idle masses to get up in arms about. My worry is that they will win, and like Singapore, the first paper-free city in the world, Spain and all of Europe will turn their books, libraries, and private and public archives into ash. 

“What do you care if it all burns up?” Osorio asks, ever defensive of what he assumes is our era’s political vanguard. “All those books, magazines, and newspapers are digitalized, and you can consult them comfortably, in antiseptic conditions, onscreen at your house.” But I don’t have a “house,” just a tiny room with a bathroom, and anyway my computer is no bigger than an old book. So his argument doesn’t hold for me. For that matter, I don’t think even he believes what he is saying. He does it to get under my skin. If he didn’t, we would get bored. 

Osorio says he feels not the least nostalgia for those faraway years when people like myself went to the library to read. But I do. I liked the tranquil atmosphere, a bit like a convent, of the Biblioteca Nacional on the Paseo de Recoletos, the religious silence of its reading rooms, the secret complicity among those of us there, with our folders, reading by the bluish glow of the lamps. When the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid closed its doors there was a protest, and I swear I saw people shed tears. In Madrid, it was a peaceful farewell. Not so in Paris, where a violent demonstration took place on the day they shuttered the Bibliothèque Nationale. There were violent protests, a fire, and I believe some dead and wounded. 

It is true that they have digitalized the former holdings of that immense building on Recoletos, and that they are now accessible onscreen. But for people like myself, people from another era, life without bookstores, without libraries, without cinemas, is a life without a soul. If this is progress, they can stick it where the sun don’t shine. “You’re a pterodactyl, a dinosaur, an antediluvian,” Osorio tells me. He may be right. 

Far as I know, Osorio never had a family. He must have had parents, but he doesn’t remember them, and he doesn’t recall whether he had brothers or sisters, and he will tell you with certainty that he has never been married. I do have some recollections of my parents, whom I don’t think I ever really got along with. I do not know if I had siblings; if I did, they have been erased from my memories. But Carmencita, my wife of many years, I remember well. I never talk to Osorio about her, though. Every night since I was stupid enough to leave her, I think about her, and I am tortured by regrets. I think I have only done one wrong thing in my life: leaving Carmencita for a woman who wasn’t worth it. She never forgave me, we never managed to be friends again, and to top it off Carmencita married Roberto Sanabria, my best friend at the time. It is the only episode from the distant past to which my memory still clings, and it torments me even today. At night, before I go to sleep, I think of Carmencita and ask her to forgive me. She doesn’t know this, of course, unless there is another life after this one and the dead amuse themselves by spying on the living. I never saw her again, and only many years later did I get word of the accident that ended her life. I no longer remember the name of the woman I left Carmencita for; it will probably come back to me, but if it doesn’t, I don’t care. I never loved her. Ours was a fierce and fleeting affair, one of those rash incidents that turn your life upside down. After doing what I did, my world exploded, and I was never happy again. 

It’s not true that I’m a pterodactyl. At least not in most senses of the word. I can recognize that in many ways the world of today is better than the one of my youth. There is less poverty than before, and that matters. According to the statistics, eighty percent of humanity is now middle class. A great achievement, and I hope it is really true. That leaves a fifth or a sixth of the planet poor and miserable, which means that we are still far from eradicating the problem. Defeating cancer and AIDS seemed impossible, but the scientists did it. Even I survived a cancer of the blood. We never thought it would be common for people to live a hundred years, and yet a good number of us bipeds are still standing to show that this isn’t out of reach. More than a few centenarians retain their lucidity and are able to enjoy life and even sex. Not me, but many people more or less my age still enjoy making love, or so I hear. As for freedom, I believe today — tomorrow I may change my mind — that it has disappeared entirely from our lives. This is a permanent source of arguments between Osorio and myself. He believes — or says he believes — that we are freer than ever, and is scandalized when I tell him that ours is a world of happy, obsequious slaves. But sometimes, when he is in a bad mood, he admits that I am right. 

I was thinking about all this — Osorio, the vanished movie theaters, the young people with their laptops — when I felt something strange in my head, something that coursed through my entire body, like a chill. A strange sensation. Discreetly, I patted myself all over, and noticed nothing strange on my head or body. What was it then? For the first time, with growing anxiety, I understood: I didn’t know how to get home. I had forgotten my address. I had often thought that I should write it down on a piece of paper and carry it everywhere I went, but I never did. Now something worse was happening: I had forgotten which streets to take to reach my house, or rather to my room with its bathroom. I looked around frantically: all the people who had attended the protest at the closing of the Ideal had left. Osorio was one of the first to go, saying he had to drop off papers at some ministry or other.

And so I was alone on that corner of the Plaza Benavente, even as people, cars, buses, and trucks surrounded me. I had no idea what direction to take. I had been breaking wind a long time, as I always do when I get nervous. Dissimulating, as though the few passersby might notice my indisposition, I walked to the corner and looked closely at the sign hanging high up on the wall: Plaza Jacinto Benavente. It meant nothing to me, though I knew that if I rummaged through my memory it would reveal itself bit by bit, gradually growing brighter like a spotlight. 

Pretending that all was well, I walked around the square, scrutinizing the names of the streets. I felt a slight tremor when I read the street sign that said Plaza del Ángel, which I was certain was familiar and meant something to me, even if I didn’t know what. At last, having come full circle, I sat on a bench, trying to calm my nerves. I was frightened. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. And at this accursed hour my friend had left me there, forgotten and alone. My friend — what was his name — ah, yes, Osorio. Sometimes I even forget my own name — like a jerk I broke wind as I tried to recall it. What must it smell like around me? I lost my sense of smell some time ago. I had better walk, maybe that will stir up my memories. Yes, they’ll come back to me when the scene changes and my serenity returns. 

I chose a street called Carretas that ran downhill. I had the feeling, almost the certainty, that my home was not far away. It hadn’t taken me long to walk to the protest that morning. A half an hour, or maybe less, it could have been just fifteen or twenty minutes. No time at all. I walked slowly to keep from tripping and falling. As I did, I remembered things and people, and my address would undoubtedly return to me soon. One by one, the streets that separate me from the little room full of books and papers will appear, and the little bathroom where I piss and shit and shower and comb my few remaining hairs every day before going out for a coffee and a conversation with Osorio. 

But I recognized nothing and nobody, certainly not the streets whose names I paused to read on every corner. Another expulsion, this time long and noisy. Why did I have so much gas? Because I was anxious. It always happens. When I remembered my address, I would relax. Finally I reached a public square, the Puerta del Sol. I had the feeling that this place must be important, with its crowds, its plaques, a clock, flags, police, and Metro tunnels. But I recognized nothing. And why bother asking questions of passersby? What would I ask? I didn’t have any identification. Seeing me so confused they would most likely call the police, who would haul me off to the station and stick me in a cell while they figured out who I was and where I lived. And I was certain that I wouldn’t make it through the experience alive. Again, a shiver shook me from head to toe. I thought I’d better stop and rest a while, and continue walking later, but slowly, taking my time, waiting for the movement to rouse my memories, until I at last remembered what street I lived on. When I got there, I would have to climb a long staircase for several stories. That much, at least, I still knew. 

There were no benches in the Puerta del Sol, so I sat down on the edge of a fountain, along with a group of young people of both sexes. Now and then a few drops of water struck our heads and shoulders. I felt a bit weary, but my mind was active, struggling to remember my address. I looked around again. Had I come this way? Probably, but I didn’t remember. Was this the first time I had a memory lapse so severe? I thought so, but I wasn’t sure even of that.

I watched the girls and boys I was sharing the fountain with get up, hold their nose, and glare at me. “I’ve broken wind,” I thought. And I hadn’t even realized it. How long ago had I lost my sense of smell? Years ago. I got up, too. My back ached, and I took a slow turn around the Puerta del Sol. I had the vague impression that I had been there that morning, when fewer people were around, but I couldn’t imagine which street I ought to take to return home. And many streets branch off from the Puerta del Sol, leading into every part of Madrid. The sun was high in the sky. It must have been early afternoon. 

It is true that all the holdings in the building on Recoletos are now digitized, within reach of any screen. But for me, a man from another era, life without libraries is a living death. Just then — walking slowly, I had made it around the Puerta del Sol — I was certain that the Calle del Arenal, which lay before me, would take me home. My heart was pounding in my chest. Yes, I could turn there and I would make it back to my room. 

Incidentally, I’m not an antediluvian, not entirely. I can recognize that in many ways the world of today is better than the one of my youth. There is less poverty than before, and that matters. According to the statistics, eighty percent of humanity is now middle class. A great achievement, and I hope it’s really true. That leaves a fifth or a sixth of the planet poor and miserable, which means we are far from eradicating the problem. Today there are African countries — South Africa is one of them — that rival those of the first world in terms of modernization and development, and that is remarkable. Defeating cancer and AIDS seemed impossible, but the scientists did it. And myeloma, as it’s called, which made me lose almost fifty pounds and still flares up now and again, because myeloma is a strange disease, no one knows what causes it or how long it will last, and it rarely kills its patients, but it never goes away entirely. (Still, for two years now I have been free of blood cancer.) We never imagined it would be common for people to live so long, and yet here we are, hundred-year-old bipeds, showing it was no mere fantasy. Let alone that men and women could last this long with their lucidity intact — but not, hélas, their memory — and enjoy their lives. (The last time I made love without chemical assistance was ten years ago or so, I believe.) 

But despite all this progress, we haven’t gotten rid of war or nuclear accidents, and this means that however far the world advances, it may disappear at any time. The slaughter of Israelis by Palestinians and vice-versa continues, a daily testament to our self-destructive vocation. It’s curious that Jews, persecuted throughout their history, have turned cruel, at least with regard to the ill-fated Palestinians. The nuclear accident in Lahore — which might have been a terrorist plot, the true cause was never established — brought about more than a million deaths in a matter of minutes. And yet an international treaty to deactivate our nuclear arsenals is still a fantasy. No one can ignore the likelihood of war between China and India, which seems to creep closer every day. Pessimists say that if one does happen, the nuclear cataclysm will blow the world to pieces. Osorio, of course, isn’t one of them. “If it occurs, believe me, only Asia will disappear. The scientists and the military have studied it. All of us this over here will survive, don’t worry. And once the disaster’s over, perhaps common sense will prevail, and peace will reign over whatever’s left of the earth. The world will be a museum, like the kind you love so much.” At times my friend Osorio utters this kind of idiocy, just to irritate me. And he inevitably succeeds. 

I had reached the end of the Calle del Arenal and was now in the Plaza de Isabel II, in front of the Teatro Real, which was advertising a run of five operas by Verdi. I felt weary and on edge and had broken wind at length and I suppose malodorously the entire time. My legs were shaking. I sat on one of those small benches scattered across the Plaza de Isabel II, in the heart of the old Madrid of the Austrias, to see if my memories would return and I would find my home, which should be nearby. I missed it. 

Osorio must be the last friend I have. I don’t remember  when we met; certainly not when we were young. The hazy swamp that is my memory seems to say twenty or thirty  years ago. I know I was a journalist in my youth; Osorio says he taught philosophy in secondary school, but I’m not at all certain he was a teacher, and even less of philosophy, since he knows little of the profession or the subject. He has never read Pascal, for example, whom I studied a great deal at one time and who nearly convinced me to return to the Catholicism in which I grew up. Maybe Osorio has forgotten what he was in life, and his memory is as shot as mine; maybe he is trying to dupe me and himself by inventing a past. And he is well within his rights to do so. We have agreed to call each other every morning to see if one of us has departed this world in his sleep and to notify the competent authorities to incinerate us, so we may disappear completely. I think I’ve thought this, and said this, already. 

I went through my pockets again, as I did many times that morning, believing I would finally find my cellphone so I could call Osorio and ask him my address. But I had gone out to the ill-starred protest against the closure of the Cines Ideal in such a rush, I had forgotten it. Damn it. 

Far as I know, Osorio never had a family. He must have had parents, but he doesn’t remember them, he doesn’t recall whether he had brothers or sisters, and he will tell you with certainty that he has never been married. I do have some recollections of my parents, whom I don’t think I ever really got along with. I do not know if I had siblings; if I did, they have been erased from my memories. But Carmencita, my wife of many years, I remember well. I never talk to Osorio about her, though. Every night since I was stupid enough to leave her, I think about her, and am tormented by regrets. I think I have only done one wrong thing in my life: leaving Carmencita for a woman who wasn’t worth it. She never forgave me, we never managed to be friends again, and to top it off, Carmencita married Roberto Sanabria, a good friend from the neighborhood. It is the only episode from the distant past to which my memory still clings, and it torments me even today. I fell in love with my dick, not my heart. A dick that’s no good for anything anymore except peeing. When I think of my dick, the word that occurs to me is the Peruvian one, pichula, but why, if no one here in Spain uses it? Force of habit, I suppose. It still pains me that I left Carmencita. I never saw her again, and only much later did I learn that she had been run over by a car and killed. I have never managed to remember the name of the woman I left her for. It has vanished from my mind, same as my address, which was gone just when I needed it most. It would probably come back to me when it no longer mattered. A long fart escaped me, but so softly I hardly noticed. How long had I been sitting in the Plaza de Isabel II? A long time, an hour maybe, maybe two. My legs were heavy, and I thought a walk would do me good. I was still lost, utterly lost, but I felt more relaxed now. It had to be past midday, and although I couldn’t be sure, I doubted that I had eaten breakfast or lunch or even drunk a glass of water that whole day. I asked a passerby what time it was and he said, “Around three.” 

Three in the afternoon! Would I ever find my house? Or would I have to go to the police and ask for their help? I’d have to show them my papers — which I obviously didn’t have on me — and the whole thing would be a mess and a horrible waste of time. I had reached a large square past which lay a building which I immediately identified as the Royal Palace. Was this the Plaza de Oriente? Yes. I remembered this place, and in the old days I think I even passed by here when I used to stroll or even jog along the Paseo del Pintor Rosales, which was just past here, in that direction. If I kept going, I would see to my left the Parque del Oeste, which was full of foreign prostitutes, Dominicans and Haitians especially, at night. Not far from where I stood, I saw a fountain where people were filling their bottles or taking sips of the cool water. I got in line and drank long and deep, and it felt good. When I was done I broke wind quickly, discreetly, and it bothered no one. 

As I walked along the Paseo del Pintor Rosales, I thought what a good thing it was that the museums still hadn’t disappeared. Weren’t we headed in that direction? Aren’t the paintings and sculptures in them already digitized? That is why so few people visit them, in all likelihood. Even the Prado, which always used to be full, especially in summer. Many people, like Osorio, prefer to look at the paintings on their screens. As if it were the same, seeing a Goya, a Velázquez, a Rembrandt, in person as on a computer! What is extraordinary is that there are critics and professors who maintain this idiocy, claiming that the digital image is not only more comfortable for spectators, but also more exact than the original. According to them, an artwork viewed on screen can be examined minutely and in its totality for an extended period of time in a way that just looking at it does not allow. Many people swallow this flimflam and as a result the museums are neglected. I need to go back to the Prado one of these days, I haven’t been for a good while. Thinning crowds mean tighter budgets, and they open for fewer hours a day, fewer days a week, and fewer weeks a year. Eventually the absence of a public will force them to close. And soon enough some scientist will discover that the blend of oil and linen is dreadful for people’s health, and we will have to burn all the paintings for the sake of public safety. I hope I’m no longer here when the tragedy occurs. 

My god, I’m a pessimist these days! I had reached the Parque de Debod, I vaguely recognized the Egyptian temple there, and since I was tired and there was nowhere to sit, I plopped down in the grass. I felt my heart beating in my chest, and wondered if I was having a heart attack. But I calmed down a few minutes later: false alarm. 

Still, I didn’t get up yet. I felt good there. There weren’t many people in the park. A few tourists snapping photos of the Egyptian monument. Someone had told me that during the Civil War, the Montaña Barracks were here. When Franco rose up, the soldiers from these barracks rose up too, but the people of Madrid came out in full force, pried the doors open, and massacred the soldiers inside. What times those were! Now nothing moves anymore in Spain, and there won’t be another civil war. Just as well. What they call Francoism now is something different: without caudillos or radical partisans, without firing squads or torture, all very scientific, based on physics and mathematics, and, above all, on the absolute dominion of screens and images over reason and ideas. 

I laid back in the grass and I felt serene. Maybe I would take a nap, and when I slept I would remember my address. 

I thought about the serious museums, not the galleries, which were no longer, at least in aesthetic terms, what they once were. Now they were little circuses, less interesting than the big ones — the only institutions, I might add, that have progressed in this era and have turned into proper artistic spectacles. I had recognized as much some time ago, but I kept my opinions to myself. I would never tell Osorio, because it would make him jump for joy, and shout: “You’ve sold out to the modern age!” But I haven’t sold out, and I haven’t made any concessions. I am simply confirming an objective fact. While everything that was artistic in the past — painting, sculpture, literature, high music, the humanities — has deteriorated to such an extreme as to either disappear or change permanently for the worse, the circus, which used to be entertainment for children or older adults who yearned for their lost childhood, and which no one would ever have called art half a century earlier, has been reborn with a rigor, elegance, audacity, and perfection that suffuses many of its routines with the grandeur of artworks from long ago. Technological developments have helped make the circus an artistic spectacle of the highest order. Young people, who once wanted to be architects, then directors, then singers, then chefs or soccer stars, now dream of being ringmasters, acrobats, clowns, trapeze artists, or magicians. How the times change. 

Did I fall asleep? If not, I was close. I felt good. There was a pleasant breeze. I did sense that the bugs might be biting me, especially the ants. My stomach had calmed down. I no longer had that uncomfortable gassy feeling that brought me so much shame. 

A few weeks ago — or months? — after a long time of waiting, I got a ticket to see the celebrated Adonis Mantra. A prodigy, that magician from Silesia: he could make members of the public vanish before the spectators’ eyes, or levitate them, or fly to the ceiling of the auditorium, and then a second later the lights would dim, and when they came back up, he would be tied with rope in the bottom of a trunk. Those tricks were pure genius, absolutely incredible.

The same is true of cartoons. And surely for the same reason: technological advances. It’s funny, as a boy, unlike my classmates, I didn’t care for the circus. Especially the animals, which frightened me. When my parents took me I would go along, but I wasn’t dying to go the way my friends were. And I cared even less for cartoons. When we argued about what we should go see, I was always against watching anything with Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, or Popeye and Olive Oil. They bored me. And yet now they are the only films on television I can stand to watch. The effects they achieve are incredible. The figures emerge from the screen, stare at you straight in the eyes, sit on your knees, hide under the sofa. Or so it seems. It must be true what they say, that old age is a second childhood. Now an old man, I had turned back to the circus and to animation, the only fields in which I am prepared to admit that the culture — is it culture? — of today had surpassed that of yesterday. 

Still, it’s sad that in a period that could never give birth to Cervantes, to Michelangelo, to Beethoven, the only thing comparable to those giants in originality and beauty are the funambulists from the circus and the puppets of the cartoons. It’s unfair of me to think of it this way, because in truth those are the only two things now that bring me the same sensation of absolute satisfaction that I felt as a young man reading War and Peace or seeing Primavera in the Uffizi or the Giaconda in the Louvre. 

I felt good, and I went on sleeping on the grass of the Parque de Debod. I don’t remember my address and I don’t care. What they call art galleries now strike me as failed circuses in the vast majority of instances. Or theaters playing out a ridiculous farce. The last one I visited, a few months — or years? — ago, the Marlborough in Madrid, was putting on an exhibition of insignificant pieces by the famous Emil Boshinsky entitled Art for Fantasy and Imagination. I can’t say at present why this con man is so famous. His monstrous creations were projected on large screens. They had flashy titles like Tiburtius, Bringer of Storms or The Hood of the Monk Romualdo. They consisted of fireworks, like the figures in a kaleidoscope, those tubes of cardboard filled with shifting colored glass that were meant to amuse children back when I was small. 

No one knows what a kaleidoscope is anymore. Children don’t play with them; they can work a computer as soon as they are born. The other day I was arguing with Osorio, who swore to me that he had never seen a tube of colored glass that changed its appearance as it moved. I thought they were entertaining, a pretty thing, and I seem to remember spending hours with them, turning my right wrist to make the images dance. I think I did that, but maybe it’s a false memory. 

The trick with Emil Boshinsky’s exhibitions is that his paintings do not exist: the titles do, but the works themselves are digital. Still, you can buy them at the Marlborough, which furnishes its clients with a certificate of authenticity. That seemed like a silly joke to me, and I cared for it even less when the gallerist offered me a socio-political explanation to justify the charade. She assured me that this invention of Boshinsky’s had resolved the ancient problem of private property and those who were opposed to it. Property had always been considered a form of theft, an injustice committed by the rich against the poor. “Immaterial” artworks, however, have owners, and therefore respect the principle of private property, but everyone can enjoy the artworks on the net without stealing them. She assured me they had already sold several “immaterial paintings” for a very modest fee — just twenty to twenty-five thousand euros — and that the gallery considered them a success. I told her — I don’t know how I remembered — that a Peruvian poet and painter, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, had invented “imaginary sculptures” eighty (or many more) years ago. He installed them in such storied settings as the Tower of Pisa, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Statue of Liberty; he even sent one to the moon on a NASA spaceship. Without ever making a cent from it. I thought that the gallerist would be amused to learn that Boshinsky had a predecessor, but she looked at me incredulously and slightly dismayed. Twice I broke wind as I spoke to her, but I covered it up, with some measure of success, by hunching over, as though I needed to scratch my leg. 

When I woke I was shivering, and the natural light had dimmed. I had the horrible feeling that as I slept I had not only passed gas, but had lost control of my bowels and soiled myself. My goddamn stomach! This wasn’t the first time it had occurred. It happened once before when I was in the cinema watching a film by John Ford, a director I admire a great deal. I would have to do now what I had done then: carefully clean myself and wash my shit-stained briefs and pants with bleach. How revolting. And that was if I ever found my home. 

There was just a bit of light left. I was shaking, and the bugs, especially the ants, had eaten me alive while I was sleeping. I didn’t remember my building number or the name of my street, but I wasn’t as scared as before. I felt resigned to my fate. I struggled to get up and asked a passerby the time. It was five-ten in the afternoon. I still had time to remember my address. If I didn’t — but I felt optimistic, I had a hunch that it was close, this neighborhood looked familiar to me — I would go to the police to avoid spending the night out in the open. Perhaps I would be jailed and never get back out. But at least with the police, while they tried to figure out who I was, I would have a roof over my head. What would I do if it started to rain? I set out slowly down the Paseo del Pintor Rosales. 

A few months — or maybe weeks? — ago, Osorio dragged me to a new gallery, “cutting edge,” he told me, in Lavapiés. The title of the exhibition was Sculptures for the Sense of Smell. There were twenty-odd mannequins vomiting, urinating, defecating, or suppurating liquids — let’s be frank: mucus — from their ears and nostrils, and to appreciate fully the significance of the works on display the visitor had to smell the containers where these figures deposited their discharge. As soon as I entered, I felt such disgust that I myself wanted to vomit in one of those slop buckets. And of course I emitted a series of farts. It always happens when I get out of sorts. But Osorio assured me that after a moment of initial difficulties, the nose would cease to be repelled and would begin to grasp the deeper sense of the exhibition. And, he added, “its metaphysical significance.” The poor fool thought that I was intimidated. “I never imagined metaphysics would smell like farts,” I responded. “I’ve got enough of my own.” At the end of the series, the artist himself, a hairy young man with the eyes of a madman, who seemed never to have bathed and who called himself Gregor Samsa, gratified the heroic visitor with a translated text from Baudelaire about the artistic value of odors. 

I barely go to the theater or the opera now, though I liked them a great deal before. Or rather, it’s for that reason that I don’t go. Because they too have become a joke, a pretext for putting things on screens, like everything in this electronic digital world that we’ve wound up in thanks to progress. 

Just imagine, this was celebrated as a grand invention — I remember it well, forty years ago, or twenty, or ten — this thing they call a guided multimedia spectacle. It seemed like an advance, being able to hear the opera while you received information on a screen about the work, the composer, the librettist, the conductor, and the historical context of the piece, especially as you could comment on the performance with fellow spectators or others far from the action onstage. Bravo, bravissimo. Except that attention is unitary, and we have only one brain, and this kind of simultaneous operation ends with the spectator concentrating on the little glimmers on the portable screen and completely distracted from the opera which, in principle, he has come to hear and to watch. The entire theater is packed with a multitude that, instead of listening to or savoring the music, is totally absorbed in its screens, informing itself about a work that it neither sees nor hears except in snippets, commenting — or rather, blabbing — with other nitwits like themselves, magnetized by the glowing pixels. A guided multimedia spectacle. It is impossible to enjoy a concert or an opera or even a light comedy surrounded by people who can do nothing but tap or caress the tablets before their eyes and gawk incessantly at the poor spectator who went to the theater with the idiotic plan of watching and listening to the things happening onstage. The only serious spectator of today is the image that the biped produces of himself on his portable appliance, that incinerator of all that is genuine and authentic, all that has gone basically extinct in this world reigned over by the glimmer of the prosthetic and the artificial. 

Was this not the Teatro Real? Was I not once more before the Palacio de Oriente? Yes, of course. Here was the Royal Palace, where the ambassadors presented their credentials to the kings. How had I gotten here? I thought I had been walking in the opposite direction. At some point I had turned around and retraced my steps from that morning. Yes, this was the Teatro Real. I was tired, and depressed again. I felt something strange on my face, touched my eyes, and found that they were full of tears. I managed to stop myself from screaming and sobbing. Would I never get home? I was fatigued, my body was quivering, I wanted to lie down. How nice it would be, to cover up and sleep knowing I would wake to natural light a few hours later, and I would be in my house, or rather my room, with its tiny bathroom. How nice. It terrifies me to think of spending an entire night on a bench, dying from the cold. If I had to spend the entire night outside, I would certainly die like a dog. I was tired and looked for a bench to sit down on and pass the time. 

When I sat down on a corner of the Plaza de Oriente, half turned away from the Royal Palace, I felt more relaxed. I touched my eyes, and discovered that I had stopped crying. I looked at the sky, and it was clear and radiant. A few stars were visible. 

Sometimes, without realizing it, I imagine that what is happening around me has contaminated me as well, and I don’t really know how to distinguish between culture and its stand-ins in this mad world we now live in. I say this because of my argument the other day with Osorio at the home of the Arismendis, the millionaires. The dinner impressed me greatly, not because of the food, which was nothing out of this world, but because of the holograms. They were truly the stuff of fairytales. We were two of a half-dozen guests who were surprised and amazed from the beginning of the night to its end. I had already seen holograms at fairs, exhibitions, and museums, but those three-dimensional figures had never before astonished me. That night, they did. I didn’t know that hologram technology had evolved to such a point that it could produce the kind of wonders we saw at the Arismendis. 

I was stunned as soon as the butler opened the door to help me remove my coat and scarf and I saw his holographic double, a butler with his same face and attire, repeating his gestures, his smile, and his bow. And that was just the beginning. All night we were surrounded by ghosts, duplicates of waiters or waitresses, serving the table, passing trays of canapés and drinks, absolutely identical to their real counterparts. We were delirious: all of us had the sensation of entering an oneiric world, of living in a surrealist poem, witnessing what you might call the quotidian marvelous, a world in which it was hard to distinguish the edge of reality, the real people from their doubles, flesh and blood from puppets wrought by technological illusions. For the grand finale, when we were at the entrance saying our goodbyes, duplicates of our hosts, fictional Arismendis, appeared to say goodnight and wish us well. 

My argument with Osorio began when I told him about the impressions that the holographic spectacle had made on me. He interrupted me with a kind of ironic scorn, as if he had caught me masturbating or doing something else untoward. “Tell me, then, was what we saw not art?” No, I told him, it wasn’t. It was simply a remarkable technological feat. He replied: “Well, that’s what art has always been, a technological feat. That’s what art in our day consists of.” We argued for hours, and I refused to accept his theory that the true artists of our time are electronic engineers, programmers, specialists in art and image, and network professionals. I never told him that he was right, but there was a depressing truth in Osorio’s point: we live in a world where what we used to call art, literature, and culture is no longer the work of the imagination and the skill of individual creators, but the product of laboratories, workshops, and factories. Of the fucking machines, in other words. (Am I a Luddite? I might well be.) 

I felt myself getting drowsy again. If I fell asleep, the sky would be full of stars when I woke. A whole day looking for my home, my room, certain that it was around here, but not being able to find it. Now, at this moment, I didn’t care. I knew my underwear was full of shit, it happened when I dozed off by the Avenida del Pintor Rosales, but I didn’t really care. I huddled up and realized I felt good and decided to sleep a bit more. 

Is it possible that culture no longer serves a function in our lives? That its former justifications — sharpening the sensibility and the imagination, bringing to life the pleasure of beauty, developing a person’s critical spirit — no longer matter for human beings today, when science and technology can do everything better? That must be why there are no more philosophy departments in any of the universities of the cultured countries on the planet. I did an internet search the other day and found that the only surviving philosophy departments are those of the University of Cochabamba in Bolivia and in the School of Humanities in the Marquesas Islands. But the latter shares the department with Theology and the Culinary Studies programs. What a mix! I imagine getting a doctorate in Philosophy, Theology, and Gastronomy, and I die laughing. 

But yes, if ideas as such, ideas divorced from immediate practical ends, had disappeared, then every form of dissidence and opposition would consequently have evaporated from our societies as well. Fortunately, it isn’t so, though I do fear we are headed in that direction, toward a society of automata. My hope lies in the movement of the “imbalanced,” which is spreading across Spain and the rest of the world. I say this despite my ambivalence toward the “imbalanced.” At times they awaken my sympathy, because they dislike the world as it is, and their way of life reveals their clear desire to change it.  They have a disinterested attitude of purity and spirituality, all the things that seem to have been wiped out in our societies, which are frantically oriented toward work, productivity, making money, and piling up entertainment appliances. 

But I am far from an advocate for their creeds and their obsessions, and their fanatical contempt for things such as sex and meat, without which my youth and mature years would have lacked for certain pleasures that sometimes I recall with so much emotion that my eyes cloud with tears. (I’ve turned into something of a crybaby in my dotage.) I’m not saying that lovemaking or dining on a succulent churrasco are the same thing, I’m not that stupid. I do believe that making love was something marvelous, especially when I was younger. I remembered Carmencita. Wasn’t it luscious, stripping down and twining in bed for hours and making love around the corner from the news bureau where I worked? Seeing a woman’s naked body for the first time, making love to her with the delicacy of a poet writing a poem, reveling, drunk on desire and happiness, feeling time abolished in the immortality of that instant that carnal ecstasy gives rise to: what a wonder! I am certain that sex no longer represents all it did in those faraway years when I slowly overcame the taboos and the sanctimonies surrounding physical love and finally engaged in the act itself, like a person setting foot in paradise. But I must say, in those days, putting away a good filet, a ribeye, or kidneys soaked in wine, was a delight a common man could indulge in with a clear conscience, free from those moral and political problems that arise today, when everyone jokes about it awkwardly, and follows the dictates of their nutritionists and dishes increasingly resemble medicines or some kind of vitamin supplement. How repulsive it is to eat and drink nowadays. And this is coming from someone who hardly ever eats to excess and rarely drinks a drop of those pharmaceutical liquids that now go by the name of wine. 

I fell asleep and dreamed serenely, in perfect peace with myself. The fear, the cold, were gone. I felt fine that way. 

They say that the movement of the “imbalanced” started in Japan half a century ago. It has slowly spread across the world naturally, the way rivers open new tributaries, not through propaganda and proselytism; and with its rank individualism, the last thing its adepts would do is become apostles and messengers of its philosophy of life. They aren’t a new religion or anything of the kind. What are they, then? Something like a fraternity of passivists or iconoclasts, within or beyond their countries’ borders, one that attracts the young above all. I use the term “fraternity” because “ideology” would be an anachronism. Nobody knows anymore what it is, or what it was. There are no more ideologies worthy of the name. Everything in life has become practical, politics included. Maybe the movement of the “imbalanced” is a reaction to the universal materialist pragmatism that has imposed itself as the one possible way of life — a singular protest against a world of people who seem to be in agreement with almost everything and cannot see around their blinders — our blinders, why should I exclude myself? 

The “imbalanced” have no doctrines or apostles, so far as I know. They teach by example. And this example has spread and gathered force. They are everywhere now, though the screens that have sprouted up on every street corner to give us the news don’t talk about them much. Their way of life has touched a nerve for the younger generation today. They are passive, they don’t have reunions or set up camps, they avoid the media and crowds, and for that reason they go largely unnoticed. But they are there, all around us. Thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions of them. All of them young. I suppose that as the years pass and they get older, they will retire. Or maybe still younger ones will kill them. I laugh in my sleep at the notion. Absurd. The “imbalanced” are pacifists. I don’t think they kill even flies. 

What do they want? How would they like to change the world? I talked once with a group of them here in Madrid. They were sunning themselves on the grass beside the Egyptian Temple of Debod, looking up at a clear sky, the Parque de Oeste all around them. 

At first they looked at me mistrustfully, but without hostility. When I told them I just wanted to know a bit more about what they were doing, what their beliefs were, what they wanted for society, they were unnerved. After an exchange of glances, they agreed. One of them asked me if I was with the police. And they all laughed, because I looked like a beggar. We talked for about an hour, lying there in the grass, me like a great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather surrounded by great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. There were a few foreigners who could barely manage a couple of words in Spanish, with occasional phrases in English, Italian, or French. 

I was confused by their contradictions and ambiguities. Reflecting later on the “imbalanced,” I concluded that they acted more from instinct than conviction. What drives them is not ideas — which are shunned in today’s world — but impulses, intentions, actions. Manifestly, they all agree on one thing: our system doesn’t leave people with enough time to waste. They are passionate defenders of leisure. Wasting time as they do there, lying on the grass, seems to them a great privilege, because it is something rare in these times. Doing nothing, lying there and dreaming, soaking in the warm sun, singing or telling jokes. “This is life,” one of them affirmed, “not spending the whole day from morning to night clicking around on your computer surrounded by walls and boredom.” A redheaded girl added persuasively, “Not everything can be work, we need to value other things.” The rest of them nodded. 

When I asked them how they ate, how they made a living, they were surprised, as though none of that mattered. They worked the odd occasional job and shared everything they had. Some had managed to get a pension from the state. They divided up their income and expenses. Everything was for everyone. Anyway, they didn’t eat much. 

When I asked them why they seemed so infatuated with lotions, ointments, and cosmetics, I noticed that they were uncomfortable, as if I had tread on intimate terrain. After a long pause one of them murmured, “Our body is sacred, and we have to take care of it.” For them, the sacred is found in perfumeries and pharmacies. They asked me if I had put on anything for the sun and when I said no, I never use sunscreen, they were scandalized. They confessed that whatever money they made with their precarious employment and the checks they get simply for being alive went toward buying pills, lotions, tonics, anything to impede the deterioration of the skin, the eyes, the teeth. For aesthetic reasons, but above all for their health. Though there are many bad things in our time, they said, there is one that is a cause for celebration, and it is all that science has invented to protect us against physical decline: disinfectants, reconstituting creams, balsams, hydrotherapy, thermal baths, massages, a whole arsenal of drugs and natural products which, used judiciously, keep human beings healthy, handsome, and in full possession of their faculties down to their final day. 

One of the boys, of a slender ascetic build, told me that the most important thing was always to keep the stomach clean, and that curing constipation was the greatest glory of contemporary science. (But all this costs money, and they are idlers and don’t have it, so what do they do?) Possession of a stomach that worked as precisely as a Swiss watch kept people from succumbing to neurosis, which was the main cause of the suicides recorded every day all across Europe. Another argued that more important still was the discovery of a gel that maintains the memory fresh and alert. Others refuted both of them, asserting that more remarkable still was a pill that relieves the libido and allows men and women to avoid the sexual worries that beset them in the old days. 

I used this opportunity to ask them why the “imbalanced” were opposed to sex and why so many of them practiced abstinence. I noticed some of the group blushing and looking away. Finally, the redheaded girl spoke up: “We believe in cleanliness in body and spirit.” “As do I,” I said, “but that can’t mean a person never makes love. Sex is healthy as well as pleasurable.” They looked at me as if I were what I am — a caveman. “Isn’t it enough that we have to defecate every day?” a belligerent young man, almost a boy, intervened. It was the first time he had spoken a word. “Now we’re supposed to expel our semen every day, too?”

 

I didn’t understand what he meant, but it seems that his companions did, because all of them smiled upon hearing him, as though he had routed me completely. When I was a boy, I told him, that was exactly what the priests told us: that sex was dirty, ugly, sinful, something a person could easily dispense with. None of these people practiced any sort of religion. There was just one girl who admitted that, without adhering to any specific faith, she couldn’t be an atheist either, because she believed in “a first principle for all things.” She defended asceticism with reference not to religious faith, but to lay morality and, strangely enough, to hygiene. 

This was the most flagrant example I had seen of the contempt for sex among the young at a time when we have achieved something that just half a century ago seemed impossible: the unrestricted freedom to have sex in any and all ways, with anyone and anywhere. Perhaps this much-celebrated freedom is the cause of their disdain. Sex used to excite people when it was surrounded by prohibitions and taboos; now that they are gone, it has lost its magic, and the young people find it repulsive. Who could have imagined? 

When I whispered that if everyone followed their example and chose chastity, humanity would disappear, one of them replied: “Science will take care of that, they’ll make people in laboratories.” But the group delighted more still in another’s contribution: “And who cares if we disappear? The plants and the animals certainly won’t mind.” 

I asked them why they were called “imbalanced,” and they didn’t know. One of them mused: “Maybe the people who saw us as a danger to society gave us that name. They later realized we were no such thing, but the name stuck. We don’t care, or at least I don’t.” One of the girls said, “Those words, we, us, we have defanged them.” Her neighbor agreed: “That word used to be an insult, now we’ve turned it into a compliment.” 

They love cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, they disdain sex, and they are dyed-in-the-wool vegetarians. The only part of the conversation that excited them was when I said that the prohibition against meat-eating struck me as absurd, as a violation of liberty and human rights, specifically the right to pleasure. The worst thing is the way the state, the government, supports their prejudices in this regard. I said I thought it monstrous that people found violating the ban were fined or sent off to jail. They lost their composure at this point, raising their voices and waving their hands as they criticized me. What would have happened if I had told them I was appalled by the ban on bullfighting? They might have lynched me then and there. I chose to say goodbye before they started in with the insults. I remembered when youth rebellion was inspired by creating paradise on earth, inaugurating an egalitarian society, banishing inequality, free love, feminism, abortion, dying with dignity (we called it euthanasia). Now what adolescent nonconformists want is for the whole world to survive on fruits and vegetables. If this isn’t decadence, I don’t know what is. 

The curious thing is that the hatred for meat on the part of the “imbalanced” has less to do with their love for animals than with a supposed medical certainty that made the rounds when they outlawed bullfighting: that meat is harmful, gives rise to illness, “pollutes” the human body, makes men and women “ugly” and “violent.” Ridiculous rumors spread at that time —for example, that when the bulls ran into the ring, aficionados sometimes lynched people. (I am repeating this exactly as I heard it.) These young people’s ideas of cleanliness are sick, neurotic, and their obsession has given rise to an entire category of sanitary fantasies. 

The “imbalanced” would not be rebels if they did not put some distance between themselves and that perverse pro-animal sentiment that has overtaken the entire globe. I liked animals a great deal in my youth, and even as an adult I had a dog to whom I used to read poems by Cernuda and García Lorca. But things being as they are, I have developed a sort of phobia about the animal world. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did away with us, the humans. Without telling anyone — certainly not Osorio — I have started to take a kinder view of those anti-animal commandoes cropping up here and there committing terrorist acts against dogs, cats, rats, skunks, flies, and other so-called domestic animals. The other day a court in Madrid condemned a ten-year-old boy to a year in a reformatory because the police found him shooting stones at swallows with a slingshot. Now I don’t think you should shoot rocks at swallows, and I didn’t do it in the days before a slingshot was considered a “deadly weapon,” but sending this boy to a correctional facility strikes me as the height of sectarian stupidity, and it was grotesque when the judge declared that swallows were, as the bureaucratic jargon has it, “living, warm-blooded beings whose right to life must be respected.” 

What did away with much of my sympathy for animals was when the veterinarians said that in our times rats were no longer vectors of disease, that scientists had managed to eradicate the germs and microbes that they formerly carried, and that they would thenceforth be considered domestic animals, as many animal rights organizations had pleaded. I had nightmares then and I still do; I detest those horrible rodents. My hair stands on end when I realize that they live in so many houses now, fed and cuddled by their owners, who stuff food into their mouths and probably let them into bed so that they don’t get cold on winter nights. Fortunately, they haven’t managed to extirpate the killer instinct of cats toward rodents, and the cats continue to eviscerate them every time they come within reach. Long live cats! I stopped taking walks in Retiro in the early morning because of the rats, and it was something I used to love to do. They have taken over that beautiful park; they are everywhere, climbing the trees, swimming in the pond, crawling over pedestrians’ feet, and wagging their grey tails so that people will throw them food. If you want to get rid of them, you have to scare them away softly, otherwise you will draw the attention of the guards or you will get slapped with a fine for being inconsiderate to your “warm-blooded” neighbors. What does warm blood matter? 

That is why I believe that I was one of the few people not frightened when the foxes invaded Madrid. In fact, I was happy to see packs of them taking over the parks, the arbors, and the trails of Madrid. For as long as those silvery immigrants were here, the rats disappeared from the city streets: they hid or the foxes ate them. Osorio was terrified and went along with others to the Puerta del Sol to protest the campaigns of all those NGOs which ran slogans such as “Welcome to Madrid, our fox brothers,” “Madrid, homeland of the foxes,” and so on, which aimed to retain the canine invaders and to condition the city to become their permanent home. I wasn’t at all bothered by the foxes’ presence in the capital. The one inconvenience, I recognize, is the scent of their piss: it is pungent, and it permeated the dry Madrid air. Mixed with my own odors, it was disgusting. Fox urine stinks, and in those weeks you would see people in the street heaving and vomiting, put off by the foul scent that permeated everything. After a while the foxes left as mysteriously as they had arrived. And the damned rats slowly returned. 

Osorio says the city loves those little beasts. Another milestone for contemporary culture, which is on the verge of bursting the limits of credulity. The other day he swore to me that in several cities there are foundations and institutions seeking to legalize marriage between human beings and animals. Maybe he was pulling my leg, because he didn’t give me tangible proof of the existence of those institutions. But if they do not yet exist, they will soon. It would be amusing to attend the first wedding of a man and a dog or a woman and an ape. Even more if, instead of just going to the courthouse, they do it in a church to the bars of Mendelssohn’s wedding march. 

When I told him about my experience with the “imbalanced,” Osorio joked that one of these days a commando of vegetarian fanatics would set fire to the clandestine restaurant where, once a month, he and I drop in to treat ourselves to a nice oxtail or a rare filet. Thanks to the prohibition, we carnivores seem to take much more joy than before in a meaty feast. This is one way in which human nature has not changed: risks, taboos, interdictions around anything make it infinitely more desirable and attractive. A friend of mine, a secret smoker, told me the same thing some time ago, that he and his friends enjoy themselves much more in clandestine smoking dens, in the knowledge that a cigarette butt could land them in jail, than when they used to smoke wherever they wished with no risk at all. 

Osorio defends the “imbalanced,” and I think he does so from his heart rather than out of dedication to his favorite sport, which is to contradict me. According to him, the old ideals of social justice and egalitarian societies simply don’t do it for the new generations, because they aspired to things that already form a part of contemporary life. And whatever falls outside that, whatever remains wedded to chimerical and impossible ideals, repels them rather than excites them, since they are schooled in “realism,” the fundamental bias of present-day culture. They are pragmatists, and they refuse to waste time and energy on things that they will never achieve, especially as they remember the consequences of the search for perfect societies in the past: civil wars, bloody revolutions, and injustices worse than those being fought against. According to Osorio, it is sensible, even wise, of these young people of today to substitute for the longing for a perfect world something more human: a world in which young people have regular bowel movements and no longer suffer the torment of acne. I praised his joke, but a few seconds later I felt forlorn when I realized that he wasn’t joking. 

When I told Osorio that it struck me as a strange paradox that young people had begun to scorn sex — to act as the priests tried to convince us to act when we were young (even if many priests where doing it this, that, and the other way) — at the very time when religions were withering like the peau de chagrin, Osorio corrected me: “What’s withering is the churches, not religion.” I had to admit that he was right. 

We had arrived at a question on which Osorio and I tended to agree: are we free, or mere automata? Orwell hadn’t known that problem, writing in the most rabid moment of Stalinism, which he combatted in such splendid books as Animal Farm and 1984 as a man of the left and a defender of a democratic left, if such a thing ever existed. He was a socialist and at the same time not one, for in the guise of his democratic socialism he defended capitalist democracy, knowing very well that without free private business it is impossible for liberty to survive, and that if the state controls employment and the production of goods, sooner or later communism will triumph in its tried and true forms, and with it totalitarianism and poverty. That is why the Soviet Union disappeared and the People’s Republic of China turned into a dictatorship of crony capitalists. What exists in China is a private company of millionaires who swallow all the lies of the regime. Yet the regime is a caricature of capitalism and the lack of freedom will strangle it sooner or later. 

What kind of regime are we living in now? It’s impossible to say, but what is certain is that we are surrounded by systematic mendacity. The economy functions thanks to private enterprise and the free market economy. But are we free? Neither I nor Osorio thinks so, though at times he changes his mind. My own belief hasn’t wavered since the newspapers disappeared. True, on almost every corner there is a screen that presents news all day, and apparently the businesses represented there favor a diversity of ideologies and systems. But do they, really? We both have the impression that they do not, and that beneath the apparent differences the screens project a single supposed truth — that is, a heavily guarded lie; that all of them in essence defend a system in which government and business perpetuate a lie in common, as in China so long ago, making a show of superficial discrepancies to conceal their basic commitment to this system that keeps the world hoodwinked and more or less happy, since there are jobs, pensions, medicines, and education for all and even something called freedom, however much it is just a smokescreen invented by technology to keep the masses entertained. Men and women have turned vulgar and malleable as culture has died or turned into a mere diversion. We are slaves, more or less content with our fate. Orwell could never imagine that this would be the end product of the “free socialism” that he promoted, which was, in a word, impossible. Now we have lost our freedom without realizing it, and the worst thing is, we are happy and we think that we are free. What imbeciles we are! 

Isn’t it strange that in these conditions sex has lost all interest, when its great enemy, the Catholic Church, the entity that worked hardest to eradicate it from our lives, at least in theory, is losing worshippers, congregants, and priests, becoming in some countries the equivalent of an organization of stamp collectors? I have often argued with Osorio about why the great churches are going under in our day, and with them the terrorist fanatics who used to try to destroy them with bombs and assassinations. What holds for Catholicism holds likewise for Judaism, Protestantism, the Orthodox Church, and even Oriental religions such as Islam and Buddhism: the ranks of the faithful are thinning, attendance is collapsing, and many think that they are on the verge of extinction. After exercising such influence over history, leaving their mark on it in burning letters, the churches are gradually disappearing without anyone attacking them, in a climate devoid of hostility, and despite government subsidies. Nietzsche’s observation from so long ago is coming true: God is dead and no one cares, because men and women have learned to live without God. God was a product of culture, and since culture is now entertainment we don’t even recognize that the old deities have been replaced by football tables, images on screens, circuses, cartoons, and advertisements, which increasingly seem like something other than what they are. 

I suspect that the Catholic Church signed its own death warrant when it began to modernize, when the erstwhile bastion of machismo, conservatism, intolerance, and dogmatism relaxed, buckled, made concessions to progressive priests and the laity. The move backfired. It seemed impossible, but there it was: the Church began to ordain women as priests and nominate them as bishops, allowed priests to marry the way Protestant pastors do, and the Pope himself oversaw a gay wedding in Saint Peter’s Basilica. My poor mother, may she rest in peace, let out a bloodcurdling cry and fainted when she heard the news and saw it on her tablet, then slipped from her wheelchair to the floor. Poor old thing. “Those were steps forward that the time required,” Osorio says. “If they hadn’t done it, the Church would have begun to wither like a rose left out too long in the sun.” But didn’t that happen anyway? 

He and I disagree about this too, of course. People liked the Church because it wasn’t like life, like society — it represented the very opposite of existence in that century. In the church you felt as if you were in another world, a territory far from everyday routine. It was a pretty illusion, made of rituals, chants, incense, Latin phrases that seemed wise to the faithful who didn’t understand them, celestial allusions to perfect lives, heroic, marked by purity, by innocence, by inner peace. Now the church has ceased to be such a refuge: it is an extension of everyday life, where everything is more or less permitted, where there are no taboos or dogmas. The church has lost its mystery and ceased to be interesting, like those political parties no one believes in, or college fraternities or football clubs. 

When the Vatican determined that Limbo doesn’t exist, things started to take a bad turn. The abolition of Hell calmed many faithful sinners, but it disappointed others, those who had dreamed of their enemies, their oppressors, burning eternally in Beelzebub’s flames. With no flames and no Beelzebub, the beyond lost its attraction for much of the flock. Now they say the Vatican is about to declare that Heaven exists only in the symbolic and metaphorical sense, not in tangible, material terms. Poor Christian martyrs! They were broken on the rack, devoured by wild beasts, and burned alive defending the principles and truths of the Christian faith, and now it turns that out neither Hell nor Limbo nor even Heaven exists. What’s the Church good for, who is it good for, under such conditions? 

Now I should clarify a point that Osorio makes often, and rightly to my mind. The decline of the great churches has not put an end to religiosity. It has just become vulgarized and bastardized to the point of embarrassment. Now that no one believes in priests, people place their faith in witches, sorcerers, shamans, divines, palm-readers, holy men, hypnotists, that whole rabble of liars and tricksters who for a few pennies will make their gullible clientele believe that another world exists and that they are privy to it, that the future is written and they can decipher it in coffee grounds, coca leaves, cards, or crystal balls. What serious religions did elegantly, beautifully, with intellectual complexity, is now the monopoly of rogues, two-bit scammers, and illiterates. Just when science and technology have reached their peak we have returned to paganism, to primitive bewitchment. This is where the culture of our time has left us. And this twit Osorio calls it progress. 

Just then I woke up. It was the depth of night, and the sky was a sea of stars. I was sitting on the stone bench in the Plaza de Oriente, and in front of me to the right I could see the Teatro Real and the back of the palace, and beside them a little street of restaurants and the service door to the theater, where the crew entered and exited, along with the cast and the musicians when they were rehearsing. I knew perfectly that if I walked down that street I would find, on the corner to the right, the Plaza de Isabel II, and that the street I lived on branches off of it. Calle de la Flora, it was called. Of course! My building, with my room and bathroom located in the attic, was number 1. 

I was neither excited nor sad. I remembered now that my dwelling lay on this short street called, naturally, I repeat it again, Calle de la Flora. You could walk right past it. My house was on the corner where it runs into Calle Hileras, just by the Plaza de San Martín, which opens in turn onto the broader Plaza de las Descalzas. There stands one of the oldest convents in Madrid, full of paintings, which opens to the public only on Sundays. There is always a long line of people waiting to enter. 

My memory had come back to me. I remembered that, if I stood up and put those last few streets behind me, I could enter my home after an entire day spent looking for it. But that didn’t excite me, or even especially please me. I knew it would be like that. I had been frightened, I had thought I might die on the street like a stray dog, but now I was relaxed. I kept sitting there. What time was it? There weren’t many people around. In the Plaza de Isabel II, I would probably run into a couple of drunks. I still didn’t stand up. 

“Was today a waste?” I asked myself. No, it wasn’t. I had felt death closer than ever as I walked around this square sensing that my home was somewhere nearby. Now my memory was back. After I slept and recovered, I would call Osorio and tell him the story. I had felt death close, but it had not been a waste of time. I knew now that I would never again leave my house — or rather, my room — without taking along a piece of paper with my name and address and instructions to notify Osorio if I fell down dead, and I would write down his phone number and address there too. 

I struggled to breath. I wasn’t cold, hungry, or thirsty. I didn’t feel happy and I didn’t feel sad. It had been an adventure. A new adventure. A lesson, too. I could lose my memory and spend an entire day looking for home without finding it. From now on I would take precautions, I would always keep that document on me with my name and address and Osorio’s number. I learned this. So I had gotten something out of it. 

I stood up with difficulty. Now I felt a little cold. Nothing serious. I knew I could walk, but slowly, stretching out my legs, right, left, feeling a little cramping, right, left, confident that my memory was back and I knew perfectly well where I lived. I would get there, climb the five floors slowly, unagitated, would wash my pants with soap and bleach, and would go to bed calmly, in the awareness that I had survived a new experience that had brought me a little bit closer to death. I told myself this without sorrow or rage, but with a newfound tranquility: I had discovered that I could lose my memory and fail to find my way home and not know who I am and lose an entire day trying to remember. Now I did know who I am and where my room and bathroom are. I walked, but unhurriedly, like a man out to stretch his legs who has decided that it’s time to return home. “My home,” I said with affection. And I felt tears streaming down my face. (I repeat: with the years, I’ve become a crybaby.) 

I know that alley by the back door to the Teatro Real very well. Most of the restaurants there had already closed, but one was still open, and there were two couples sitting at the outside tables paying their check. When I passed by them, slowly, I said goodnight. They responded with a silent movement of the head. 

I was afraid I would fall, which is why I walked slowly. When I reached the corner I turned right, and less than a minute later I was in the Plaza de Isabel II, which was still brightly lit. I breathed calmly. The usual spectacle was there: a row of taxis, the drivers standing in groups to smoke and converse; a very young couple making out on a bench; two shuttered newspaper stands; and at the intersection of the Calle Arenal, which led to the Puerta del Sol, a solitary dog trying to bite its own tail. To the left of it was the street that led to my home — to my little room with its bathroom. Again I told myself that I would take the stairs slowly, not tire myself, even if I had to sit down on each of the landings. Calle de la Flora, it was called. How could I have forgotten? I walked up it sluggishly, very sure of myself, musing over what an idiot I had been, looking around all day for my address. There it was, at the end of the street. My confidence was back. I had reflected on many things. I had been very afraid. 

And I was afraid again, when I reached the corner of Calle de la Flora and Hileras, beside the tiny Plaza de San Martín, which opens onto the Plaza de las Descalzas, where I realized, feeling around in my pockets, that I didn’t have the key to open the large front door to number 1, where I live. I felt again the lash of terror that had harrowed me all day. Would I spend the rest of the night sitting here on the ground, hoping that someone who lived in the building would show up? But I got lucky. After just ten or fifteen minutes of waiting, a gentleman with a cane appeared who looked more or less familiar. He stopped by the door, removed his key, and opened it. 

I approached him and said, “At last you’re here. I forgot my key. Would you let me in?” The gentleman — somewhat older — looked at me with distrust. “I live here,” I assured him. “In one of the apartments on the top floor. I’ve been walking all day. I’m very tired. I beg you, please let me in.” The gentleman nodded, opened the door for me, and stepped back so I could enter first. When I was standing in the long vestibule with its flagstones, I thanked him again, effusively. The gentleman turned left, taking the door opposite the one that led to the office with the gas, electric, and water meters. He was very kind. He opened the door to the elevator with another key and asked me if I would take it up with him. I agreed. Those of us on the top floor don’t have access to the elevator. That was a surprise. The man lived on the third floor, and from there I would only need to climb two flights of stairs to reach my room. 

I took them very slowly, stopping for a moment on each step, inwardly cheerful, but trying to still my heart, which was pounding from the effort. I felt it racing in my chest, and I had the fleeting thought that I might die here from a heart attack before I could reach my room and my bathroom. 

I took the last few stairs in slow motion. Whenever I placed a foot on the next one, I could hardly believe the effort required. Once I reached the attic, I breathed easier. If I had a heart attack here, I didn’t care. The people, the neighbors here, know me, they could tell the police, even Osorio, who has visited me here a few times. I took a deep breath, and when I reached the door to my room I saw the key still dangling from the door. That is to say, the keychain with the key to the front door and to my apartment. I was in a hurry that morning and had forgotten them, and there they were, where I left them. For an instant I felt happiness as the key turned in the latch, and at last, at last, I was in my room. 

It is a tiny space full of books and papers. But very clean and orderly. I sweep and tidy up every morning before I go out for my coffee and chat with Osorio. I always make the bed and wash the sheets once a week; not the blanket, which gets washed every fifteen days. I clean the bathroom, the shower, the sink, and the toilet, every day after showering and carefully lathering myself up — especially my backside, which is always dirty because of my constant expulsions of gas. Tonight, after breaking so much wind during the day, it must be filthier than usual. 

No sooner than I turned on the light than I looked around with satisfaction at my clean, ordered room. Then, rather agitated, I shuffled to the bathroom, where I took off my shoes and pants. It was a long operation, as I was exhausted and my heart was about to burst from my chest. 

When I realized that I had soiled my underwear, I turned desolate. I had felt the farts, of course, but the shit surprised me. It had squeezed past my underwear and streaked my legs. I had become a man made of shit from the waist down. I was disgusted with myself. But instead of standing there like a dimwit, feeling sorry for myself on account of this minor catastrophe, I emptied all the shit into the toilet and flushed. It worked, and once the shit was gone and the toilet was pristine once again I opened the faucet and waited for the water in the shower to warm up before carefully scrubbing my legs and behind until I had made sure, ten times over, that both were impeccable. Then I washed my underwear with soap and bleach in the shower until it, too, was clean, and I hung it on the curtain rod with a couple of clothespins to dry. I toweled myself off gently, feeling ready to fall asleep and yawning constantly. 

I went back into my room, but I didn’t bother putting on the pajamas that I keep folded under my pillow in bed. I was exhausted, but at least I had showered and washed off all that  repulsive shit that had clung to my legs for hours and hours without my knowing it. 

I dried my hair hastily, running the towel back and forth over and over, remembering how ages ago my grandfather used to tell me that you lose your mind if you go to sleep with wet hair. When he said this the old man would bring a finger to his temple and laugh, imitating Napoleon, who apparently lost his mind in Santa Elena. That’s one of the few things I remember from my childhood, which is largely erased, apart from the memory of the happiness that I experienced until I discovered the horrible way women get pregnant and give birth to children. I was fine so long as I thought you ordered them from Paris and the stork delivered them. I don’t think I was ever happy once I found out the truth. 

At last, I got into bed, wrapped myself in my blanket, curled up, and turned out the light. 

Almost immediately afterward, the tachycardia set in. But it wasn’t my heart that frightened me, it was the sweat. It wasn’t hot, it was cool or even cold — it was the end of autumn, the nicest time in Madrid — and yet I was soaked with sweat. I ran my hands over my face, then a handkerchief, then the sheet, but it was pointless, because more droplets emerged from my pores and my face and neck were soaked again, along with my chest, back, and thighs. What was this? I thought I should call Osorio, but it was late and my friend usually went to bed early. What would I say to him? That I was sweating and my heart was racing? He would laugh at me. “I forgot the address to my building and I spent the whole damned day looking for it, I just got home a second ago. I washed out my shitty underwear and showered and got in bed, and now I’ve got tachycardia and I’m soaked in sweat.” Osorio would crack up and joke back: “You woke me up for this bullshit?” 

Instead of calling him I balled up, tried to forget the sweating, brought my knees all the way to my chin, and waited for sleep to overtake me. But the pounding in my chest got worse. I had to keep my mouth open to breathe. I thought, frightened, in the darkness of my room, “Am I going to die?” Many times I had imagined that it might happen, especially recently, whenever something felt off. But I always got through it, usually after falling asleep. Now my heart was thumping like a kettledrum and I was gasping, slack-jawed, as if I couldn’t get enough air. My chest, my shoulder, and my right arm began to hurt. Should I call Osorio? Would I wake him up? I imagined hearing his mocking laugh: “Are you dying, brother?” And so I didn’t. 

Now my left arm and shoulder hurt too, and I was sweating from head to toe. Everything ached, even my neck and back, my muscles, veins, tendons, and bones. I was sinking into something that was not sleep but unconsciousness. Was I fainting? My body began to shiver all over. And I swooned as though sinking into a whirlpool. Perhaps it was for the best. Death surprising me while I slept was a good way to go. Osorio would call me in the morning, according to our agreement, and when I didn’t pick up he would realize that I died in my sleep and would tell the ambulance to come. The paramedics would declare me dead and would take my body to my columbarium in Madrid. I would be immediately incinerated — or almost immediately, after the inevitable paperwork. The worms would already be pullulating in my body, but the fire would destroy them. 

My chest ached. This was not a false alarm. This was the end. I wasn’t scared, only aching. I felt myself sinking into something viscous and confused, not sleep but the dawn, the anteroom of death. I was not consoled to imagine that in a few minutes — a few seconds? — I would know whether God existed, whether the soul would survive the disappearance of that bodily energy that kept my heart pounding and the blood flowing through my veins, or whether in the future there would be only silence and oblivion, a slow decomposition of the organism, until the tongues of fire extinguished the filthy, damp flesh that had already begun to rot when they burned it.