How difficult everything becomes when there are people watching. The same thing happens when you look at the world, which always hangs by a thread if you don’t stop looking at it.
It happened a long time ago. There were three of us on a bench and if I remember correctly, a fourth was going to arrive and never did; one of those moments in life when absence is justified because no one wants to spend a November Saturday in the shade of a poplar tree in a garden drinking Embdrau beer if they can choose to do something else. The afternoon, the day, life went by without anything remarkable happening, without taking anything with them; come back as you left, with nothing in your pocket and nothing to say; hoping that the next day something would change. From time to time, a neighbor would pass by and there was silence. Mario took out his cell phone and Manu took the opportunity to make a joke; A smoker knows how to find breaks where another only sees a moment.
It was about appearing normal even though, to tell the truth, there was nothing and no one more normal than us. If the local light appeared – the nationals ignored us as if we were mailboxes – we had to put our legs in front of the beer, because even if most of the time they told us to throw it away, more than once they had asked us for our ID and we had confirmed that we ran faster than them. The guy from the bar on the next street was not happy to see people drinking without taking their share. There you learn that the police are simply doing their job and doing it perfectly; the job of safeguarding the interests of people who, for one reason or another, always have more money than you; The police, like fascism, are the armed wing of those who own a concession, a bar or a consultancy. You also learn, to your cost, that if you have something stored in your sock, it is better not to be too confrontational.
Shortly after, a neighbor I had already mentioned in another era, pot-bellied, bow-legged – and earthy – passed by, dragging his dog, a mutt uglier than the end of the month – over time I began to see him as similar to Federico Jiménez Losantos – and looking at his cell phone. He didn’t look at us and I was surprised that he didn’t even flinch at our presence. They say there is a sixth sense that allows us to detect when someone is looking at us, even when our backs are turned. And we have all felt it at some point: that sort of metaphysical itch on the neck, that breath of a stranger’s gaze that passes through us even without being sure that there is someone behind it. A lot of things happen to me, and the worst part is that it conditions me.
After that, a few days passed and this idea hovered in my mind like in parabolic orbits. I had to make some send and I crossed a small garden between my house and my Mandao and I felt my sixth sense start to kick in. I could swear I had passed some children a moment ago, also a man with his granddaughter and a few breakfast tables with a waiter here and there; suddenly everyone was looking at me. Even though no one was looking. How do I walk normally? I feel strangeI thought, and in a few seconds I saw myself from the outside and I couldn’t take a step without feeling out of my body. How difficult everything becomes when there are people watching. The same thing happens when you look at the world, which always hangs by a thread if you don’t stop looking at it.
As I was very young until recently – now I am only young; I know, it’s terrible, I sometimes tend to think that I have discovered fire, gravity or the Americas every time I have an idea or that the universe conspires to confirm my theories. I almost always discover that someone has already thought of it before or that someone else has already spoken about it Noséqué Nosécuándo, or that I am always so absorbed in my thoughts that I have imagined many people looking at me in a garden where, in reality, I am not. There was no one but me, but it is inevitable to become defensive in the face of – possible – public scrutiny. The gaze of others forces us to survive, said Vázquez Montalbán, because it is always trying to kill us.
