One specific day in his childhood, Nicolás had witnessed a man fall from scaffolding, from the top of a building under construction.
Nicolás remembered that day because he was traveling with his father, heading to a soccer match with schoolmates. He didn’t want to miss that match for anything in the world; and seeing the man fall, he thought if he told his father, maybe he would stop the carI would try to find out, I would seek help. His father was so; Even Nicholas himself. But he didn’t want to lose the game.
In a split second, he decided that any distractions on the way to the game, which they arrived at just in time, would not help the fallen; while for Nicolás it could make him lose a highly anticipated match. How many moments of life have been spent happily, among friends? They were very few.
The game was played, Nicolás, as time went by, stopped remembering whether they had won or lost; but he remembered perfectly why, when he had arrived, during or after the game, he hadn’t told his father or anyone else.
He hadn’t told his father why I was afraid of considering him heartless. Hush up such a brutal sighting so you don’t miss a football match? And with the rest of humanity she hadn’t shared it for the simple reason that he hadn’t shared it with his father either. He couldn’t have told anyone if he hadn’t told his father first.
As he grew older, he assumed that, at some point, he would be able to discuss it with his father. He not only tell her, but to talk about it, because having witnessed that tragic episode, and having kept silent about it, he deserved to talk about it.
Many times he had thought of going alone to that building, located in a street in the Belgrano district, which he remembered geographically, but not by name. But until he was 13, the neighborhood was far away, or far enough away from his neighborhood, El Once, for him to travel alone or give himself the opportunity to.
And a few months after his thirteenth birthday, his parents moved the family, Nicolás and his sister, to Vancouver, Canada. Nicolás did not return to Argentina until he was 30 years old.
When Nicolás was 18, his father died of sudden cardiac arrest. Upon receiving the news, the intact image of the man who fell from the scaffolding from the top of the building in the Belgrano district immediately came back to his memory, like a ferocious bolt of lightning in his own heart: he had never told his father about that scene and would never tell him again to nobody.
For many years afterwards, after reading Don Quixote, I would reflect on the first line of Cervantes’ timeless novel: “In a place in La Mancha, whose name I don’t want to remember.” Nicolás could not remember the street name of the building under construction in the Belgrano neighborhood.
In what sense had Cervantes used the verb “to want”? It could be: “I don’t remember.” An irony: since I don’t remember, I express it by saying that I don’t “want” to remember. A glimpse of what will later be called “the unconscious” and which is much more imprecise than the ambiguous irony of Cervantes, the latter without any claim to categorical or academic.
The other sense is literal: I don’t want to remember that place. Why doesn’t Cervantes want to remember? This is another matter. Perhaps because, even ironically, no one thought of repeating Hidalgo’s odyssey; As a warning: don’t do this at home.
Or to add credence to the story: if it hadn’t happened in a specific place, none of the locals could have affirmed or denied the existence of Don Quixote and Sancho.
Nicolás doubted throughout his adult life if he didn’t want to or couldn’t remember the name of the street where he had seen a man fall from scaffolding from the top of a building under construction. And for the first time, back in Argentina, he wondered if that man was really dead, if he had fallen on the sidewalk, if they had picked up his lifeless body, who was his closest relative.
All the memories were accompanied, in his soul, by images that were impossible to visualize, to imagine; and in this case, no doubt, because I couldn’t and didn’t want to. She had seen him fall from a height that, in her son’s eyes, was indisputable. Probably twenty floors. But of course I couldn’t guarantee that.
Nicolás had faced each of the decisive circumstances of his life keeping in mind the fall of that man, the silence with his father, the trip, the soccer match and the immediate epilogue that followed.
In every dilemma, sentimental, working, existential, considered the possibility of the tragic case, a silent witness, responsibility, the options that fate puts before us; and our decisions, in which, as in the first sentence of Don Quixote, we never finish configuring the exact meaning of the verb to want.
When he finally returned to his childhood home and walked, like a pilgrim, not knowing the route but knowing the destination, to the building, now twenty-five stories high – a building that had gone from being an ambitious project to a novel construction, to an antiquity without prestige or history, except that of Nicolás himself, he recovered the name of the street, which he somehow knew he had always known, and the exact tragic scene, as he had seen it more than forty years ago.
He was tempted to seek out a neighbour, of the same age or older, to consult regarding this event. But there was almost no chance that any of the man’s relatives could live out there.
And on the other hand, she was afraid: that her consultation would somehow complicate everything. Either asking right there – which would sound like something very close to insanity, like Hidalgo himself – or by any other means.
Only he allowed himself to be reconciled with his silence, because it hadn’t necessarily been sensational. He had kept a secret, and probably would, for the rest of his life. He had lived as well as he could, perhaps like his father and the man who fell from the scaffolding.
Source: Clarin
