I really like watching someone read. I love scrutinizing his face, studying the slight changes that occur in his gesture (eyebrows, eyelids, corners of the lips) as his eyes run over the lines of the text and the words resonate within him, in what we as people are beyond the body. I like it because I write (with the desire to resonate, even if only a little), but I like it above all because I also read. Sometimes when I do this, it turns out that I’m the one being watched. I’m with a book in the living room and out of the corner of my eye I see my children watching, and I think about what they think that I think, and if one day they will immerse themselves in these pages that I now have in my hand, perhaps looking for their father in the notes and underlinings. Other times I am also the one who observes myself while I read.
I often ask myself this, because I read. I wonder, even if I have an answer. Maybe I do it, asking myself so much, just to remember the answer. I read because I desire, with all my soul, to rediscover what I have sometimes found in other texts (more as a child, as a young person, the other day), one of those little miracles made of words that are hidden (sometimes many, the damned ones) among thousands and thousands of paragraphs and that when you find them, oh, how wonderful, you feel that those letters arranged like this suture every lack of meaning in life, in the universe, in everything.
It’s not easy. You have to read a lot to find a great novel, and for a perfect sentence, or a small combination of two words (beautiful in itself, like a well-drawn wall at the edge of space), you have to read even more. It happened to me recently with Eduardo Halfon (“Each drop of rain echoed off the roof tiles, as if announcing its name as it fell”), and before that with so many authors that this column would fall short if I tried to name them. The fact is that when I come across one of those sentences, two words magically united, a brilliant paragraph, I feel like exclaiming, like a certain Aztec storyteller: “Thank you God, for literature, for these pages”. I’m not exaggerating. Perhaps only those who are readers can understand it.
Like Amèlie, I also like to scrutinize the faces of my roommates at the cinema and, obviously, those of my fellow believers in the stadium stands. I love those fans who bring in the procession, those who are suffering, those whose gestures make it seem like they are having a hernia operation. I wonder: what are they thinking now? And again: what does the suffering fan want to find in the stadium? I ask myself this in them, but also in myself. Because sometimes I look in the mirror dressed in my colors, before going out to the stadium, or returning from the temple. As for reading, my answer is the same: let’s try to relive something that touched us very deeply before (more as children, as teenagers, the other day), an unlikely goal or, perhaps the opposite, the spontaneous celebration of the magic of an opponent’s shot against the post, with an empty net.
You have to watch a lot of games to find the perfect moment. But when they come, oh, when they come. It happened the other day, with Scotland. I’ll be damned if anyone expected a bicycle kick goal from a guy called McTominay. But what about the fourth? What can you tell me about the room? Scotland’s fourth goal is the certification that life itself is worth living, despite the bad moments, the gray days, the heavy and slow routine of existence.
When I saw Kenny McLean’s last-minute shot from center field, when I saw the ball fly into the Glasgow sky, I watched as Schmeichel (son) corrected his position and finally, after a moment of waiting that could fill the entire universe’s time, seeing that the ball had arrived at its unlikely destination, I whispered the now literal words of Victor Hugo Morales. And when I turned off the television I thought about how to explain to those who don’t understand that goals also resonate within us, like good literature, in what we are beyond the body, and that, like a perfect sentence in the middle of a sea of words, an improbable and beautiful goal, yes, it also gives meaning to life.
