I had a relative who, after retiring, whether it was hot or cold, sat down every afternoon on the terrace of his house accompanied by a glass of wine and some hazelnuts and remained for two or three hours staring into space. I, an underachieving student at the time, was fascinated by his unproductive stillness. On one occasion I asked him what he was doing and he said wait. “Wait what?” I insisted. “May God appear to me, or an equation,” he replied.
The God thing seemed logical to me because we belonged to a very religious family, and the equation thing also because I had been a mathematics teacher. The hardest thing to explain was the association between one thing and another, as if they were similar.
I accompanied him in silence with the fantasy of being present at the moment the miracle happened. As time passed and because that stillness had transformed him almost into a mystic, I asked him if God or the equation had finally manifested itself. “You’ll never know,” he said, “go watch TV.”
Watching television, which was like returning to normality, gave me a somewhat infernal peace. I think I understood that there were two ways to establish oneself in the world: in front of the home screen, without expecting anything from life, or in front of infinity, waiting for a miracle.
My relative died on a Tuesday, with his nuts intact and his glass of wine untouched. He didn’t make a sound, he didn’t even change his position. His wife found him at dusk, already a little stiff. I heard that he died with his eyes open, which then – and now – I didn’t know how to interpret. These days, remembering this, I sit on the terrace every afternoon, with a gin tonic which I barely taste, and some assorted hazelnuts on a plate, and I remain contemplating the horizon, waiting for, if not God, then the devil to appear to me. And, if not an equation, a square root. Let’s go less.
