History of Human Stiffness

?????????????? That day, Bruno arrived very late at the office; it was half past ten, and a pile of documents that had not yet been endorsed lay desperately on his desk. As soon as he came in, he noticed in the mirror that he had omitted to neaten his white mustache and iron his only suit. The displeasure was enormous, because his personal care was a notable attribute in him; he then groomed his finely drawn tie, worn at the tip, and cast a knowing glance at the sea of papers that begged for his attention. Gently, he took the “Urgent” folder and decided that this would be his first review of the day. Just like every morning, he looked at the building opposite through the glass, and counted the seven floors of it one by one; an old personal superstition dictated that as long as it was intact, he would not lose his job. Finally, he filled his pipe with tobacco flavored with Malabar oils and prepared himself for an extensive reading.

?????????????? It was closing date; the walls of the publishing house shook with the hissing roar of the final proofs flying between the desks, before final printing, torturing each reviewer. The presses demanded promptness, without which they would not be able to meet the release date. Tight footsteps, rushing through the hurried corridors, braking and stumbling, disturbed the place and constituted the anxiety of the morning. The Living History Magazine, published fortnightly, was due to be released that same week, in three days at the latest, given that the last issues appeared with considerable delay, and a sharp drop in sales was causing the editorial coffers bleed.

?????????????? In front of his desk, on the prolific main dresser, Bruno had arranged the portraits of his numerous grandchildren; faces of many ages stood out from the shapeless mass of books that overwhelmed the office. On both sides, two rows of small tables displayed individual volumes, wide open, of faded encyclopedias, grouped by historical eras, in which cyclopean battles, depositions of monarchs and evil plagues that for hundreds of years defined the course of Humanity lay, anarchic, exposed to be traversed at a stroke. Six world maps from different eras hung disheveled on the back wall, marked in pencil and repaired with tape along the worm-eaten edges.

?????????????? Bruno's isolation was not absolute, even in his private office. He entrenched himself within the endless world that he introduced into his small enclosure, but he left it from time to time, to go in search of a lucky piece of information that would rescue an essay from the trash can, or a volume absent from his shelves that would free him of some fearsome doubt. Being Chief Editor of the Magazine was not a trivial matter, but rather required abrasive monastic patience. His wise determination led him to the top of the profession; from up there he shouted his love for History, the most varied hypotheses about the creation of Time, the cosmogonic character of its infinite repetition, of its astonishing irreversibility. The effusion for historical truth made him often imagine himself as an archaeologist or a diver of marine pearls, immersed to the viscera in the ocean of his passion. The man also kept a diary, in which the milestones of his personal life became archetypes, were reiterated, and made up his most intimate and hermetic universe; this is how he conceived them: Bruno was tormented by the feeling of having repeated every act of his life, leaving little room for creativity. The world regenerates every day?he used to affirm?in an eternal reincarnation of the same events, configured in always dissimilar scenarios, which in the end, woven together, we call History.

?????????????? In recent times, the regret of not having created anything original became more pronounced. But he also thought: can anyone claim to have done something that was never done before? Is there creation, or only systematic repetition? Between two mutually exclusive alternatives, that doubt trembled in his head. Two knocks on his door reminded him where he was; not ten minutes had passed since his arrival and some reviewer was already requesting information. He pretended not to hear. Those four walls protected him daily from having to listen to the novel reasonings of those whom the editor's meager budget managed to hire; but in the end, and in all cases, he ended up monopolizing the work.

?????????????? In fact, day after day, he endured the attacks of unknown young people in search of guidance for their contribution to the Magazine; to them, with a very bad temper, Bruno used the pretext of analyzing the task with more time, when he could, thus keeping it to himself. Deep down, having to perform the didactic function for a legion of impermanent young people who never managed to complete a semester there, was for him, with almost fifty years in the same publishing house, a waste of his wisdom. It was, without a doubt, a punishment. How much of it was there in the world, in the recurrence of atrocities such as famines, wars and epidemics, which oblivion incinerates to mitigate the pain? The notion of punishment is a close neighbor of the concept of sin; to what serious fault is this endless sequence of brutality attributable? Perhaps forgetting is a sin in itself, the one that requires being averted by dusting off the true root of the facts and their causes? But in his own case, that of the individual being, to what strange error did Bruno owe the fact that he had to suffer exhaustive hours of poorly paid work, in conditions far inferior to those his abilities deserved? Was it not perhaps the strict principle of love for the truth, the one with which he was nursed—and which later became a solid religious faith—that led him to be consecrated by his peers as the best historical revisionist in the country?

?????????????? That was what the previous night's meeting had been about. On a monthly basis (and often more frequently, when everyone's work allowed it), professionals from the most reputable publications in the field would gather in a nearby mansion, equipped for such purposes, to preach their latest findings and discuss theories. Bruno was reluctant to exercise the supremacy of his erudition, although it was widely recognized by everyone there. It was not without a certain disdain that in that last meeting, one of the oldest members of the group was encouraged to address again a thorny topic: on repeated occasions they had made him aware of everyone's disagreement with his situation, and even came up with job offers that would imply a considerable improvement; without exception, these approaches resulted in outright anger on the part of the person questioned, as if the change were some type of betrayal or infidelity to an unsuspected cause. But that time, the last one, the comrade attacked forcefully, using an additional argument: how was it possible that, having the entire responsibility of the edition on his back, Bruno's name never appeared in the Magazine? Instead, the one who retained the official title of Chief Editor was the owner, to whom no one recognized the slightest talent or knowledge; it was the third generation of the founding family, with whom Bruno had begun working several decades ago. Even the most gullible human being would have been amazed at such altruism: the finery and editorial success fell on the one whose financial management was tearing the Magazine to shreds, which exasperated everyone around. So much spoiled excellence! However, and to the surprise of those present, Bruno's anger this time was not so fierce; he simply remained silent at first, then delivered a toned-down version of his usual sermon.

?????????????? The meeting lasted until three o'clock, much longer than usual. Bruno was the first to leave, without greeting anyone in particular. When they said goodbye, the rest agreed to meet next month, and remembered to keep each other up to date with the news that arose about the plan that had just been hatched: three publishers, the largest, had plotted to bring down the Magazine, takeover the market it was losing, and end up acquiring it from its owner (whom the academic environment deplored with frenzy) for meager coins. All those present knew of the purpose, (although they had sworn one by one, on the thick History of Herodotus, that they would never reveal it to Bruno, under penalty of being stripped of the piece of Pleistocene rock that each member had to guard, as a membership credential to such a select group); and although unaware of the monetary issue, they furiously supported the attempt, in order to free their beloved colleague from his voluntary ostracism. The publishers, meanwhile, were already fighting for his permanent incorporation.

?????????????? But despite the well-kept secret, his friends managed to make him reason about his persistence in a job with such unjust emolument and conditions of adverse precariousness, and given his reluctance to see beyond the doors of his own office, they reminded him that since its founding, the Living History Magazine earned the hatred of other publications, who considered its owners mercenaries of History, whose sole purpose was the unscrupulous profit of any kind. Furthermore, no one was unaware, except the disheartened reading public, that it was Bruno who had sustained for three generations the purist virtues and excellence of its editorial line.

?????????????? Therefore, when he arrived late for work the next morning, which was extremely rare, the echoes of last night tinkled in his mind: is it possible to reset the count of time and create a new moment in life? Are we condemned to repeat? The French Revolution ended up designing a new calendar: another beginning, different directions, different protagonists—it is imperative to forget mistakes so that there are no obstacles when regenerating time; however, many countries commemorate their victories over enemies that no longer exist, introducing into social memory past events that condition the present. Those peoples who do not learn from their past cannot get rid of it. Bruno always advocated his scholarly duty: to unearth History in order to stop its cyclical course. But since entire nations cannot pierce that circle, can one man alone do it? Perhaps, after all, creation is a divine act, unworthy of humans who will only manage to emulate it without ever achieving a genuine fact. But in that case, what is the purpose of his work? At times, he assimilates oblivion to death: probably the very limited human conception of life clouds man's vision of History. Bruno is the guarantor of an almost finished revisionist lineage, which seeks to unravel the truth, which was instilled in him in his earliest childhood. “We must save the world from the errors of History, digging beneath the foundations that support society to reveal them, display them in the light, analyze their veracity,” was the music with which the parents, famous scholars themselves, cradled him. This precept was inoculated into his blood, creating a rigid immunity that walled him off from any professional folly.

?????????????? Two more knocks on the door brought him back to the present. A young girl with a red beret and a hummingbird voice, carrying handwritten pieces of paper showed her fine body without waiting for Bruno's response. As she introduced herself, he recognized her adolescent candor and most faithful idealism in her olive eyes. She was new, starting today. She chose to delve into the Second War, and as she emphasized with a gesture the reasons for her decision, her long hair unexpectedly emerged from her cap, leaving in sight a thick mane that, suddenly, turned her into a woman.

?????????????? At another time, the irruption would have caused him to utter little more than imprecations in ancient Aramaic. But that time, subsumed as always in his thoughts, he was surprised to have been torn from that ordinary state and made room for her in a dusty chair, from which he removed the Universal Atlas and a fascicle of the New Notebooks of Heraldry. For Bruno, the unexpected eroticism of her forms constituted a break in the course of his life there; the timbre of her voice was enough, so that he did not even differentiate the words from the melody. He asked her to repeat the reading and listened to her with delight: “I was taught not to believe in G’d, but to subordinate myself to the State.” The child woman was mortified by this contradiction, extracted from the letter of a Bolshevik soldier during the occupation of kneeling Berlin, at the end of the war. The dilemma was exacerbated because that soldier was as adolescent when he wrote the epistle as she was today. It was undoubtedly a philosophical conflict that modern historiography, on its own, was incapable of encompassing. Bruno understood very early in his life that moral dilemmas are a hidden field for formal historicism, more concerned with factual elucidation than with the interpretation of the facts themselves. This is what he let her know while he was surprised by his own gesture of spontaneity, and wondered through what magical influence that girl fascinated him, to the point of dedicating those precious minutes of his busy day to her, of giving her explanations that his ivory fingers fixed on her paper with winged softness. During that same war, he recalled out loud, while he was still young, a tremendous surprise hit him when he witnessed Europe's anger towards the Germans for having repatriated to the continent itself the concept of genocide, an unwritten tradition that had prevailed for centuries in its colonies in Africa, Asia and America. What dark aspect of the human condition allows extermination from a distance, as if it were happening in another world?

????????????? And that other world did not change; the succession of cruelties that plague Humanity since its birth is the same: ethnic persecutions, massacres; economic subjugation in increasingly sophisticated forms, the overcrowding of the masses, the manipulation of morality and religious dogma, forced recruitment for unknown battles, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, widespread hunger, the birth of diseases never seen before... The new generations go for more... Another look at the beauty of the young woman, so remarkable in that precise and unique moment, beyond all grandiloquent words, convinced him that there would still be another opportunity. She listened to him in admiration walking with authority through the quicksand of History. Almost at the end of the talk, he reminded her that terms such as “world”, “State” or “people” are hopeless abstractions, while man, as an individual, experiences the reality of his own particular life. As he spoke, he told himself for the umpteenth time that, like Universal History, his own was stuck in instances such as, for example, being subjected to a job of elusive gratification.

?????????????? Later, when he was left alone, he thought: by virtue of truth, something did change; the children of this civilization worship rationalism in the manner of a deity—they take refuge in it. Vast conceptual structures, unlike any other era, build rigid walls that shelter the actions of individuals. Laws, doctrines and precepts encapsulate behavior, give it support and name, and despite them the essential suffering increases. Perhaps that same constitutive rigidity, the one that holds the human skeleton firm, also prevents man from looking in other directions, from perceiving the world in unforeseen ways? And furthermore, wouldn't the imposition of these rigorous conceptions be what forces others to adopt equally rigid positions, causing stale, rancid concepts to proliferate, deprived of the creativity that he himself demands?

?????????????? That's why, when hours later he had the owner of the Magazine in front of him, Bruno felt that everyday life was once again imposing on him a fact that had been a fait accompli for a long time, a mere update of the same thing. Generations displace one another, and innovation is very often only apparent; his comrades, the flower of historical revisionism, were right when they warned him that the rigidity of which he spoke so much also works to perpetuate the advantages of the privileged and his descendants. The young man visited him late in the afternoon and demanded explanations about the imminent edition. New financial pressures forced him to make a resounding income increase, given the certain threat of closure. Bruno looked at him with reluctance when he heard from his mouth that if the worst happened, he would lose his job. How many times did he hear, submissively, the screech of that alarm, activated by him and his predecessors?

?????????????? In his hands, the editor brandished a pile of papers, from which a small, printed sheet protruded. The rest, as he explained in a voice worn out by cigarettes, were unpaid bills and other debts that he had to deal with as soon as possible. With every movement he shook the papers; he undid his tie stained with fresh ink, and smoked, finding relief in producing streams of white smoke, behind which Bruno's face grew increasingly pale. When the recounting of his economic hardship ended, when they could hardly even see each other, a monarchical gesture from the young man put the champion of History on guard, who prepared himself to receive a new order. It was the tiny paper that, according to the young man, was a valuable unpublished document that his grandfather had found many years ago, during a bibliographic search. While the original was lost, that anonymous transcription had survived; he wanted to use it as a coup de effect in this new issue of the Magazine, given his urgent need to revive it.

?????????????? A freezing cold reached Bruno's back from the Ice Age itself. There was no time for relevant research; no serious historian would lend himself to such embarrassment. It was, as was customary, to publish the extract and identify the author, to provide data about the timeframe to help readers' understanding; an exhaustive work of no less than a week, which had to be carried out with total responsibility and academic rigor in just one night and by a single person, without even knowing what their language of origin was. Suddenly, the very subsistence of the Magazine, as well as the honor of its founding ancestors, depended on him, and his superior would not accept a refusal without feeling his feudal lordship besieged.

?????????????? The young man brought the small paper in front of Bruno, who read under his breath:

?

…the longing for the ?absolute: beauty and compassion. The evils of the world awaken the sensitivity of a few. My warm and safe youth, along with the landscapes of my land, will? inspire my work. I can’t understand others that think different, so we have to strive to instill in them the privileges of our faith. My life is free of doubt. I had a happy childhood: why not aspire for everyone to have it too? Nature, in its infinite wisdom, created Good so that man would be worthy of it, and Evil so that the existence of virtue would be noticeable…

????? [illegible in the original]

?…What I say is proof of Justice. For her we act. For her we fight…

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????

?????????????? As he read, his brain became crammed with names, and an endless sequence of historical facts bogged him down. He scribbled:

?

?????????????????? ° from Alexander the Great

??????????????????? ° from some Roman conqueror

???????????? ???????° from a 17th century Jesuit missionary

??????????????????? ° from Genghis Kahn

??????????????????? ° from Frederick the Great of Prussia…

?

?????????????? …and the list continued ad dislocatium. Bruno's confusion was oppressive. To whom would he attribute those words, there being so many historical settings in which they could fit? The man despaired his path; writings of supreme preponderance had been devoured by the apathy of the people, and the editor intended to raise the interest of the Magazine with a text of childish flatness (although with such acute penetration into the thoughts of many of those who were in a position to decide). Furthermore, there was no way to carry out the study with the depth it deserved in so very few hours—by saying this, he exacerbated the young man's anger.

?????????????? Bruno tried to dissuade him: “Since this text fits logically into many levels of History, why not save it for later?”, and added slyly: “Better still, why not write a History of the Future right now? You should not waste your money by employing me to compile the next issues of the Magazine; these have already been described in the first issue?except names and dates?given the cyclical nature of the events (but we will maintain the secret so that our readers don’t abandon us.)”

?????????????? At this point the owner's anger reached supernatural levels, all the more so because of Bruno's daring tone, completely unusual, who did not want to do the job, unworthy of his lineage and his excellent professionalism. In an example of his ineffable sense of opportunity, the young man reminded him that, after all, it was not easy to be the Chief Editor of a publication of such high prestige, a position that Bruno held in practice (although he only admitted it when they were alone), and that from time to time that honor entails sacrifice of magnitude. In short, he was not convinced by his arguments, and ordered that tomorrow's final draft include the text, plus all the information corresponding to the author and his time, in the Historiography Notebook that was kept aside, for internal control, on each of the articles that appeared in the Magazine. Otherwise, he stressed menacingly, he will attribute those lines to some random historical figure, with which he will solve the problem with practicality. That said, he slammed the door and disappeared from the office bellowing. “As the centuries go by,” Bruno thought sardonically, “we observe that totalitarian societies are very similar to themselves: they continue to repeat their own very particular stories, as they pass from one dictator to another.”

?????????????? In fact, his memory became flesh of that fateful night, forty years ago, when amnesia came to the rescue of shame; the young man's grandfather, founder of the Living History Magazine, urged him to choose between two possible authors for a newly found writing, in the rush of providing the scoop in that same edition. It was mid-1957; it was his first job and he had started ten years ago, under the tutelage of the owner. Within six months, Bruno was already the official Chief Editor, given his unusual analytical skills. But on that occasion, after examining the case for a long time without much success, his desire to please his mentor was greater than his heritage as an investigator, and in view of the predicament he made a chance decision that later proved to be the wrong one, in an attitude that disgraced him for the rest of his life. His resignation was not accepted, but instead his position was revoked as a punishment, and he was thereafter sentenced to work in unforgivable conditions, which he consented because he considered it a well-deserved punishment.

?????????????? Forty years ago: the details of that instance, preyed upon by oblivion, returned to the present and hit him like they had never hit him before. One by one, including the crushing anger of the man who reduced his prominence in the Magazine, the moments emerged to the surface, longing for a breath of oxygen that would give them life and, perhaps, the opportunity to be discerned in a different way. “History must be well told,” Bruno insisted from the beginning of his career, “so that it can be digested, so that the words that describe it do not lose the immanence of their meaning.” His conception of historical truth had the warmth of a maternal refuge, but in that same nature, its solidity became at times a prison. That principle of truth, fixed in its essence with such robustness that no geneticist would have predicted any variation, did not change throughout all those years. But then, what does evolution consist of, while the pillars on which life itself is built do not fluctuate? Through dedication to his work, he reached peaks of sporadic happiness, every time he revealed some mystery drowned in the swamps of History; he immersed himself in them, happy, feeling the reach of freedom with the force of a theological conviction, but the rest of the time, the cost that the freedom imposed on him was that of submitting to other people's rules of the game, under penalty of desecrating the altar of his sacrosanct dedication if he didn’t do so.

?????????????? In his diary, Bruno left testimony of many of the moments in which he felt he had made an important contribution. He would never return to it, because it caused him an unsuspected terror to discover that what he had given to his science was not proportional to what it had paid him. In the corpulent tomes, he had poured hundreds of masterful findings, all of them at the level of the cenacle of scholars to which he belonged, and to counteract the solemnity, as a joke to himself, he fathered a creature decades ago who, having walked through his papers as if it were his own home, criticized him caustically and pointed out every fault. It was the ??????????????????, (like this, lowercase and smaller letters: from down there the world looked immense), a hominid bent over by its own weight and by the stiffness of its spinal column, a species that was not in danger of extinction but, on the contrary (and to the chagrin of his father), spread widely throughout the world. A subfamily of the saurians discovered by him, whose characteristics were to carry its entire history on itself at all times, and therefore, to be highly conditioned by it. Bruno was not competing with Darwin, by the way (he would never dare to such irreverence); he only resorted to the character when he wanted to take the blame on himself, as a reproach for not having focused on some old idea in a new way. He called his journal History of Human Stiffness, given the insistent reiteration of facts observable in its pages, which even encompassed his own place in life.

?????????????? He rarely reread a paragraph from those volumes. Generally, upon concluding an annotation, he would jump from his desk to go look for, when appropriate, the green pencil with which he would make an H in the margin, indicating that it was a note of scientific value, worthy of being disseminated through the Magazine. The rest, the unmarked paragraphs, were personal reflections in which, more often than not, his modern prehistoric animal gained preponderance when interpreting some sclerosed fact. As for the rest, fiction also occupied lines without an H, dependent on his moods and acidic comments on a reality that often left him perplexed, and which he had to provide with fabled scenarios in order to digest it... A strange combination of notes; the particular lens with which Bruno viewed the world made him alternate observations about himself, with comments and data from the past and the present.

?????????????? Perhaps that's why he was so reluctant to reopen the books. Never before had he felt so compelled to do so. The volumes of the History of Human Stiffness did not have labels on the covers or spines, so as not to attract curious people; his writing had an intimate character, if you will, and at the same time emanated from it the tone of a journalistic chronicle. He went straight to 1957, tracking down some sign of the night that derailed the successful course of his life, looking for some unhappy detail that would help him stitch together an explanation between then and now. He found the inexperienced account of the pressure received then, remarkably similar to that imposed on him today, and then rescued one of his stories, dated that same night and later buried in the quagmire of his oblivion:

?

The plot begins with the arrival of a Carthaginian navigator to Terra Alta, many centuries ago. He had to find a chest, buried by his grandfather in an unfathomable sandbank, which contained a showy stone, highly valued in his country, which would make him a rich man. A cartographic sketch showed him the way, but not the direction in which the desert lay, so he asked a Bedouin for guidance, without mentioning the treasure.

The native, guessing a hidden intention, became intrigued: “We have lived among the dunes for generations; is there something valuable among them that my ancestors have not known? Can a stranger from a remote land know more than us?”

Watching the parchment, the stranger prepared to walk alone, which further fueled the curiosity of the Bedouin, who decided to go after him.

For years they wandered among the zigzagging dunes.

At first, the sailor tried to avoid his follower, but the whiteness of the landscape made his camouflage evident; so, he decided to stay vigilant, to avoid being robbed inadvertently.

They both wandered in circles for several decades, and their steps burned in the sand, igniting a great fire.

They also made it so that the sun never set, to avoid involuntary sleep.

Time thus became an infinite day, lasting more than thirty years; its combustion burned the desert, consuming the treasure and them in it.

?????????????? As soon as he finished reading, Bruno cleared the desk of the volumes that were not open; the living flame from forty years ago coexisted in him all that time, on his shelves, in his office, but it never showed itself so evident until today. He inquired with fear: what will happen every time he addresses, from now on, the History of Human Stiffness? That story shocked him, taking him back to his first years at the publishing house; he relived his youth, during which he had looked towards a fickle future, always changing and uncertain, challenging... although now he warned that perhaps it was not like that: in his narrative of yesteryear, both protagonists succumbed to their own rigidity, without contributing a minimum of originality. In theory, that was not the way in which he had conceived the future of his life, long before he turned thirty, but on the contrary, as an unprecedented chain of events, an endless adventure that would run through the pages of History, at the same time that he adhered with loyalty to the inheritance of his elders. The search for historical truth was his goal, but the tenacious firmness of that concept prevented him from reformulating it; it lived in him as he had received it, and time had fossilized it, callused it, armored it against all mutation. And now, in that hidden story, the seed implanted at the base of his nature came to light and was confessed in the open. That lack of creativity, which for decades he reproached himself for, could already be glimpsed in the genesis of his life as a historian, in an embryonic state, in the lines that he had just read. There he consented to the practice, perpetuated later, of clinging to definitive concepts, lacking in evolution, stripped of novelty.

?????????????? “Strictly speaking,” Bruno thought, “each absolute notion prevents us from proposing a new beginning, a break in the automatism of time, the emergence of the timeless instant of the beginning. Is it feasible to start again?” Like the navigator in his story, he tenaciously adhered to the inherited route, the one that would lead him to the safe discovery of the priceless treasure. But there it was: forty years later, subject to the same tyranny of having to clarify a historical instance in a few hours, with the imminence of a new edition of the Magazine. The importance of his principles began to be relativized, as it became evident that he himself had suffocated them without allowing them to grow. “There must surely be a form of progress that does not alter the essence of ideas, that updates them without their values being modified.” An Old Testament inlaid with mother-of-pearl sat on one of the upper shelves. If Noah had appointed him to select the species for the Ark, would he have included the ?????????????????? in it? It was not important, after all, considering the hundreds of floods that the species had survived... An unusual sensation overcame him: he had never conceived of himself taking the reins of anything, much less "selecting" a species for its survival. His position, unchanged since the beginning of time, had been “to comply”. There was no situation in his past, real or imagined, in which he had issued an order or designed a plan of action. That's why he worked isolated, in his fortified office, which protected him from exchanges with his peers. Hordes of young people had failed in their attempt to come close to drinking in his immense knowledge and, perhaps, to risk some auspicious contradiction.

?????????????? A new look at the diary, hopping between its volumes, resurrected another immemorial testimony. Ten years after the incident in which he lost his position, during an extensive study on a lost civilization even older than the world itself, an enormous crater of questions opened in his mind about the rigidity of the intellect and the intervention of the spontaneous thought in it. According to the theology of that culture, the cosmic order was established by the force of the word of its god, so that each entity had a precise and unique place in it. That logical hermeticism bewitched him; he could not help but continue digging through all available information, to sadly discover that there was very little to scrutinize. Then, finding himself unable to continue, he had the impulse to fantasize a mythology, designed to suit that divinity, and that archaic tribe. According to his notes, which he now had in front of him, Bruno fell into the depths of an unsuspected tribulation, noticing that the more he wanted to provide the character with a powerful intellect, the more difficult it was for him to prevent the vagueness of intuition; independent of himself, his pencil traveled the opposite path to that indicated by his determination. That dilemma erupted with force, and plunged him into a prolonged work paralysis, leaving his certainty about the superiority of intelligence above any other human attribute in flames. This new story had a name: “The preliminary refuge”, because of the last pause of his character before trying to free himself from all traces of spontaneity. The dismay of not achieving it widened, pulled by the awareness of a certain kinship between that fiction and his real life, which is why he also dressed that instance with a mantle of pious oblivion. However, thanks to his narration, Bruno ended up reluctantly accepting that no aspect of his work would no longer have an impact on his personal life, and saw his logical architecture crumble with the forcefulness of a Gothic cathedral.

?????????????? Immediately, the present took him back. The hours until the morning were becoming scarce, and he had to find a convincing solution, so that the nonsense of taking a random author would not end up delivering the coup de grace to the Living History Magazine. Bruno was not unaware of the struggle of the most important publishers to acquire it, although they kept it secret, nor did he doubt that, if the transfer was consummated, he would form part of the Olympus of exegetes to which, due to his background, he naturally belonged. (He had noticed signs of this mercantilist intention in recent months, but only now did he feel the impulse to act to prevent it, to take action.) Suddenly, his years at the Magazine, which he already felt was his, operated as a great incubator that protected him until that moment. The time has come to review his points of view, his interpretation of the truth over time, under the clarity of the new situation. “That's right,” Bruno thought nostalgically, “the years passed inertly, thrown into the world in a single push, by the same hand, in a single initial moment—never again have I felt the original chaos, the outburst of the beginning, and each instant became past tense with the speed of the zenith. There is no way to go back now. So, if I can't free myself from the past, I'll make a deal with it.” Without thinking too much, he grabbed the last volume of his diaries, the current one, and imagined a new ending for his story, the one he conceived that night in 1957. He rewrote it like this:

?

After wandering for years, exhausted, the Bedouin surrendered to sleep, realizing that the stranger could never escape the desert on his own.

In turn, the sailor understood that he would not reach his destination without help, so he decided to sleep at the same time.

The agreement led them to jointly elucidate the path, and to unearth the old chest together. However, the sailor's euphoria was instantly clouded:

The stone found, called xyloxite, was abundant in those lands, inside and outside the desert. He could have gotten as much as ?he wanted of it, should he had asked for it from the beginning...

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?????????????? That night, Bruno fruitlessly compared old editions of historical treasures, in order to detect some benevolent coincidence that would bring him closer to the true author of the lines he was ordered to publish. The text would go in the body of the Magazine; the documentation that supported the study, composed of the biographical file plus reliable and proven data of the time, was routinely included in a Historiography Notebook, individual for each case, of circulation reserved only for the employees of the publishing house, but which never abandoned Bruno's office. He kept them neatly on his shelves, to maintain internal order, every time he considered a topic exhausted.

?????????????? Since ancient times, a heavy burden had weighed on his shoulders, but he noticed that what until then had been affliction, transfigured into essential energy and impelled him to act in a way opposite to what he had done until that day, to take an initiative that would mean an innovation while remaining faithful to his beliefs. Today, his concept of historical truth was unchanged in its deepest essence, and an intense tranquility indicated to him for the first time that, no matter how much fresh air he allowed to enter from the periphery, that principle would remain so without requiring the weakest support. Bruno had that very night a premonition as firm as he had only experienced before some relevant historical discovery: he would be able to take off from his past when he no longer had to react against it but, on the contrary, abandon it gradually and carefreely. “Perhaps,” he thought, barely exalted, with the intention of transgressing a principle learned with severity, “an original act would be to abolish History, in order to be able to regenerate time from nothing.” And despite the burden of having to make a precise decision in such a short time, with decisive accuracy, and knowing that some solid premise was being repealed within him, imperceptibly, he proposed, before tasting the liquor of those who come out to seek his destiny, not to allow his peace to be altered when some new judgment were applied, in order to solve the problem and save the Magazine from an unequivocal death.

?????????????? That's why, when the next day, eager for news, the young man learned that the definitive version was already in the printing presses since dawn, he was not upset to find Bruno asleep with the placidity of an infant. He had, without any doubt, worked all night. It was almost noon; on his ashtray lay his pipe, and a colorful smoke gave off trails of perfume that firmly enveloped the emptiness in his office. His snowy hair, spread over the desk, inertly covered the draft pages; the intact knot of his tie revealed the drowsiness that, after hours of battle, had turned off his eyelids, freezing the last moment of his exhaustion.

?????????????? When leafing through the new issue, the young man read the full text of the scoop with pleasure, but a fierce vertigo overwhelmed him when he noticed that instead of the historical data, a neon marquee on the center page summoned readers to participate in the investigation, to send to the Magazine their studies and impressions on that passage of History, and to even risk the name of the character who, in each person's opinion, would have starred in it. The correct answer would be revealed in the next edition. As an additional attraction, and for pedagogical purposes, the authors of outstanding analyzes would be invited to collaborate in the Editorial Team, under the supervision of the new Chief Editor, a position with which Bruno anointed himself, and to go on in a few months to form part of the paid staff of the publishing house, should their work warrant it.

?????????????? Without searching further, and facing the silent calm of the sleeper, he attacked the Historiography Notebook corresponding to that unpublished text. His fingers restlessly slid over each page, again and again, tilting the tome in every possible way. He then started from the back, but obtained the same result: its pages, silent and blank, deliciously invited to be written.

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Text: ? Daniel Romano, 2001

Visual: ? Daniel Romano, 2024 | Adobe Firefly – Photoshop Beta – Illustrator

Unleashed impulses: renewal, hope, anguish, emptiness, stuckness, pride, strength, enthusiasm, passion, commitment, relief, determination, attachment, motivation, regeneration, fear, liberation

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