I cross a tunnel under the railway of the most literary town on the coast of Catalonia and stumble upon a dilemma: two people are asking for their will, separated by about seven meters. One sings, with works by South American singer-songwriters, and the other does not, the other is limited to being poor.
Were they like that, unwittingly, to cancel themselves? Or does this competition of models encourage generosity between those who offer music or those who confine themselves to embodying a physical ruin, to the point that neither carries a dog nor needs a poster full of spelling mistakes?
The semi-darkness of the tunnel was a vision: that of citizens of the citizenry who will not end up – we will end up – living on the will of the last person to cross a tunnel, as long as Madrid builds the thousands of tunnels that it does not build and owes to Catalonia since from the time of Kubala!
Without a municipal protocol that regulates the minimum distance between voluntary applicants by peaceful methods, what he feared most happened: pedestrians seemed to speed up their pace and those who were inclined to give their will became paralyzed, uncomfortable in the face of the obligation to choose between two different and respectable models.
I admit it: I went through the tunnel without giving coins to either of them. The musical repertoire made me think of Atahualpa or Facundo Cabral, so overwhelming, while the physical posture of the poor man, neither young nor pensioner, conveyed such abandonment that giving him some coins would have been as hopeless as not doing so.
I lacked patience to see which of the two left before the tunnel or if the relevance resulted in a fight over who had arrived first or if the Andean music of one or the physical abandonment of the other harmed the partner’s interests.
Maybe, let’s not be pessimistic, Saturday morning went well for them and they ended up with two reeds and some frozen brava, toasting that neither one nor the other greases the axles of the cart, even if they call them abandonaos and other things ugly
There are few people left in Spain, like those who rent pillows, who tell you the price and add, optimistically: “And the will!”. To these, I would make them ministers!
