I go through a tunnel under the railway of the most literary town on the coast of Catalonia and I stumble upon a dilemma: two people ask for their will, separated by about seven meters. One sings, like a South American singer-songwriter, and the other doesn't, the other is limited to being poor.
Were they condemned to be annulled? Or does this competition of models between those who offer music or those who limit themselves to embodying a physical ruin, to the point that they neither carry a dog nor need a poster full of spelling mistakes, incite generosity?
The semi-darkness of the tunnel was a vision: how many citizens of the citizenry will not end up – we will end up – living by the will of the last one who crosses a tunnel, as long as Madrid makes the thousands of tunnels that it has not made and owes to Catalonia since the times of Kubala!
In the absence of a municipal protocol that regulates the minimum distance between applicants for the will through peaceful methods, what I feared most happened: the passers-by seemed to quicken their pace and those inclined to give the will paralyzed, uncomfortable with the obligation to choose between two different and respectable models.
I admit it: I went through the tunnel without giving coins to anyone. The musical repertoire made me think of Atahualpa Yupanqui or Facundo Cabral, so overwhelming, while the physical posture of the poor man, neither young nor a pensioner, conveyed such abandonment that giving him a few coins would have been as hopeless as not giving it.
I lacked patience to see which of the two left the tunnel first or if the conflict led to a fight about who had arrived first or if the Andean music of one or the physical abandonment of the other harmed the interests of the partner.
Perhaps, let's not be pessimistic, the Saturday morning went well and they ended up with two beers and some frozen bravas, toasting because neither one nor the other greases the axles of the cart, even though they call them abandoned and uglier things.
There are few people left in Spain, like those who rent accommodation, who give the price and add, optimistically: “And the will!” I made these ministers.
