None of this would help me find the right words to explain to Isabel that I wouldn’t be turning in an interview or an article or anything about Vicente Rojo. Despite having felt so close to an important revelation, despite almost having grasped the sort of mystical truth that seems capable of transforming a human being, everything was very confused. I had ignored Isabel’s calls along with the emails where, for the millionth time, she asked me when I would be able to send her the text. She had said it was a good week to find space for it in the newspaper. It was as if she was addressing herself to a person who wasn’t me. Those calls and messages seemed to be for a journalist who was capable of making decisions and working through any setback. I was an insecure, timid, and fat woman, unable even to comfort her own fifteen-year-old daughter, who was going through a traumatic experience.
When Berta arrived home, I asked her to show me how to play prosopagnosia. At first, she didn’t understand, because she and her friends must have called it something else. She told me she was very tired, because she had spent the afternoon with Mario. When I asked her how he was, she didn’t answer. I’ve already tried to describe how during those weeks any comment or gesture related to Mario acquired a theatrical patina. It was clear that my daughter’s response to her friend’s situation was a solemn silence. But she did explain that playing just for the sake of playing didn’t work. When they did it, they were training themselves to see things differently. I asked her if she’d achieved her goal. It took her a while to answer, and after a silence that had nothing dramatic about it at all she told me that for her, the ibis wasn’t ugly at all. And without waiting for me to respond, she told me how her classmates had decided to paint a mural with Mario’s face on the wall of the gym at school. It would be a huge mural, a tribute to Mario from all his classmates.
She had fallen into the sofa, her head resting on a pillow, her eyes closed. I was surprised by what I was seeing, as if we had already started playing prosopagnosia. She had shaved her hair again, and you could the little hairs beginning to emerge from her stubbly scalp. I didn’t recognise the huge hoodie she was wearing, and I imagined it must belong to Mario, but I didn’t ask her about it.
‘The art teacher won’t let us paint the mural.’
‘Well, I think it sounds like a nice idea.’
She opened her eyes at the sound of my voice, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at some fixed, unknown spot. I thought that she had, in fact, learned how to see things differently.
‘They’re waiting for the final act.’
I was surprised to hear my daughter use the phrase ‘final act’, another sign of the drama imposed by Mario’s illness.
‘They say we have to wait, but the art teacher said it’s not a good idea to cover a whole wall with graffiti. She doesn’t understand anything. She couldn’t care less about the students. I bet she’s angry because we asked that artist friend of yours to help us.’
At that point she turned her gaze on me, and it felt like she was trying to look at me from the back of her eyes, from the exact point where the optic nerve transmits images to the brain.
‘You know he’s not my friend, and besides—’
‘Daniel says he can do it himself, because he’s good at drawing and he’s done some cool graffiti already, but I think it’s a good idea for a real artist to help us so it doesn’t turn out to be a crappy portrait. That’s why the art teacher got so angry. They’re waiting for the final act and then they want to do something more formal, but we want to paint the mural now, so Mario can see it. We already know that artist guy is crazy, but I bet he can help us, he must know something about painting. If they don’t let us, we’ll go at night and do it, but then everything will be much more difficult.’
‘I met with your teacher this afternoon.’
‘I know, Mum, I know. But all you parents have to help us now, because it’s really important for all the students, and even more so for Mario. I already told everyone you’d talk to the artist and ask him to help us.’
Berta’s gaze had softened again, and she looked at me in the way she had since the truce imposed by her friend’s illness. She was demanding once more that I behave like a mother. My voice sounded almost painful.
‘Berta, I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything at all.’
She got up from the sofa and came over to me. She hugged me, and I wasn’t sure if she seeking consolation, or offering it.
‘I know, Mum. I know. But it doesn’t matter.’
Intellectuals have an obligation to denounce abuses of power and every element of society whose purpose is not in line with the struggle towards the collective good. Good artists are considered as such because they place otherwise hidden truths before the eyes of other human beings. The purpose of journalism is to show the population the greatest number of events possible so that we can be aware of just how much is going on in the world we live in. Then we can understand that each and every one of these events affects us directly, some way or another. The intellectual, the artist, and the journalist have a responsibility to the society in which they live. This is a responsibility they cannot shirk. We spent many hours discussing this and other similar themes in my last class at university. I have to say they always seemed like very abstract topics that had little to do with my daily life. On the other hand, there were other students who engaged in the conversation with true fervour. They were convinced that those of us gathered there at the university had, or one day would have, a responsibility to our society. At the end of the day, the State had spent a lot of money building universities and paying professors and lecturers to instruct us on how to build a better nation: one that was more advanced, more supportive, more egalitarian, more cultured, more conscious… In those discussions, my classmates took each other on, brandishing their enthusiastic idealism at our cynical professors who told us that in a best-case scenario, once we left the university with our degrees, we might find a job in a media outlet where our role would be to replicate messages of power. As for me, I was incapable of joining either side of the argument, simply because I was unable to see that every event happening anywhere in the world was directly related to my life, which I felt was circumscribed with much closer and more immediate boundaries.
I was thinking about all of this on the last afternoon I met up with the man who thought he was Vicente Rojo. It had been very difficult to secure this last interview. For several days, the artist had ignored my calls, and I thought that perhaps he, too, had realised that once his sham was discovered, the best thing would be to blow up any bridges that linked us. He must have been thinking that I knew about his absurd lies, which is why it would be so uncomfortable to have to talk to me, because I’d probably demand an explanation for everything that had happened. All in all, I think I deserved one. When I was about to give up on the idea of talking with him again, Berta asked me to keep trying. In another absurd twist of events, now it was she who needed that man.
Finally, I reached him on the phone. I thought I could detect impatience in his voice. We made no mention of our previous interviews, or of my supposed interest in writing an article about him. I told him I needed to speak to him about something related to my daughter’s school. We set a time and place, and that was the end of the conversation. He would meet me two days later, in the late afternoon, in his studio.
It was a gloriously sunny afternoon. I left home a few hours earlier than the time I’d agreed upon with the man who thought he was Vicente Rojo, because I wanted to take a walk and think about what I was going to say. But the only thing I remember is that I spent a lot of time in a café close to his studio. I was going over all the notes that I had taken in our previous meetings. I thought that I truly must not have been as smart as I had thought I was in other moments of my life, or that there must be something seriously wrong with my brain if I had never realised that, throughout all the conversations we held, that man had limited himself to reciting fragments he had memorised from books written by the real Vicente Rojo, especially from his Open Diary. It ought to have been very easy to catch on to what was happening. I should never have wasted so much time, I should never have called Isabel to propose working together on something that turned out to be such a nightmare, and I should never have told him so many things about my life. This last point didn’t just make me uncomfortable, it made me furious. Having been fooled by his absurd game and giving him access to my most personal thoughts put me in a very disadvantaged position. His idea of me must surely now be as terrible as my own.