“But it’s only a question of direction,” repeated Mister Juarroz, at the precise moment in which, blissfully unaware of the fact, he once again entered a dead end.
Something on the Roof
Mister Juarroz’s wife was beginning to get rather irritated.
“Are you going to climb up or not?!”
Mister Juarroz, however, wasn’t paying the slightest attention because he was thinking.
“The invention of the washing machine enabled people to stop washing clothes by hand.
“The invention of the telephone spared people from having to travel long distances only to deliver a message.
“The invention of the stepladder gives people the choice of not having to climb up on it.”
Names and Things
To show that he did not submit to the tyranny of words Mister Juarroz would call objects by different names every day.
Thus, half his workday would be spent in attributing names to things.
Sometimes, he would get so tired of this creative task that he would spend the second part of his workday resting.
When he dozed off, the new names he had attributed to things would get mixed up in his dreams with the old names, and sometimes Mister Juarroz would wake up so confused that he would drop the first thing that he tried to hold, and that thing, whose name for a few instants he couldn’t for the life of him recall, would break.
A Long Journey
As he liked to read and was setting out on a long journey, Mister Juarroz decided to put six copies of the same book in his suitcase.
Journeys
But Mister Juarroz’s suitcase would be so heavy that he never managed to travel anywhere.
Mister Juarroz came to the conclusion that he could not take his entire house with him when he traveled, because he would not be going to another place but would instead be going toward his own objects. Essentially, he would be going toward his own house. And such a journey would thus be quite unnecessary since, when you come to think about it, Mister Juarroz was already in his own house.
Thus, in order for it to be a serious trip, Mister Juarroz felt he shouldn’t take anything with him: not a single item. Bound for the unknown, he murmured.
Just as he was about to leave the house, this time without any baggage whatsoever, he began to think that being thus unprotected he would catch a cold, and starve, besides running the risk of catching various other existential and hygienic ailments.
Therefore, at the last moment, he inevitably decided to stay at home.
Darkness
“The lights! The lights!”
If there was a kind of electricity that could make the darkness appear as there is electricity to make light appear, the number of possibilities would double. But the monthly electricity bill would also double.
“However, it seems to me to be quite unpleasant,” thought Mister Juarroz, “that it is enough to switch off the lights to have darkness appear.”
In order to give due importance to darkness — at least as much as we give to light — it should be necessary to be able to switch on darkness.
Thus, when the lights are switched off, darkness wouldn’t immediately appear but instead there would be some kind of intermediate state.
“Only things that cost money are considered to be important: it thus seems to me to be imperative to be able to switch on the darkness and pay for it,” thought Mister Juarroz, a split second before he hit his knee against a table.
“Who switched off the damn lights?!” yelled Mister Juarroz irritatedly.
The Absence of Physical Proof
Since it was quite inelegant not to see anything when there was so much to see, Mister Juarroz stayed at home, glued to the window, watching the world go by.
Since it was possible to hear the silence within the house, Mister Juarroz would open the window to let some noise in for, at heart, he hated silence.
Since hands are, above all, machines to touch things, when Mister Juarroz was at home in front of the open window, he liked to place his left hand against the glass.
Since one of the most endearing characteristics of human beings is their capacity to smell and taste, when Mister Juarroz was at home with the window open to see and hear, with his left hand against the glass in order to touch, he also liked to drink a hot cup of coffee.
Since he liked to think, when Mister Juarroz was at home with the window open, and his left hand against the glass, drinking hot coffee, he would lose himself in his thoughts and, thus, when his wife would ask him what he had seen and heard from the window, Mister Juarroz never knew what to say because he could never remember anything. And only an empty cup of coffee proved something: that he had indeed drunk some coffee.
Mister Juarroz often thought that the world would be more physical if things that were seen or heard would also eventually leave an empty coffee cup, so as to prove to his wife that he was not wasting time, as she accused him of doing. However, even after his bouts of thinking, nothing changed. Since thoughts, too, do not have any proof. Just the coffee, just the coffee — he would murmur.
Shadows
“Of course shadows aren’t good for hiding shapes,” thought Mister Juarroz, “but they are excellent for hiding colors. But if you hid a white square in a shadow, everyone would make fun of you.”
However, just like a diver diving in water, inside a shadow anything that is black and flat disappears.
“For example,” thought Mister Juarroz, “a shadow is an excellent place to hide a black square. The only problem is that it is an ephemeral hiding place.”
“But there is no hiding place that is not. All hiding places depend on the sun,” Mister Juarroz murmured enigmatically.