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The morning changes names. The morning changes the world. Voice

His eyes slowly opened. They stayed obstinately awake against his will, in spite of the need for rest that he still felt. He observed the hair and nude back of a person who was his love. From somewhere near the back of his eyes, a strange consciousness of his own breathing was spreading. He knew that all these perceptions which were bringing him a personal experience of physical and corporal hyper-reality, had started when he had fully breathed in her odour. When, some time ago, he had begun to love this person, he had said that her hair was decidedly green (especially in Nordic countries).

They already knew then that they would become people of certain relevance. Their names, lineage, education, style and character guaranteed it, just as they would for their children. We deserved it all, our life, the objects we possessed. He was surprised at having doubted so little, at having lived through the stages of his successful destiny with such confidence. He had always considered himself to be a capable and necessary person, and he had always been treated as such. He turned over. Though dinner had been light the previous night, he had the sated sensation only possible in someone who has never suffered hunger.

Without getting out of bed, his mind established a certain relationship between the hair of the person sleeping by his side, his thoughts at that very moment and what had happened on television the night before. Watching it usually helped to quieten the murmuring in his head and left him anaesthetised till the time came to go to bed. But that night it had produced in him a strangeness that had no origin in any particular moment, or in any specific program as sometimes happens (that clear feeling of “being soiled”). That dysfunction of the television program revealed itself through multiple details with different meanings: the hairdo or the frameless glasses of a host, the use of the sentence “this country of ours” in the mouth of a hostess with lying eyes.... From the time it was, he had related his discomfort to the effects of lack of sleep and he had gone to bed.

He looked at the clock confirming there was still a long time to go before he had to get up and get ready to leave for his office that morning. Over the years he had occupied so many. He could remember himself in each of them on his first day at work. And now that he was playing this comparative game for the first time, he could see that his attitude and person had changed with each move. Better wages, more security, more responsibilities... But also less time, more disappointment, more automaton-like.

He thought: each of my gestures in the confusion of an office, in a meeting, make up the options within the spectrum of people’s resources. I act as mediator at the precise moment at which everyone else opens their eyes in the morning and sees the hair and nude back of a person who is their love. The simple opportunity of appreciating a series of emotions in that instant, their form and intensity, even the possibility that someone may or may not have a single moment like this in the whole of their life, passes over my desk in some way. At the moment of breathing in the odour of her hair, I’ve discovered how mistaken my life has been, shaped like a trajectory of forgetfulness of all that is important. I have put reality between brackets to decide about it, but perhaps I haven’t been able to distinguish whether I was making a world for men and women, or I was simply operating within the succession of interests whose only true motivation is economic benefit or personal ambition.

He opened his eyes wider to enter more consciously into reality. An immense sadness overcame him. Sometimes an irreparable caesura occurs, a point at which everything starts to exist or is modified in relation to what has already started. And it had. Right at this moment something has opened, something inside me which is too clear, with implications too basic for my own life to be possible for me to deny it, or even to modify it so that it would be more convenient.

Who am I to mediate in other people’s lives?

He got up. He was already too wide awake to yawn but he stretched as much as he could in a last, vain attempt to rid himself of the new person he was starting to be.

He felt all this very clearly, and with the same clarity he sensed that if somebody asked him to explain what was going through his mind, he wouldn’t know how to. It was difficult to understand that the light in his bedroom had made him think, precisely in that propitious instant: how many smiles will I have erased and how many will I have drawn and from whom?

The following thoughts drove him to the conclusion that the people who had surrounded him for years didn’t have a life, and mistook emotions for representative ironed shirts. He was well aware of the labels that defined mutual recognition inside those groups. I’ve sought security in that recognition. He asked himself: how many of the decisions that I have taken, the acts that I have signed, were mine? How many were really necessary and who needed them? Of the decisions that I have taken, imbued with executive and supposedly democratic powers, I know that some confirm me as the appropriate person. But how many legitimise my privileges and my respectability, if that is possible in any case?

He had taken decisions many times in the name of the many, in the name of a whole country. He had taken them in places where those many had never had a chance to enter, knowing secret information that had been influential or even determinant, but which common people were not considered well-prepared enough to know about; secrets that History and school books, would not record. One learns at home, in the street, that the people have not come of age and need guidance.

Once in the kitchen, having washed his face without noticing at all and looked at the weak morning sunlight, noticing it very much, he sat down. All of that was important. Someone with a soft sound of pullover, with an unseen smell of woollen pullover that rubs, served him coffee. It was his daughter. Thank you, he thought. She was the first person he had seen awake that morning.

I had, I thought I had a project, criteria, principles... I was taught that my status and social prestige made me strong and I shouldn’t think beyond that or search for alternatives. Me, like all of us, but why is everybody like this? Why is everybody heartless? In all this time I have forgotten that every one of my actions allowed or prevented the actions of others. He was watching his daughter come and go, preparing the beginning of the day, and thought about other daughters.
In spite of the precautions he had adopted so that life would not hurt his loved ones, he knew in those moments that they would be in vain, that decisions by others might make them unhappy and deprive them of developing their ability to choose. Now I believe I understand attitudes and behaviours that before I was not even capable of conceiving as real.

It frightened him to think of the amount of damage that forgetting his responsibility could have caused. He felt he had lost the capability to look other people, any other people, in the eye, and for the first time he needed to recover it, basically to be able to look at himself.

After a second sip of coffee, he thought: I have seen how the paths of honest and intelligent persons have been undermined in the upper reaches of power. I have myself enjoyed the rewards for docility, by reproducing the accepted social model, while those who tried to remember our responsibilities and answer for them, were punished. I have been witness and party to the obstruction of their initiatives, the discrediting of their work and the neutralisation of their efforts.

There are decisions that affect diverse groups of humanity that have to be taken and someone has to work at thinking out and carrying out solutions for everyone. Not, however, under a conception of the public good adulterated by the prevalence of an exclusive, patriarchal sense in the administration of democracy, but under the criterion that it must be the will of the people which conditions the constitution of the State and not vice versa.

His sadness was now giving way to a new illusion. He felt that this painful process unleashed by the odour of her hair, that shame of himself that he never thought he could ever feel, was giving back to him not his innocence but, yes, the vitality, the inner strength and energy which comes from the conviction and the hope of developing the potentialities of one’s own life.
Each and every powerful man and woman looked at their women and men just as they were sitting down with them at the table, with washed faces and sparkling eyes. Within each and every powerful man and woman, this strange process had been revealed that morning in different ways but with the same sense.

Each and every powerful man and woman decided: from today on, I'm not coming back anymore. I have freed myself from the blindness I had learned and I can no longer continue to participate in the perverse lie that constitutes the present system of power. I have no alternative organisational model, but at least I know that I refuse to reproduce behaviours which are causing the division between the levels where the political will is formed, and the levels of its execution and administration. I have to reflect on how to use my experience and all my doubts to find alternative structures that can replace the present distribution of power and its benefits, and allow people’s involvement in decision-making. And I know that it all starts with looking for the people who are already working in this same direction, from the fissures in the system, which are the consequence of the contradictions caused by the established, controlled disciplines.

The idea of the world as a small, safe, controlled place that is making progress, has not made us any less miserable, nor any less fearful. The way in which this closed, fragmented and minimised conception of reality has affected people demonstrates the social and individual need for things to happen that allow us to regain the right to criticise, to have a voice and to act, and that, by means of new (non codified) strategies manage to make the need for this revaluation evident and the alternatives, credible.
It will not be easy. In the same way that we have compelled ourselves to forget we are a people, and we have defined ourselves, in contrast, as a ruling class, we have also compelled the construction of an identity among the working class that excluded their own consciousness of citizenship. In spite of the damage it has brought to people in their lives, it is in the fact of being a people that the potentiality and will to think that things could be better than they are has always resided. But this will should be transformed into rights, which requires a collective effort to build and maintain them.

The powerful men and women did not go to work.

They were immediately substituted by other men and women.

The morning changes names. The morning changes the world.