The house was clean and tidy, the bed as neat as a marriage bed, the kitchen bright as a new pin, the bathroom exuding detergent odors, a sort of lemon smell, which one had only to breathe in for one's body to be purified and one's soul to be exalted. On the days when the upstairs neighbor comes to bring order to this single man's apartment, the occupier eats supper out, he feels it would show a lack of respect to soil plates, light matches, peel potatoes, open cans, and then put a frying pan on the stove, that would be unthinkable, the oil would spurt everywhere. The restaurant is close by, last time he was there he ate meat, this evening he will eat fish, it's good to make changes, if we're not careful, life can quickly become predictable, monotonous, a drag. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has always been a very careful man. The thirty-six videos he brought from the shop are piled up on the small coffee table in the living room, the three remaining from the previous visit, and which have not yet been seen, are in a drawer in the desk, the magnitude of the task ahead is quite simply overwhelming, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso would not wish it on his worst enemy, not that he knows who that might be, perhaps because he is still young, perhaps because he has always been so careful with life. To pass the time until supper, he started putting the videos in order according to the dates when the original film was issued, and since they would not fit on the table or on the desk, he decided to line them up on the floor, at the bottom of one of the bookshelves, the oldest, on the left, is called A Man Like Any Other, the most recent, on the right, The Goddess of the Stage. If Tertuliano Máximo Afonso had been consistent with the ideas he has been defending about the teaching of history to the point of applying them, insofar as this was possible, to his everyday activities, he would watch this row of videos from front to back, that is, he would begin with The Goddess of the Stage and end with A Man Like Any Other. We all know, however, that the enormous weight of tradition, habit, and custom that occupies the greater part of our brain bears down pitilessly on the more brilliant and innovative ideas of which the remaining part is capable, and although it is true that, in some cases, this weight can balance the excesses and extravagances of the imagination that would lead us God knows where were they given free rein, it is equally true that it often has a way of subtly submitting what we believed to be our free will to unconscious tropisms, like a plant that does not know why it will always have to lean toward the side from which the light comes. The history teacher will therefore faithfully follow the teaching program placed in his hands and will therefore watch the videos from back to front, from the oldest to the most recent, from the days of effects that we did not need to call natural to these days of effects we call special and which, because we don't know how they are created, fabricated, or produced, should really be given a much more neutral name. Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has returned from supper, he did not, after all, have fish, the dish on offer was monkfish, and he does not like monkfish, that benthonic marine creature that lives on the sandy or muddy sea bottom, from inshore areas to depths greater than a thousand meters, that can measure up to two meters in length and weigh more than forty kilos, with a vast, flat head equipped with very strong teeth, which, in short, is a most disagreeable animal to look at and one that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso's palate, nose, and stomach have never been able to tolerate. He is gleaning all this information now from an encyclopedia, finally prompted by curiosity to find out something about this creature that he has detested since the first day he saw it. This curiosity dates from times past, from years back, but today, inexplicably, he is giving it due satisfaction. Inexplicably, we said, and yet we should know that this is not so, we should know that there is no logical, objective explanation for the fact that Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has spent years and years knowing nothing about the monkfish apart from its appearance and the taste and consistency of the pieces put on his plate, and then suddenly, at a certain moment on a certain day, as if he had nothing more urgent to do, he opens the encyclopedia and finds out more. We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other. If we had time and if impatient curiosity were to prick us, we would always end up finding out exactly what a monkfish was. The next time the waiter at the restaurant suggests this inelegant member of the
Lophiidae family, the history teacher will know what to say, What, that hideous benthonic creature that lives in the sand or on the muddy sea bottom, and will add firmly, Certainly not. Responsibility for this tedious piscine and linguistic digression lies entirely with Tertuliano Máximo Afonso for having taken such a long time to put A Man Like Any Other in the VCR, as if he were hesitating at the foot of a mountain, pondering the effort required to reach the summit. Like nature, they say, a narrative abhors a vacuum, which is why, since Tertuliano Máximo Afonso has, in this interval, done nothing worth telling, we had no option but to improvise some padding to more or less fill up the time required by the situation. Now that he has decided to take the video out of its box and put it in the VCR, we can relax.