Ithink it will be difficult to save myself. Not because I have lost hope. Truth be told, I think that word no longer belongs to me, but because I have lost, without a doubt, something more fundamental: the thread that binds what I am to what I was. Memory, under these circumstances, does not disappear all at once. It frays. Like an old piece of fabric someone pulls from one corner, slowly, unhurriedly but without pause, knowing that in the end nothing will remain.
I am tied to a chair.
That is the only thing I know with certainty. My wrists against the armrests. My feet against the legs. A strap around my neck that does not tighten completely, only enough to remind me that someone put it there. That there was a decision. That there were hands.
I cannot be sure that there was prior torture. My memories do not give me that, only fragments. Let me see: a door, a very bright light, the smell of metal. But not a clear sense of before, not an ordered life I can claim as my own — and without that before, what am I? A man tied to a chair, simply? A body with a name?
—Manuel.
The name reaches me from the outside, as if someone were saying it in another room. As if it were being lent to me.
Sometimes I think there was no executioner. That it was me. That at some moment I cannot recall I decided to sit here and fasten the straps with that strange precision that now feels foreign to me. But that makes no sense. No one chooses this — and if someone does, he is no longer himself when he does.
Unless this is something else.
Unless I am nothing more than a character and my author, in a moment of cold cruelty, has placed me here without explanation. Without a past. Only with this present that smells of burned flesh and silence.
But even if that were true, even if I am not real, the pain is — and the fear as well.
"The chair is what remains. We are what passes through."
I hear footsteps in the hallway.
And then I understand something I did not understand before: I do not need to remember what they did to me to know it. It is enough to hear how they drag another man into this room. Enough to imagine what they will do to him: take him from his house, kick him in front of his children, strike his wife and laugh when she falls to the ground, the youngest left motionless from a blow to the head with the butt of a rifle. Enough to know, with a certainty that does not require memory, what they have already done to me.
The other will take this chair.
The same restraints. The same strap. The same smell.
And I will be free. Not because I have been forgiven, but because they need the space.
That is what we are here: shifts. Interchangeable bodies in a chair that never changes. The chair is what remains. We are what passes through.
They will come to untie me.
Not for me. For the next one.
—Manuel.
The voice comes again, from the hallway, from somewhere I cannot see — and I do not know whether they are calling me, or the one who comes after. I do not know if that name still belongs to me.
Perhaps that is the worst part of all this. Not the pain. Not the restraints. But the moment when a man no longer knows whether his own name corresponds to him.