Our Areta

A man who is not dark or big or changeable goes down the dark street of a large city in a country in transition. His name is Germán Areta. He seems to be a common man, a citizen of a dying dictatorship, but he has no illusions about the future: he knows evil and opposes it instinctively, and understands that the validity of that confrontation does not depend on the form of the State but on the heart rot of men; and by the way, not a few women. It has been a long time since he slept well but that does not diminish the wakefulness of his senses, which are the raw material of his business: private detective.

He makes a living fighting for money with the declared misery of others, but does not accept any assignment even if it would help him start a new life in a good flat on the side of the Retreat. She has plenty of courage to punish a batterer who doubles in size so much as to challenge a vicious plutocrat, and lacks the sentimentality needed to excuse a woman who refuses to save herself. He manages to find out the truth without setting more traps than just ones, because his fixed gaze accesses the soul of his interlocutor like an infallible probe. Arrive, observe and understand. But it doesn't judge.

Areta loves boxing , the only sport that is not a game, and also dry martini, which enters into one like a dissolved knife. He is forgiving the abstract human being, and if due to weakness he must be courteous, he will be so sooner with his faithful secretary than with his sophisticated client, but no matter how much chastity he wastes his assistant, he does not allow him to arrive at the office five minutes late or explaye in the story of his sexual exploits. It is no prudishness, because he knows how to throw a kiss when he is sure that it will be well received, but something once damaged him enough to prefer the kisses that are received to those who risk. If necessary, with the pain on the outside, destroyed but not defeated, he will be able to plan a revenge in a church because he does not have to hide anything from God.

Areta is nostalgic since he was born, because he himself is a piece of a world that is gone. A world in black and white where decency is recognized by contrast, but also a gray world, which is the color of melancholy, skepticism and the monochordic eyelid that drains the lives of loners. Areta does not waste words because he measures the exact weight of his meaning, so that when he warns a miserable man that he will kill him if he recidivizes, he is committing to do so at that moment. And the miserable knows it.

Areta thinks he doesn't look like his face and he's right. Because Areta only resembles the matter from which Garci's dreams are made. And if there were more people like him, I think the world would be a much better place to live.

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