El indiferente azul del cielo

An old fakir faces his last performance at a sleazy disco; the Australian landscape becomes hell for a frustrated writer who survives on the road as a cosmetics seller; a couple of outsiders set up a bookstore in an insignificant village and a nine-year-old boy spends his afternoons there, witnessing prodigious events; the power of music captivates an old neurologist and pushes him to commit a crime likened to one of Mefisto; a general is faced with his revolutionary son without turning back; a morning of hunting in the mountains turns into a horror film; a humble German refugee in Patagonia hides a page of heroism against the Third Reich in his biography; Florence will be the idyllic setting of a piano competition that will mean a titanic effort for a certain participant.

These and so many other characters fill this book by Emilio Aragón, anonymous beings whose lives place them in extreme circumstances, as if the toys of passion and dreams. Stanley Kubrick said: “If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad”. However, these stories demonstrate that beings, focusing on their trifle, can grow or shrink according to the will with which they dominate the plot of their life, and thus manage to give meaning to the experience even against the indifferent blue sky.