Perfection is the return

Connecting the dots had become a matter of honor. Sometimes straight lines came out, of a mathematical thinness, lines as pure as a clean sky that has rid itself of every scrap of waste and kept only the lean cut of an unaltered blue. Other times the lines were like dirty blots, stepdaughters of a trembling hand whose stroke is itself the proof of a fault, a dishonor, a sin.

Some nights, in the idleness where life reveals its monstrous face, everything filled up with sinuous dots, like tadpoles quivering in a pond, and all he managed were loose basting stitches that barely grazed the surface of each dot, in a dizzying dance of electrons that stunned him with that anarchic, obscene movement. His life, then, looked to him like a series of dots with no plot, no knot and no ending.

He remembered the magazine he had leafed through at the hairdresser's, a magazine of round dots, of tidy shapes, with connections proof against doubt and suspicion. It explained the formation of beliefs as the necessary outcome of biological evolution, of tribal animals that need patterns and intentions as much as they need bread and water. And yet he could barely assemble a handful of beliefs, let alone a system of beliefs like the one that article preached. In the word "system" a flash of omnipotence appeared to him that left him inane. In the blind darkness, his naked body barely covered by a fermented quilt, he admitted in surrender that he had no lines with which to connect the dots of his life.

Work offered no escape either from that sensation of gazpacho, of mayonnaise, of a whole mixed and beaten together that would not let itself be ordered with chains and purposes. That magazine dwelt on the virtues of the scientific method for sculpting beliefs with a pedigree, thoroughbred beliefs, but it said nothing about the soups, the creams, the sauces and, in short, the jumbles in which he watched his existence emulsify. All that liquidity did not add up to a story, to a plot, though it paid for the daily transactions that at least had their part on the stage of the various economic, social, political and psychological theories he could always turn to in search of linked dots.

Perhaps love, that hurried sip, that extraordinary aggression that crosses the tissues like an ethylic bomb wrapping them in its blazing radiation; perhaps in love, precisely in the exception that stands out above the laws, he might find the longed-for warp threads. But he was alone and could barely stir the embers of some past fire that had been born already refusing to be caught by the reasons that wanted to dissect it in the fortress of their nets.

An intuition, an experience capable of founding an ancestral order of beliefs, lodged itself in his consciousness. "Perfection is the return" he repeated several times while savoring each letter as he used to drink the gazpachos of childhood in those summers where life was all pleasure and one infinite afternoon of games and hiding places, a continuum of ancestral rites, magical years still innocent of the horror of becoming an adult. And he became a dot.