Everything fits in one hand, by Juan Tallón


amazing to think that hand that gives you that high-five is the same one that, a moment before, maybe pushed someone on the subway, and only a little while later, puts a spoon to his mouth, or waves goodbye from the sidewalk, or puts cream on his face , or shoos away cigarette smoke so no one can smell it. The hand finds no borders. knows how to do everything. It serves to make it clear to someone that you love them, or that you don’t anymore, or to pull the trigger, slap Rita Hayworth in ‘Gilda’, turn off a tap, make the scissors gesture.

What can not be done by hand? Sometimes its scope is so abstract and opaque that absolute power fits inside it, and there’s still room for more power. She is able to take down thousands of people without anyone looking at her. In some people she leads a very discreet magic wand life. Other days, however, you don’t know where to put it, as if she were an outcast, something too clumsy and nondescript to be seen, and you leave her in the darkness of your pocket. Perhaps these are those days when, full of confidence, you believe that the world can be directed with your eyes, without touching anything. I remember when, as a teenager, I would sweep the kitchen with one hand in my pocket, and my parents would be outraged instead of admiring me for it.

If necessary, a hand turns the world upside down. Or at least the part of the world within your reach. A few weeks ago, with the same hand that the faithful to Pablo Casado stabbed him in the back, they applauded him shortly after, when he only seemed alive and no longer painted anything in the PP. There is no record that his hand does not dominate. “The hands of the president mark the determination of the government,” he wrote a few months ago Moncloain one of those tweets with which you have to laugh unintentionally.

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The hand knows when to be subtle, cold, clever, when inattentive, ingenious. Everything, the good and the bad, is pushed by one. You can’t count the things we do with it. Even thinking can be done for a few days with your hands. Ultimately, the head asks you to rub, remove, move away, lift, force, bring closer, destroy, and in this way the hands complete the cycle of ideas. They alone change everything in a second, in hours or in years. They have the secret of all speeds. They can do everything: first one thing and then the opposite, as happened with the PP. In their infinite and silent gestures they declare love, hostilities, compromise the word, confirm friendship, fear, faith, crime, even the taste of things when you lick your fingers.

Is there a way to stop the feet to the hands? Julio Cortazar He did it in one of his first stories, in which the protagonist, Plack, gets into a fist fight with his friend Cary when Cary tells him “you’re a coward, a scoundrel, and also a bad poet.” As a result of the brawl, Plack’s hands begin to grow. First they don’t fit in his pockets, then they drag his fingers across the floor, and soon he can’t get them through the doors. He didn’t tell the end but, in his despair, Plack decides to cut to the chase.


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