An elephant in the room

Every era has its elephant in the room. That obvious thing we don't want to see, that problem we refuse to identify, to discuss. What is it that happens to us today, strangely unnoticed despite being right before our eyes? For centuries it was patriarchal machismo, finally unmasked. Also the abuse of nature, which has now turned against it. Or racism, which still lingers, if not reigns supreme.

Today, immigration—surely there are others—is a huge elephant right under our noses that we prefer to ignore: we exploit it, we don't give it papers, we keep it eking out a living among us, and, as if that weren't enough, we blame it for our malaise. A beating donkey and a scapegoat. When the pandemic hit, perhaps people began to see, in the silence of the empty streets, all the invisible elephants we live with. But we forgot too quickly, didn't we?

In the book Elephants (Empúries), winner of the Mercè Rodoreda Prize, Toni Güell has written stories in which, subtly and in the Calderonian manner, these great African or Indian beasts appear as metaphors that shake up our normality. Uncomfortable, absurd presences in the midst of our hectic, imperative lives. For example, that of a successful businessman, owner of a gas station empire, who, on the day he is being honored, keeps seeing the animal in question. He doesn't understand what's happening to him; he's dumbfounded. Perhaps the audience thinks he's grown up, that he's losing his mind. But he, without a doubt, sees the elephant and feels deeply disconcerted. Of course: he would have preferred never to see it.

As the author illustrates, elephants are not pachyderms, but proboscideans. Another strange piece of confusing evidence. Why is everyone so wrong? They are first cousins of the extinct mammoths. And they are the largest terrestrial animals that exist today. Not seeing them is a serious matter. How can it be, for example, that we don't realize that financial capitalism, through unleashed algorithms, is becoming an autonomous elephantine reality? Güell invents a society that emerges from the great crisis by recording the wind with a tax. What if we recorded the algorithms? It doesn't seem such an absurd question. He already has it, fiction, which is ahead of reality.

Friendship is, sometimes, also a kind of elephant. In this case, a zoo: immense and untouchable. Jordi, the protagonist of one of the stories, thinks that, unlike love, which we can examine inside out, "the fear of examining friendship has to do with the fact that, although it is also an indispensable fidelity, it is the one we are least pressured to be part of our lives. No civil code or any sacred code. It is exactly the same as what he says." the philosopher Marina Garcés in her latest essay, The passion of strangers.

In the story DelectationIn a train conversation, two boys and a girl try to imagine their future friendship, when the most beautiful and athletic person is a famous soccer player, and he shows up to pick up the other two in a Porsche. Suddenly, they too start talking about elephants, the ones about Hannibal that Escribano, the teacher, told them about. Perhaps because of their time there, they still "On the school field there are these very big holes". Nothing. This is friendship: surreal irony without papers. An elephant in the conversation. The intangible trace it leaves is, however, indelible. Is friendship the elephant that will save us?

Elephants It is written with elegance and fluidity, with wit and meaning. Toni Güell has entered Catalan narrative with a bang, like a subtle and delicate proboscis striding slowly, and who, as if by chance, makes us smile and think because he sees, and makes us see, both the significant details and the invisible elephants.