Do bad things

Since I'm in an era of misdeeds, when I feel I have to do everything I haven't done before (skydiving, walking the Camino de Santiago, getting a tattoo), I decide I'll take the infallible railways to go to Terrassa and, from there, take the dangerous Renfe to my Bagenc village. My daughter tells me: "You're not old enough to be doing crazy things as if you were fifteen." She doesn't dare. She'd rather hitchhike and let herself be picked up by one of those criminals who trick young girls than let herself be picked up by Renfe.

I try to pay for the ticket, but the chosen machine refuses. When I ask for it, it goes out of service. The other one does the same. No person, no robot can help me. I put a card of who knows what into the (electronic, yes) reader. I pass.

Once inside, I already hear the exciting public address. "Trains on line R4 are more than twenty minutes late." More than twenty minutes is ethereal. It could be twenty-one minutes or seven hundred and three minutes. But I don't give up, because I don't know if my line is the R4 either. Once on the platform, a train arrives, with all the fanfare it deserves. Happy passengers, even happier informers. It's going to Manresa. I jump on it. My supposed train was supposed to arrive at 1:40, and it's now 1:30, but I won't let it escape. I get on it. I look for a plug for my phone. Oh no, we're on Rodalies. I sit down. The train doesn't move. I look at the rest of my fellow travelers, who show the expression – sleepy and alert – of lambs in a slaughterhouse truck. Will the train driver be able to leave at the scheduled time? At 1:40?

Well, yes. At 1:40 the train starts moving. I smile blissfully. Is what they say about Renfe just nonsense? "We're on time, aren't we?" I say to a woman sitting next to me. "Oh!" she says, smiling. "It depends on how you look at it. This train is the one that was supposed to come an hour ago. It arrives on time, but for the next hour's train, which we don't know when it will arrive."