The master's student's mother occasionally forces him to glance at the newspaper, especially if it carries news about his future profession. “Here, read!”, she tells him this morning. And she gives him her mobile phone with the news from ARA. It waits behind it, because if I sent it to the The student puts the phone down on the table and says “That’s it”, as if he were a pupil. “And so?”, asks the mother. “And so, what?”, he replies. “What do you think, what would you do?”, the mother exasperates. “It’s just that the news doesn’t make sense”, the boy huffs. “What do you mean it doesn’t make sense?”, the mother gets angry. And he shrugs and repeats: “It doesn’t make sense!” He immediately picks up his phone, which he had left on the table, and checks the news. The mother shakes her head: “Tell me what doesn’t make sense, although perhaps you should say that you don’t understand it”. He then points to a word with his finger: pedaç
.
The mother looks at the floor. She doesn’t understand pedaç. And she doesn’t understand pedaç
, because her generation doesn’t patch. She wore patches on her knees, but fake ones, of course, when they were in fashion. In Spanish would she understand it?, parche?, perhaps yes. And would she understand that it’s a literary figure? Perhaps not, because, of course, she has never worn a real patch, the kind that covers holes in clothes when they are too big to be darned. Nor has she read any novel by Folch i Torres or Dickens (she doesn’t know who they are, they were born before her) where boys and girls are shown with patches all over. She looks up to explain it to him, but he’s no longer there. He must be on the sofa in the common room.
