Something happened in the street today. It was around noon and I was walking along the pavement. At the traffic lights, a taxi driver was shouting abuse at a woman who’d stopped him turning where it wasn’t allowed. ‘Motherfucking bitch,’ the taxi driver yelled. The woman turned off the engine of her SUV, looked at the taxi driver and got out in a rage. ‘For your information,’ she said, ‘my mother died recently, and it was very sad for my siblings and me, so show some respect. Besides, that’s no way to talk to a woman. Maybe you never had a mother to teach you manners at home. And why did you swear at me? Just because you wanted to turn where it’s not allowed? Don’t you have a wife? Or daughters? You obviously never talk to women, if that’s how you treat them.’ When she’d finished, two or three people gave her a smattering of applause. By then, several curious bystanders had gathered, among them a plump policeman from a pharmacy, who was the first person to clap. The woman went back to her car. A man asked if she’d like him to punch the taxi driver who’d offended her. She closed the door, as if bidding farewell to the crowd. A driver honked his horn, as if giving the woman an ovation.

We may not all be parents, but we are all children. Perhaps this obvious fact was what prompted the general empathy with the woman. Perhaps it was also her courage and eloquence. And what would happen if every time someone offended a woman, she responded along those lines?

I wonder if our position in relation to our parents marks our character. If that woman, if that taxi driver, if Jonás or I are what we are because of where we are in relation to our parents. As if the members of a family formed a figure, a simple shape, like a rectangle, a cross or a circle. And we form that shape simply because we exist in relation to other people. I also wonder if the taxi driver’s insults, and his attempt to turn in the wrong place, are a sign of something bigger in this country. As if there’s an enormous whale swimming in the depths of the ocean and all we see is the odd bubble bursting on the surface, like that scene in the street.

The problem with this place. What is the problem with this place? There’s no one verb that can sum it up. There are so many. Several of those verbs are all over the press every day. Even though Spanish syntax shouldn’t let them, they insist, the verbs, in jostling to the front of the headlines. They even contort, the verbs, as if in a circus, on a tightrope, to be the most important words in the newspaper headlines.