Panic Signs

31. The Statue

DISOBEDIENCE AND THE BEAR HUNT I hesitated a long time before giving a title to this text. As the reader will understand when reading it, disobedience and bear hunting are two different things (which makes it impossible to use the conjunction “or”), but they are closely related, to the degree that one term alone could not be used in the title, without causing detriment to the other. I decided to maintain their connection through the use of the conjunction “and.” That way, the latter becomes curiously revealing. The narrator. The first disobedient act happened when we decided to invade the lawn around the flower beds in front of the Cathedral and the Movie Club. At that moment, about a hundred people were leaving the small hall that had daily showings of old movies, some of them censored. That day, they were showing one of Bergman’s old films, The Seventh Seal. The film speaks clearly about our present-day situation: feudalism as a social and economic structure in our countries, the rich, the masses of poor people, and the bears dancing in the centre, on a wooden table, abundant and well-served. Bears are ancient animals, with legendary vigour and energy, who can be caught by hunters using various tricks. They can do this because they (the hunters) are more numerous than the bears. They are well-armed, they are equipped for winter, summer, and seasons in between. They can detect them from afar with their helicopters that buzz like blowflies, with their —— 60 —— 30 binoculars that scan the prairies, hills, and mountains, and as if that weren’t enough, they have a great variety of traps, especially prepared to hunt bears. There are specialists who have spent their lives, years, stuck in laboratories making snares to catch bears. Then, the feudal lords (and some who aren’t, but secretly wish they were, collaborate with them as if they really belonged to the same class) leave their houses, their winter homes, their summer homes, their party halls, their drawing rooms, their museums , their family vaults and together form a large hunting party, whose purpose is to get a bear. Once they’ve singled one out (and almost all the other animals of creation collaborate in the hunt and persecution, sometimes due to hunger and sometimes due to envy), they hurl the greatest and most varied quantity of arms at their disposal against him. After using dynamite, gunpowder, turpentine, a poisoned dart, an axe, a pike, a lance, a halberd, a club, a crossbow, and if they finally get to corner one, they carry it triumphantly as a trophy to the palace, to the country house, to the summer house, where they exhibit it to astound the ladies of the court. The ladies, at first step back, terrified. An animal so fierce and so strange, how could God, The Supreme Creator, have made it? This animal amongst us? Then, feeling more confident because of the strict watch over the animal , they get up the courage to examine it better. In fact, some attentive soldier, one of those indulgent ones who guess the wishes of their masters by merely looking into their eyes, is capable of separating the tussock of hair that covers the bears’ tail, to show the monster’s magnificent sexual organs to the astonished lady. The lady, admiring, fakes modesty, but doesn’t allow the bear’s hair to go back in place, to cover its private parts, but begs the soldier to keep it that way, while she goes and invites her friends to take a look at what she has seen, which is so incredible. This is the theme of The Seventh Seal: the bear hunt. That’s also why we see signs everywhere, guaranteeing a nice reward to whoever locates a bear and provides information to the closest master. I have seen a large number of ants assigned to that task by their queen. If they manage to find one, it’s possible that their work will be over forever. Apart from the pleasure that inferior beings feel from informing—it’s a unique circumstance, the yearnedfor moment to participate in something, they, who are always in the middle: they are not hunters (they don’t share their nobility, or oligarchy) nor are they bears. Basically, they prefer to be swallowed up by the feudal lord than protect a bear. And besides that, there’s the advertising. I said that the first disobedient act happened when...