I had a masterpiece in my bare hands. It was a novel, carefully written. Perhaps the novel of my life, not for autobiographical reasons that you could surely speculate, but because its fiction, meticulously created, was my sacred key to a free life. It was that slot, hardly found for those of us who are shy and who live chained to the impositions of our subconscious.

It was that novel I talked Nora so much about. It was such a novel that would give me that little push I needed so much, I told her. She wanted to know what I meant. I told him that I alluded to two things: the first, the economic benefit I would receive from being my novel the winner, for which I was extremely confident; the second, to the graceful impulse to which, undoubtedly, every leap to fame was to submit.

After two weeks of delivering the novel—impeccably placed inside a folder—in the location of the contest, a colleague of mine, a great friend of the institute, had given me a good hint that I would receive the prize. He was the contest's manager that the powerful Central Publishing House carried out every five years, very close to the evaluators chosen for the occasion. In every sense, his words were worth a lot: even in the very essence of speaking, because, in the solitary October, I hardly dialogued with anyone.

I thought I should remain calm, but indefectibly the emotion and anxiety came to invade even the slightest of my thoughts. In this way, during the lobe nights when a debt stalked the small room in which I lived, incarnated in Old Martinez, whom I had always hated, I managed to find a tender distraction in the days to come. I noticed that if I were to win, I could finally reach my adult longing to be a free man: without debts to pay or rules to follow, brought to discussion by the deplorable fact of living in a stranger's house. I wanted to live by my rules, get myself a place in the countryside, and never listen again to any soul say, "Rent-day is coming."

My novel would be my escape from that detestable doom. It was as simple as that. If I were to win the contest, then I would celebrate the victory against the endless battle of life. I would say, "I've already suffered, dear life. Now it's my turn to enjoy, life"; or at least that was what the number of copies sold and of awards received by the winning works in past editions illustrated me.

Emotion! Soon the words of my colleague were confirmed. For such reason, I ended that young night at Don Vallejo's bar, celebrating with strangers the reception of a letter:

Dear Albert,

I have the joy of notifying you that your work, titled "Adam's apple," has been selected for publication by the Central Publishing House.

We specify that you will be present at our offices on October 27 of this year, at 2:00 of the day, to define royalties and copyright agreements.

I want to remind you that, as announced from the outset, the filing date is unique. If we do not show up on the day and time indicated, we, without any complaints, will immediately contact the second writer on the waiting list.

Thanks a lot.

Jorge Peglau

Freedom! Freedom! I came out screaming. Freedom! "What's going on?" a stranger asked me. I told him I would finally be free, that we would all be free, after all. He asked me if I was being tried for a crime, or if I had perhaps been in jail for a while, to which I replied that no, that nothing had to do freedom with a cell. "You shouldn't be saying that," he claimed. I immediately thought that that man had lived in prison, or at least such a thing was illustrated by his gaze and his invisible halo embalmed in darkness and blood. I told him that although unimaginably hard to accomplish, an imprisoned man was free to escape and that freedom had nothing to do with the limits of prohibition and permission. I left him thinking.

I rushed out to my small room, located a considerable number of blocks away. My legs, free, swung joyfully without ceasing. But, nevertheless, a contrast occurred. A tender contrast: while the joy was freed from my thin body, a gentle cry began to be announced from the sky. Drops and drops fell that afternoon. It kept raining when I got home, and there was no change while I was asleep. I slept like I have never slept before, dancing with the rhythm of the rain.

The days passed, and I was getting closer and closer to being free. What exclusive power did Old Martinez had over me if I would consider him a non-existent being in a couple of weeks? I would not see him again. Of course, I would pay him rent, but I cared little about her claims when he heard me sing at night, with the black sky still crying, while I was dancing with the sole rhythm of the rain.

In the mornings, I saw myself reflected among the puddles of the unnoticed concavities of the street, and I observed in that reflection an increasingly free man. Where before I saw a man chained to a pole or prostrated on a cross, now I saw a young man embraced by the sky or resistant to actual darkness.

I sang at night, listened to the complaints, dived into the bedsheets; the sky was still crying.

And it continued to rain in the evenings until the dawn on October 27, when the reddish sky exclaimed to me that the day had come.

I left my room, maybe in a hurry. It was too early yet, but I preferred to wait, indifferent to the time, rather than missing the opportunity of my life. I realized that I had not read my novel since the day I delivered it, and strangely, little had I cared. It had been easy to write it, but later on, it consumed my afternoons: I had been reading it for months, in search of any meticulous error that could injure the idea I so vehemently wished to express.

I was almost running, not understanding why. I listened to everything, just as I had never done. I was free to listen to everything. I was free to stop, and I did. I stopped. I breathed. I was also free to run again, and I ran. The long journey seemed to be shortened with my thoughts: I was free to shorten the path.

The birds sang, and the sky was bleaching—fresh milk in the morning. Few walked the sidewalk. I was running. I crossed several avenues, hearing rumors coming from the cafes, whose mass of man began its morning pronunciation, and analyzing the murmur that the sights from the cars propelled; they were free to do so. Running I was.

And suddenly, from among the whispers that the city offers so early in the morning, an inescapable hustle arose. Two shirtless men were bare-knuckle fighting on the sidewalk across the street. I wanted—using my freedom!—to pay attention to the problem, to decipher those free faces that freely brawled on the public road. And I slowed down my pace. And I saw them so thoroughly that I felt that I was inside the fight. I was now trotting and soon walking. But… but… but...

I kept walking freely, looking around. I was at the beginning of the zebra crossing. A truck was holding steady to my left, respecting the pedestrian. I kept watching around me. People were still waiting without plunging into the asphalt. I wondered why they were not crossing, but I could not find an answer. The fight went on; free people making use of their freedom. I looked at the free faces of the motionless pedestrians, and then, on the opposite side, at the free combatants' angry gestures. I wondered who all those people were. I kept walking, submerged in black and white. I kept on walking… hits… hits… motionless… kicks… free…

It kept on walking. I looked at the traffic light on my right for the first time. I could not see its color, or perhaps there was not any color. I turned to my left; the respectful truck had no driver. No. The driver was just coming, behind the motionless bodies. It was a parked vehicle. I kept on walking. I turned to look at the light again. In fear, I hesitated as a man free to be afraid, or, rather, free to build his fear. And I kept walking, and I recognized the light color on my right: green. Green for cars. Green for trucks. And I had already walked too far. A kaleidoscopic river would come to run over me. I turned to my left, and it was coming.

I could hear the rumbling of the car horns, of a billion car horns. And I was no longer free. Neither were those motionless bodies because they could not decide how to react to my catastrophe. The fighters, who wanted to keep on brawling, were not free either because the noise of thousands of voices and screams and sobs, externally and internally, stopped their fight unconsciously. They turned to see my body, if it could still be recognized as such. And they saw it for a while, but not freely, because they did not keep fighting, which was what they really wanted. Something had prevented them from continuing their fight. It was an ungovernable occurrence. After all, they were not free. Because although they might have chosen to return to fighting after the catastrophe, they were never free to decide what would happen with the fight, nor sure that they would not be hit and killed by an intoxicated driver, who was perhaps out of his mind.

Some may argue that they could have decided to go elsewhere to fight, but that is not pertinent to the case. Nowhere in the world, neither at any time, can one be safe from the misfortunes that may occur! Neither the most perceptive, not even in a cage resistant to all the ills of the planet, would be able to predict the future, nor what would happen outdoors, which in any case could catch their attention and stop the fight.

But let us talk about me now. I, overwhelmed and dead, now realize several things.

I woke up in a black and obscure environment. I do not know if this is heaven or perhaps a simple transitional room in which God expects me to reflect on my sins. Maybe this is life after death: an inexplicable empty land; probably words cannot describe it.

I have noticed, picturing my poor corpse, that there were many contradictions in my thinking, such as when I told the stranger in the bar that I was just free and that freedom was in no way ruled out by prison bars. But, contrary to what I predicted, neither did freedom have to do with paying a debt, however costly; following that wrong philosophy, I too was indefectibly free. But no, I was not free and never will be. If I were to be free of my fate, I would be agreeing royalties with the publisher at this precise time, but, unfortunately, I had no way to be sure that such a thing would happen. No one, absolutely no one, will ever be free.

I thought I could when I got the money to separate myself from Don Martinez, from his debt and claims. However, that's not what freedom is all about. It does not even exist! The tale of freedom has been thrust into the depth of our knowledge, but we have rarely thought that we are slaves to a higher force. I do not want to despise the souls—I do not know in which another way to call them!—who were slaves to other men, but the slavery to which I refer has nothing to do with being the property of a fellow human, but with being the property of something—something!—superior, whose nature and explanation escapes our understanding

I was never free, or at least not entirely. I was not free neither when I decided to go to sleep every night, nor when I decided to get up and see myself in the mirror, nor when I decided to take a bath to have a miserable drink at the bar. I have not been free because there is much I cannot control.

In the dark environment I am in, something pops up. It is something. But I do not know how to describe it. Doing my best, maybe I can define it as a "presence." A "presence" has appeared to me, but I do not know who or what is present—I just know it is.

"Do not confuse freedom with omnipotence," it tells me.

Of course not, I tell it. I know that to be free is not equal to be omnipotent, or else I would be God. I know there is a distinction between being able to have everything and making free decisions with what you have. But that is not really pure freedom either, I told it.

"If you say you are not free, you are exercising your freedom to not be free. Man is condemned to freedom. "

But no. It just does not go that way. Freedom cannot be reduced to being free to want something. And now I understand we are free from many things, such as wanting and deciding with what we have, but we will never be free to define others' freedom. If we all have equal freedoms, they overlap. Just look at my death! I was walking calmly, but someone's freedom overlapped mine and killed me! Whoever was driving was free to decide to go that way, but still, he could never know that I would be there in front, at the most unwelcome moment; he is not to blame for anything.

But now I see it clearly. It is not that we are not free because we cannot do anything we want. After all, we can do anything, just in the way that I, If I would have desired, could have murdered any colleague. In fact, we are not free because we do not know the future. No matter what I do, no matter whether I do it with intention or not, everything contributes to the formation of the person I am today, in almost incomprehensible ways, so that, irreparably, I am building through my decisions, the decisions that I will make in the future. Ergo, I am a slave to my past! Sure, we are all slaves to our past. And in a world of slaves, I will never be able to predict how a particular slave will act in the future, so I will never know what will happen to me because every minimal action done by a slave affects each of the other slaves.

"You do not deserve to be here," it said.

If I am a slave to my past, my past owns my future. My past owns the world! But what about the past of my past. How could I know which was the actual past, owner of the world? I realized then that there was no such thing, but that it was the sum of all past ages, even before my existence. Everything that happened before my birth is included in what leads me to behave in the way I do today.

I was dead.

Now I was part of the past, owner of the world? No. I continue to exist, just as, in essence, all the elements belonging to what we call the past still exist. I do not understand...

But… If everything that happened still exists, somewhere in the universe, in some dark environment like I am now with what I call "presence," then we all exist and will exist forever.

I then realized I already existed in that black environment. I remembered the "presence." I had always existed in that black environment. I even remembered the time before I was sent to earth, the time before I was born. And then I remembered many more things, more than you humans can now imagine.

"You exist," it said.

I realized, slowly, that little had to do with freedom, except that, in reality, we are not free to exist because we do not decide it nor want it. And in turn, I realized that life and death are so minimal compared to existence itself. There is no eternal life, no eternal death. There is only existence.

I finally understood it. Yes. Finally. And I saw the "presence" as directly as I have never seen it. And I intensely wished to escape. I wished, although knowing that there would be no result, the thing that every person—I say it in this way for you to understand—when he ends his condemnation of life and finds himself in an undecipherable environment as in which I am now, should wish:

I wished I did not exist.