A leap of faith
Matt taught me the secret to love the damp, dark English winters. He's a calm, reliable guy, an inveterate optimist with a toddler with ringlets. Before getting married, he asked me to give him a hand with the groom's speech and I managed to convince him to say something nice about the bride. It wasn't easy because Matt doesn't talk about his feelings, but he did it in the end. He loves his wife very much, although it seems like she's not going to be waiting for him tomorrow, at the finish line. She thinks he's gone mad for wanting to run an ultramarathon. A 100km race through the countryside. One of the hardest athletic tests out there.
Tomorrow is the big day and to my surprise he suddenly seems out of character, so neggy, nervous and scared. 'I'm going to be in so much pain... I won't be able to move the following day, my whole body will ache as I run.' I don't know what's gotten into him, or how his legs will respond tomorrow, but I haven't got the slightest doubt that he will run that 100km... can't explain why, but I know it. He says he'll let me know if he survives so I can offer his lesson to someone else in case he doesn't – Matt is a student of mine.
As per usual, as soon as my work ends, I forget it exists. This is supposed to be a good trait of mine, I guess... yet given how much I enjoy it, it seems a bit strange. Perhaps I have some sort of partition in my brain, like in the hard disc of a computer. Me from Tuesday to Friday, from 10am to 5pm; me the rest of the time. The rest of the time has been difficult to enjoy lately, though. Weekends have become Mondays and this weekend a heat wave has hit the coast, all the way up from Africa. They say high temperatures can drive some mad and turn good people into criminals. There are more murders in summer, in fact. One of them, many years ago, happened in a small village like this one, on a day when thermometers allegedly read 52 degrees. A farm worker and devoted worshipper of the Virgin of the Valley got so hot that he lost his mind and killed his entire family in a matter of seconds. I bet that once night fell and the temperature dropped he experienced the most terrifying human feeling: that of having done irreparable harm. I've never killed anybody but I know too well how an atmosphere can be maddening and I feel for that man. If time didn't work as it does and his family could have come back to life, I wonder if they could have forgiven him. I mean, it's a damn hard thing having someone kill you and then giving the man another chance, but maybe, because they felt that torrid heat too, they would have taken pity on him. Who knows?
And that's what was crossing my free-time brain when I suddenly got a message from Matt, as if one partition of the hard disc could send a message to the other: he had done it. He had run that bloody ultramarathon the same way he had spoken about his feelings at the wedding: overcoming the fear, daring, making a huge effort.
Overcoming the fear, daring, making a huge effort.
That would have been the only way in which the resurrected family of the farm worker could have possibly forgiven. A leap of faith. And after that, it'd be up to the Virgin of the Valley.
