This man, who endures a double ordeal, suffers a triple punishment: that of the "condemned man walking with his hands tied in the middle of the street," that of the enraged crowd accompanying him to witness the sacrifice, and that of the hundreds of eyes watching him through the window _ all of them severe forms of torture and condemnation, in which man has specialized.
In the first, second, third, and fifth stations, there are clear references to the double ordeal, with expressions like "I am before the gallows," "rope and cross," "rope around my neck," and "rope tied to my neck," respectively. But the ritual that predominates is that of crucifixion, with the scourging, the ordeal already recorded in our Christian memory. Fragments of scenes narrated in the Gospels mingle with those of an ordinary man, who, by analogy, could be any one of us. A man who suffers deprivation of human freedom; cannot prove his innocence of a supposed transgression; endures the betrayal of a friend, a kind of biblical Peter who, however, equates to Pilate, washing his hands to absolve himself of responsibility for that crime. He has, like Christ, a mother who suffers for him and with him, and a father (powerful-absent) who does not remove the cup of agony. Differently, this man (a doctor? a pharmacist?) who also heals, but not by extraordinary means, has a wife and child and a childhood (Christ's only period of life for which there is no record), a paradisiacal childhood, where he learned about confinement and the leap to freedom.
The short story, in an atmosphere of "A rally, a procession, or something similar, if it weren't for the blood wetting the ground," seems to end with the man's crucifixion and the agony that precedes his death: "this asking for water, for water, for water, water, water." This thirst is not physical. In the symbolic sphere, thirst can be the desire for human completeness. But does the character's life really end this way? Does he literally die on the cross?
The beginner reader might imagine that the story of a character who actually relives Christ's scourging, going through another via-crucis, unfolds here. In truth (if one can speak of truth in fiction), the action is internal and not external. A product of psychological pressure, everything happens in the character's mind, who, within a very limited space _ the prison _ for a reason we do not know, imagines such an ordeal. Therefore, in the First Station, in a kind of delirium, "which comes and (...) flees," the character sees everything "in a fog or nebula" or "through shadows," even saying "I have a vision," referring to the hanging. The dilution of the plot, constructed in a tenuous and discontinuous way, contributes to the reader who is not accustomed forgetting information that, when put together, gives us the keys to the puzzle. This type of narrative is indeed built as a game. It is indeed an interactive art, similar to some computer games.
There are two modalities of time in this short story. Several expressions connote that the time in which the narrated events, with the diffuse episode of crucifixion, take place is conventionally called psychological time. This is internal, subjective, immeasurable, created by the imagination of that anonymous character who lives a drama we do not know and which needs to be deciphered. We cannot measure how much time she spends in her "deliriums," in the form of interior monologues, although they extend to the fourteenth station. Expressions such as "and you felt yourself walking" (II station); "Scenes succeeded each other and you tried to machine-gun memory with successive scenes" (IV station); "and the sound of hammers (...) could be a vision solely mine" (V station); "The memories" (VI station); "placing recollections in each place" (VIII station); "The thing [the delirium] came back slowly (IX station); "The agony again" (X station); The agony of the night. (...) "And you have nothing left (...) but to think and be alive through thought" (XII station) all of these, among others, are indicators of purely interior or psychological time.
However, there is also, in this short story by Miguel, another time: chronological time. But instead of being external, objective, measurable, perceptible to the reader, with allusions to the hours of the day or other explicit temporal markers, as happens in traditional narratives, it is not easy to grasp its duration. One gets the impression that it, as usually happens in any short story, encompasses no more than a day in the "prisoner's" life, as there is a reference to the morning, in the First Station, and to the "agony of the night" in the Twelfth. These are data seemingly thrown in randomly, but, even so, they are markers of this chronological time.
A psychological space is also noted, created by the imagination or delirium of the narrator-character (the street, the path, where a scourging similar to Christ's is re-enacted) and a physical, "concrete" space, where he finds himself, apparently awaiting the judgment of a crime we do not know, a space that, in a first reading, can be understood as that of a prison.
The action, consequently, is also purely internal. There is nothing that can be called external action. The man (anonymous) is confined and perhaps immobile in a prison, or a kind of prison, all the time, going around "within himself," which means lost in his speculations. He does not move within this space. Only his memory, or his psyche, travels. However, it is in the "Third Station," when the character's sense of anguish intensifies, that he refers, in the first person, to "the fetid cold, ugly floor of this prison." Later, changing the point of view to the second person, a narrative voice states in the "Eighth Station": "You are again in that prison." And it reaffirms, within the same narrative focus, in the "Tenth": "Your prison was like your childhood home." Finally, in the "Thirteenth," changing the point of view back to the first person, the character herself confirms: "the sound (...) reached me through the iron bars of a fifty-year-old window." Fifty-year-old window. Here again is the ambiguity proper to the poetic. Besides being a physical object tied to a chronology, this qualified window can refer to a mature being (fifty years old) who, from his human prison ("iron bars"), can self-evaluate. Perhaps for this very reason the character, through the vision of a second person, admits that he has nothing left to do "but think and be alive through thought."
Note, incidentally, that the author uses, from the beginning to the end of the narrative, these two angles of visualization of the story: first and second person. This latter modality has never appeared in conventional narratives. It is an experimental resource. The alternation of these two focal modalities seems to assume a symbolic sense of complicity. A certain way of saying that the "I" and the "other" look at each other and identify with each other.
