Praise of spontaneous responsibility

A passenger at the departure panel at Barajas airport (Madrid) .Paul Hanna / Bloomberg / EL PAÍS

The other day a couple with two children approached me in Barajas to ask me, waving the ticket, what was that about T4S and how to get there.

I told them that T4S was called that because it was Terminal 4 Satellite, a purely intuitive data that I checked on the internet later (I do this a lot; it turned out to be true, but it might not be: it was data that was not going to change anyone's life ), and that to get there you had to take a subway.

I had to take it too, I explained, so they could follow me.

That filled me with responsibility. I saw them go to their luggage carts bound for Mexico (to live? On vacation?), And the four of them prepared to follow me wherever I took them. I thought of that moment, while they placed their journey in my hands, of the extraordinary trust that human beings continue to have in each other without knowing each other at all. In how we continue to fill restaurants, which are, together with operating rooms, the greatest social pacts of humanity: you are a stranger who I do not know what you are going to put on my plate or take me out of my body, my life is in your hands, I trust you, I don't know your name and I don't care.

I looked back to confirm that they were following me. I got a little nervous because I carry responsibility fatally, and I began to think about the typical chain of errors that occurs when trust is blind and the guy you trust, you idiot: they all end up on a plane to Pamplona.

Finally we go down the escalators and stand in front of the subway that leads to T4S. I don't even know how many times I checked that it was that metro, and that in T4S there were indeed flights to Mexico and Santander, which was the place I was flying to. We parted ways there, or so they believed, because I couldn't take my eyes off them. That was already my mission, and I wanted to be so convinced that it was going well that I lost count of the times I saw on the screen that from T4S he was catching his flight. Like when I get up in the middle of the night three hundred times from bed to go to the computer and check in the report the next day that I wrote a name correctly (it is in 301 when you would have discovered that you wrote it wrong).

They didn't help my peace of mind either: in the wagon I saw them checking all the time, and on one occasion, glancing at me, they asked a third party if the subway went to T4S (they have cheated on me several times ―or many, I I don't know - but having them put on your face is priceless). What I did was follow them to their boarding gate, stand there looking from afar so they wouldn't get distracted, and then go whistle to my door so as not to miss the flight. And now while I watch the series

and the speech in that very peculiar family, in which a girl defends the noble causes of the planet while mistreating her brother without mercy, I thought how very lightly she would have advised a friend or a relative on something, and how punctilious and rigorous that these advice or help are made when asked by a stranger. Maybe it has to do with the first or only impression that others will take of you, even if they don't even know your name and tomorrow they won't even remember your face, and in a way that's fine. (Mistreat who you love, no: clarification for new sensitivities).