By Miguel Murado

YOU MIGHT have read on these same pages Alberto Mahia’s chronicle about a speechless man who is being tried in court for insulting no fewer than five police agents. If you did read it, then you’ll know that he didn’t used mime (with which you can insult so much and so precisely) but words, quite unexpectedly in a mute. The trial is taking place in Corunna through a sign language interpreter, amid an embarrassing silence, and yet the five policemen remain firm in their denunciation. “Sons of a bitch”, “faggots” and “idiots” they claim the mute called them while they were taking him to the police station for disorderly behaviour in a bar. The state attorney is pledging for a one-year prison term to punish the mute for the disorder, insults, and for allegedly attacking the policemen. Voiceless or not, what is clear is that the man is by no means armless.

I won’t go into that, though. Let the judge decide what’s going on here: if it is the mute who speaks better than he pretends or if it is the policemen who hear less well than they think. What interests me, and amazes me actually, is that the most obvious explanation seems to have been overlooked, that is, that we are before a miracle. Not that there are no precedents. In his Dictionary of Miracles, the Portuguese writer Eca de Queiros details all the prodigies (in alphabetical order, for easier consultation) from Saint Aldebrand’s miracle of the roosted partridge to Saint Narcis and his justly famous miracle of the flies. Unfortunately, I don’t have my copy at hand, but, if I’m not mistaken, the prodigy of the mute who recovers speech is a recurring one (to say it all, it is usually recovered to make more saintly comments).

I don’t know what to think, and leave the matter to the doctors of the Holy Church todecide: whether the Almighty has manifested himself at last, maybe for the first time, in the City of Corunna, or not. What I want to note is the sign of the times. In times gone by, those policemen would have fallen to their knees singing prayers and then travelled to Saint James’s tomb as humble pilgrims. And what happens now? Well, only that, apart from Alberto Mahía and me, nobody spreads the news of the prodigy and the police agents who, far from changing their uniforms for the guise of holy men, issue a warrant and sue the miraculous man. Oh, times without mystery! No wonder the saints appear less and less frequently.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia