THE HAT

Yesterday I bought a hat. How foolish. Today no one wears hats anymore. And the worst thing is that I don't even know why I bought it, I don't need hats. I'm not in the habit of covering my head with an accessory. But the hat spoke to me as I passed the window. I could hear it. I know, you're going to think me crazy. Hats don't talk, of course not. But if I say the hat whistled and made a loud bang, it's because I want you to believe me. However, rereading these words, I feel sorry for the idiot who, in an unfathomable future, in which there is not even the dust of my bones, would pick up this diary, open it and read the crazy things written here.

I started to wear the hat daily and the habit took root and started to bother me. I felt bad when I wasn't wearing my hat, when I was sleeping or taking a shower. It was as if my heart was ripped out and consequently my life was slipping away in a countdown, until I placed it again on my head.

My friends joked, laughed, tried to talk me out of using it. But over time, when they realized I wouldn't change my mind, they stopped joking and I say they even stopped caring, bothering me about it.

As with me, the hat also only hinged and came to life when I wore it. Unlike when I saw him in the window, without a "owner". But I didn't pay attention to that at the time.

I listened to him all the time. He told me things about hats, which are about the weather, whether it's going to rain or shine, and also things about philosophers and people's thoughts. Yes, the thoughts. This is curious and makes for a good laugh. The hat read the thoughts of people who also wore hats. That's why I started going to places where heads were covered by them. There was the central square, where retirees went to play dominoes on Sundays and also the church, and the bingos, I can't forget the bingos.

But I was not amused by such thoughts. They were tedious and almost always about grandchildren, pets and plants. Pamper the first, feed the second, and water the third, so that too soon passed and the boredom of life returned, with no new emotion other than listening to the hat's tales of some honorable heads it covered.

He then reported to me the hat one night about it. A murder. He who never mentioned atrocious episodes that involved him, now decided to enter into this issue. Perhaps he would notice my boredom and the hours I spent slowly in his company. Whether your inventions or not, I don't know. But that hat, according to his own account, walked on the head of a 19th-century Mexican gunslinger, who killed thirteen Indians, nine Americans and two horses. He was a thief, wanted in five states and who always managed to escape. In another story the smug hat told me that he adorned the head of a Japanese army cavalry officer, and that he fell in love with a geisha and kidnapped her from the house where she worked, waking up in the morning in the hut where he had taken her, surprised with his own gun pointed at him and his beloved wearing her hat, with a devilish smile on her face. It was the last thing he saw in his life. And he told me this one too, about this homeless Englishman who stole a beggar's hat and has been killing and robbing beggars ever since. There were so many other stories and this pertinent reflection that now distressed me, that I too would become a murderer like everyone else who wore the hat before me.

It was a firm resolution I took when I threw away the hat, which lay in a corner of the room. I could not let an accessory of human clothing be responsible for my actions, or worse, accept that these disturbed thoughts that began to occupy my ailing brain induced me to believe that such an object was the ignition that triggered a murderous instinct that of another way would reside forever dormant in me.

On the other hand, things for me started to change for the better after I gave up wearing the hat. My social life evolved and my downtrodden manner and apathetic appearance were transformed. And this new behavior, which alienated old friends, brought new ones together. This extravagance and sometimes offensive, portentous vocabulary brought me closer to the same people to whom I always felt indifference and insecurity.

It was at a party where my new hotspot skills could be put to use and for the first time, without stuttering or exchanging words, I had a pleasant conversation like the opposite gender. Her name was Albertina, but everyone called her Tina. Expert in the art of braggadocio, this one I was still on my honeymoon. Gross, with brusque gestures and obscene verbiage.

– Is it just me thinking this party sucks? – She said as she sat down in front of me, turning the chair where she sat.

– I always think it's a party bag for high society bigwigs who drink champagne and talk about things that only they think they're smart enough to understand, but they're just boring observations of how postmodernists are misunderstood by the great mass, for example.

"Yeah," she said, and grinned, taking a glass of champagne from the passing waiter's tray. – You look nice. What are you doing in a place like this?

- I do not know. I came with a friend. I had never been to parties like this. I got curious. Know what happens. He knows?

I started to get more comfortable with her. His ways that once shocked me now even made me laugh. There would be no other way to end this night without her in bed. And those were warm and unforgettable moments. I fell in love with her that night. How stupid.

The Japanese officer took over my dreams and kept me company every night, doing me a lot of harm and causing aversion to Tina, who at the same time I loved with all my strength and from whom I was reluctant to leave.

She just can't find the hat, ever. I cannot hesitate, he thought. Everything will be fine. I will not have the same end as him. It was dumb indeed. At some point he found out about the hat, evidently. And left him hanging around at home knowing the risk.

Time passed and our encounters were daily. I looked like a teenager in love. He had found happiness, love. But the hat, which is treacherous and does not forgive anyone, began to impose its dirty will and thoughts, as if it were the devil on the left shoulder.

"She wants to rob you" – "She doesn't love you, she just wants to be paid for by you" – "I'm not surprised if one day you have a surprise. Her lover steals from her or kills her" –"She's no good. It's no good"!

All of that, along with some truly suspicious attitudes of hers. They made me doubt their conduct and their intentions. I went on to follow her and found that she did indeed have a lover and they saw each other every day.

Willing to kill her, I waited for her at home one day. She took longer than usual and that day I didn't follow her. He didn't even need to, because now he knew where she was and with whom. She opened the door and found me standing beside the bed with the gun pointed at her head. He held a basket of fruit and a bottle of wine. He dropped it when he saw me. Just like a tear. She didn't say anything, nor did she have any reaction either. It just stayed there, stopped.

After a while without deciding whether to shoot or not I too started to cry and not satisfied with what the hat would make me do I ripped it off my head and threw it away. He fell on the bed and I shot him. A shot that went right through that demonic piece of shit. And I fell. The vision blurred and my strength was extinguished.

They said I woke up from my coma by a miracle. It's been a year since that episode where shooting the hat, my own head got shot. That's what the nurse told me. Tina, according to the same nurse, stayed by my side for three months. Every day she came and went. Sometimes he spent the night. That woman I thought was plotting against me, maybe she just had the sin of promiscuity, but she loved me.

Grace, the nurse, enchanted me with her presence. We spent a lot of time together after all and she enjoyed my company too. She also told me about Tina, that the day we were seen at the hospital, she was out of control, telling everyone the crazy story that I had shot her hat, but that the shot also hit my head, as if two bullets at the same time were fired.

She was preemptively arrested, but was soon released. Experts soon concluded that the shot could not have been fired by her from her position. And right after the shooting, as the nurse reported, a bunch of onlookers surrounded the house and called the ambulance and the police and held her there just in case.

The fact is, you couldn't prove that Tina shot me, any more than you couldn't, in the face of all the evidence, claim that I shot myself. The case was closed, without being concluded and to this day people talk about it.

Today I walked. For the first time I got out of bed. I looked out the window and saw a man calling for a taxi. Before he walked in I noticed the hat he was wearing and heard that bloodcurdling whistle again that alerted me to the disgraced future of yet another poor hat lover.