The way the world is perceived by the narrator of this microfiction does not simply align with how adults see it. We glimpse him as a small creature. Curiously, his capacity to observe everything, his patience to unravel things from below, his gifts of precocious reflection exceed the average of much older ages. And yet, there lingers a sensation of uncertainty. An explanation that is not easily given. That ambiguity is one of the qualities of this narration.
Nor does the grandfather easily fit into the category of ordinary adults. That elderly man knows how to appreciate a reality that others do not perceive with such precision. It matters not that, as they say, one ear fails him. Others consider that the grandfather simply “hears what he wants” and that his regular interlocutor is the cat. They seem more like excuses than truths. Perhaps that man belongs to a specific breed, to one who approaches reality until he encounters it and remains enchanted by its possibilities. Captivated. The narrator lets us know this. He detects tides, elevated breaths, the expressions of the cats and their clandestine movements. The narrator brings near mysteries to what our senses do not always reach. Whoever credits what he says may glimpse that not everything important can be perceived through ordinary senses, or that it cannot even be formulated in words. But literature penetrates there, crosses the walls of the dreamlike, leaps the limits and their heights. And we observe that the grandfather and the grandson are bound and resemble bonds that perhaps blood alone cannot explain. They are both of a similar sensibility. They accept that silence enlarges spaces of intimacy, of freedom, of strangeness, of enigmas or of possible discernment. And they understand each other.
All this clamour of words is deftly defined with art and the subtlety of sketching with soft, concise strokes by the writer Sara Coca in «Incomprensión». That is why it is worth reading this story of hers. A story subtly suggested, faintly, where notions contrast, oppositions exist, in addition to diametrically opposed characters. The noise and, opposite it, muteness. A healthy ear and another that, instead, barely distinguishes murmurs. What others perceive and, on the contrary, what the grandfather perceives. And perhaps above almost everything, the differences and outcomes between speaking and the act of staying silent. Which lead to that immense swing between certainty and the blur of the first imagination or, failing that, enduring and wise intuition. Or they cause one to pause and wonder what the first words should be that connect us to the world and its scores.
Don Hilarión Eslava, a nineteenth-century Navarrese writer, defined music as “the art of well combining sounds and time.” The melody that follows «Incomprensión» links movements in a musical structure. First, the introduction of the grandfather and his peculiar way of listening and the opinion others have of him. Then, the deepening: the narrator suggests how he understands what is really happening. And it closes —a final left in suspense— with the narrator’s entry as a character who attains a protagonism similar to the elder. The venerable literary matter of the puer senex or puer prudens (“old child, sensible”), with the virtues of wisdom and prudence that are considered the marks of those who are adept at humanity. And in cats. And in what we do not uncover ourselves.
Why do others consider what is normal or comprehensible? A question that echoes through the centuries.
To continue discovering the Sevillian Sara Coca, a journalist, cultural manager, facilitator of Creative Writing workshops, and poet, we can delve into her books Micromundos (Albanta, 2009), A qué sabe lo que somos (Algarabía Ediciones, 2012), No quieras saber tanto (Ediciones en Huida, 2018) , Desubicados. Microficciones Audiovisuales (Tusca Editoras, 2021), Caóticos (BGR, 2023) and Disonantes (Platero CoolBooks, 2025).
***
Incomprensión
The grandfather hears better with the ear that does not listen. He asserts that he perceives the sound of the stars, the tides, and even the breathing of those birds that circle above our house. But everyone believes that he hears what he wants and that he only speaks with the cat.
What is true is that with the sound ear comes the noise of the world, with no certainty whatsoever. Or so I am told while he strokes the feline, which shifts its ears to the rhythm of his words.
However, I prefer silence, even if it is a illusion. Except for the grandfather, others wish for me to learn to say mom and dad as soon as possible. ■
————————