El viejo bufon

 

Bruce Wayne, Batman, has also left Gotham City and this world long ago. The grave of Mrs. Wayne, the famous Catwoman, has disappeared under the elegant ivy of a middle-class cemetery in Gotham. No one in Gotham is afraid of the black creature of the night who used to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. The mask with the two little ears, the long cape in the shape of wings, the belt and all its gadgets remained for a long time, full of dust, in the basement of the mansion. 

The former billionaire, the philanthropist who organized parties for the city's elite, was remembered as an old man, sad and thin, who had lost his mind. The colossus of more than a hundred kilos had melted with the years, consumed by the grief of a traumatized child, never consoled. Batman, one of Gotham's most iconic characters, succumbed to his psychotic tendencies. In his later decades, he was downright insane.

Batman never had superpowers. He grew old, watching superheroes like Superman go to the stars, go on adventures that were forbidden to him. He stayed in Gotham. A simple human being, he gradually left his training, put away his gadgets. He no longer wanted to enforce justice in his city. The times were getting away from him.

After the death of the Joker, especially, the world no longer had any interest in Bruce Wayne. He had no desire to stop the new generation of criminal gangs. Most were illiterate, crack-fogged morons. He almost felt like cheering for those poor guys who were destroying this society of dumb consumers. You know, we are regressing intellectually in the West. The average IQ is falling, just like it did in the year 500 A.D., at the time of the "barbarian invasions" in Europe. In short, for intelligent and cultured people like Bruce Wayne, the civilization of Rap and the cap is very similar to the barbarian invasions.

Not even Catwoman could give him the will to live. The poor girl had inherited a considerable fortune when she married Mr. Wayne. She had bought everything she could, had sunk into the mundane, the overkill. She had cheated on him, taken drugs, but never erased the memory of her years as a prostitute. Bruce Wayne had not tried to save her. He had watched her sink, indifferent. One day, Mrs. Wayne had slit her wrists. He had her buried and had shut himself up for good.

His strength, his agility, his intelligence even, had been left to waste. He, who had once had an iron will and never backed down in the face of adversity, no longer felt like fighting. Wayne Enterprises had been sold.

After the death of Alfred Pennyworth and Lucius Fox, the Batmobile, the Bat-Moto, the Bat-Wing or Bat-Plane, the Bat-Boat or the Bat-deltaplane and all its gadgets had been donated to a museum that no one visited in those days of sanitary confinement. 

In the Batcave, underneath Wayne Manor, only the suit, the mask and the belt had been left hanging for a while, until a developer razed the whole thing to build an office complex.

Even the inmates of Arkham Penitentiary had gradually forgotten to hate the name Batman. 

One day, Bruce Wayne bought a plane ticket to the south. He had bought a small white house in the town of Catriel, at the northern end of the province of Rio Negro, Argentina. There, at the corner of Pedro Hernandez and Chubut, he had locked himself in his superhero memories.

Strangely, at the end, he looked like Gaff Morgan, the white-haired character he adopted when Bruce Wayne, the billionaire, wanted to go out incognito in the suburbs of Gotham.

In Catriel, the campesinos called him "El viejo bufón". No one among those redneck morons knew that he had been one of the most brilliant minds the world had ever known. No one cared. Bruce Wayne deserved to be a super-mutant, a guy genetically capable of running off to other galaxies. But he was just a man of flesh and blood. He had croaked there, far from what had been his Batman life, far from the stars.