The more I debated with Rekieta, the more familiar I became with his argumentative tactics. At the outset he counted upon the ignorance or short memory of his viewers, but when he got so entangled that he could not find a way out, he played the trick of acting as a casual drunk or a clown who couldn’t be expected to take things seriously. Should he fail, in spite of these antics, he would feign confusion, claim he didn’t understand the counter-arguments, and then bolt away into another digression—usually some irrelevant legal trivia or juvenile ranting about someone’s goo.
He would lay down truisms and legal platitudes; and, if you accepted these, he would apply them to other situations of an entirely different nature from the original point at issue. If you pointed this out, he would dodge again, never allowing himself to be pinned down to a single precise claim. Whenever one tried to get a firm grip on him, one’s hand grasped only liquor-soaked bluster and half-jokes that slipped through the fingers and reassembled a moment later into a smug facade of certainty.
If, on occasion, he was forced to concede a point—because of pressure from others present—and if you thought, at last, some ground had been gained, a surprise awaited you the next stream. Rekieta would be utterly oblivious to what had happened before, repeating the same nonsense with even greater confidence. And if you reminded him of his prior defeat, he would pretend astonishment and swear that the opposite had been proven. He could remember nothing—nothing except that he had been right all along.
Sometimes I was left dumbfounded. I did not know what amazed me more—the endless tide of his verbiage or the clever way in which he dressed up falsehood as insight, corruption as charm. Gradually, I began to hate him.
