«El derecho a equivocarse»

«El derecho a equivocarse» is the principle Fermín Montes offers Zabalza as he struggles with doubts before his wedding: a person must be allowed to make mistakes, acknowledge them, and avoid being condemned for life. But Zabalza immediately presses the principle’s moral limit, asking what happens to the people caught in someone else’s errors. Montes answers without softening his position, making the expression less a consoling maxim than a blunt claim about freedom and its costs.

Meaning and Context

Montes presents the right to make mistakes as something he learned through experience. He recognizes that his own divorce may have led Zabalza to expect him to speak against marriage, and admits that for a time he did hold a negative view. Instead, he argues that an error should be recognized and valued as such, rather than becoming a lifelong sentence. The right he defends is therefore not a claim to infallibility, but to the possibility of being wrong and living beyond that mistake.

The advice comes amid Zabalza’s anxiety about the approaching date of his wedding. Montes has framed such doubts as a familiar response to commitment, especially after a couple has endured difficult periods or even a temporary separation. His own history gives the counsel personal weight, though it does not make it easy reassurance: as he speaks, his gaze rests on the remains of coffee in his cup, seeming almost trance-like.

The Objection and Montes’s Reply

Zabalza repeats the phrase back to Montes, then challenges its reach. A person’s mistakes, he observes, can drag other people down too; the right to err may belong to the person making the decision, but its consequences do not necessarily stop there. This question shifts the exchange from private uncertainty about marriage to the responsibility owed to those affected by one’s choices.

Montes replies in deliberately rough terms: people should make their decisions and their errors, while others must bear them. The bluntness matters. Rather than resolving Zabalza’s concern by distinguishing harmless mistakes from damaging ones, Montes accepts the burden on others as part of how the world works. His defense of fallibility thus carries an unsettling edge: it grants room for error without promising that the people harmed will be spared.

Use and Significance

The exchange gives the expression two competing emphases. Montes treats the right to err as a protection against permanent condemnation; Zabalza insists that recognizing a mistake does not erase its effects on others. Neither point cancels the other. The phrase holds both the need for a second chance and the unresolved question of who pays for it.

Zabalza ultimately calls Montes’s response good advice. The closing reaction registers the force of the exchange, but does not state that Zabalza has accepted every part of Montes’s answer. The expression remains characteristically unsentimental: it offers permission to be wrong, while leaving responsibility for the consequences exposed rather than settled.