His words filled me with fear and not just because of the brusque manner in which he spoke. For, since in his eyes there was no difference between the boy he had known and the boar currently plundering our valley, what the old man really wanted was for me to give my blessing to a crime. I must confess that I myself had my doubts on the matter. I was wrong, you will say; a simple priest has no right to doubt what has been proven by so many theologians and other wise men. But I am just an ordinary man, a small tree that has always grown in the utmost darkness, and that animal, which in its actions seemed to exhibit both understanding and free will, had me in its power.
For all those reasons, I wanted to avoid a direct answer. I said:
“There’s no point even trying, Matías. You’re an old man. You’ll never catch an animal like that, one that has made fools of our best hunters.”
“It will be easy for me,” he replied, raising his voice and not without a certain arrogance, “because I know Javier’s habits.” Then he added: “Anyway that’s my affair. What I want to know is whether or not I can kill the boar. You have a duty to answer me.”
“But is it necessary? Why kill an animal that, sooner or later, will leave Obaba? Provided that—”
“Of course it’s necessary!” he broke in, almost shouting now. “Have you no pity for him? Don’t you feel sorry for Javier?”
“Matías, I wouldn’t want to…”
But again he would not let me finish. He sat up in his chair and, after scrabbling in the bag he had with him, placed a filthy handkerchief on my table. Do you know what it contained? No, how could you? It was the bloody foot of a boar. It was a ghastly sight and I stepped back, horrified.
“Javier is in terrible pain,” the old man began.
I remained silent, unable to utter a word.
“The people of Obaba are cowards,” he continued after a pause. “They don’t want to meet him face-to-face and so they resort to snares and traps and poison. What do they care if he dies a slow and painful death? No good hunter would do that.”
“It’s only natural that they should be afraid, Matías. You’re wrong to despise them for that.”
But I wasn’t convinced by what I said and it was an effort to get the words out. The old man was not listening anyway; he seemed to be in mid-soliloquy.
“When a boar falls into a snare, it frees itself by gnawing off the trapped limb. That is the law it lives by.”
He spoke hesitantly, breathing hard.
“Don’t you think Javier’s learned fast?” he asked then, looking into my eyes. The smile he gave me was that of a father proud of his son’s achievements. I nodded and thought to myself how utterly justified his feelings were and that on the last day, God our Father would not have the least hesitation in bestowing on him the paternity he claimed. Yes, Matías was Javier’s true father; not the one who abandoned him at birth, nor the other one who, having taken him in, treated him only with contempt.
“Can I kill him?” the old man asked me. He had grown somber again. As you know, dear friend, pity is an extreme form of love, the form that touches us most deeply and most strongly impels us toward goodness. And there was no doubt that Matías was speaking to me in the name of pity. He could not bear the boy’s suffering to continue. It must be ended as soon as possible.
“Yes, you can,” I said. “Killing the boar would not be a sin.”
Well done, you will say. However, bearing in mind what happened afterward …
The tenth page stops at that point. The first four lines are missing on the next and last page; the rest, including the signature, is perfectly preserved.
… on the outskirts of Obaba, not far from this house, there is a thickly wooded gully in the form of an inverted pyramid, and at one end there is a cave that seems to penetrate deep into the earth. That was where Matías sensed the white boar was hiding. Why, you will ask, on what did he base such a supposition, a supposition that later — I will tell you now — was to prove correct? Because he knew that was what Javier used to do when he ran away from the inn. He would hide there in the cave, poor boy, with only the salamanders for company.
But, as I said, I only knew all this when it was too late. Had I known before, I would not have given my consent to Matías. No, you can’t go into that cave, I would have told him. No hunter would wait for a boar in a place like that. It’s too dangerous. You’ll be committing a grave sin by going there and placing your own life in mortal danger.
But God chose not to enlighten me. I made a mistake when confronted by a question whose rights or wrongs I could not hope to fathom and, later, there was no time to remedy the situation. The events I will now recount happened all in a rush, the way boulders, once their support has gone, hurtle headlong down hillsides. In fact, it was all over in a matter of hours.
When Matías left, I went into the church and it was there that I heard what, at the time and to my great astonishment, sounded like an explosion. At first I could not establish the origin of such a loud noise, so unusual in Obaba. It was certainly not from a rifle, I thought.
“Unless the shot were fired in a cave!” I exclaimed. I knew at once that I was right. With God’s help, I had guessed what had happened.
Matías was already dead when I reached the gully. He was lying facedown at the entrance to the cave itself, his rifle still in his hand. A few yards away, farther inside the cave, lay the white boar, panting and losing blood from a wound in its neck.
Then, amid the panting, I thought I heard a voice. I listened more carefully and what do you think I heard? The word that any boy would have cried out at such a moment: “Mother!” Before my very eyes, the boar lay there groaning and whimpering and saying over and over: “Mother, mother”… pure illusion, you will say, the imaginings of a weary, overwrought man; and that is what I tell myself when I remember all I have read in science books or when I recall what faith requires us to believe. Nevertheless, I cannot forget what I saw and heard in that cave. Because then, dear God, I had to pick up a stone and finish him off. I could not leave him there to bleed to death, to suffer; I had to act as honorably as the old man would have done.
I can go no further and I will end here. I am, as you see, a broken man. You would be doing me the greatest favor by coming here to visit me! I have spent three years in Obaba. Is that not enough solitude for any man?
With that question — and the signature that follows it — both letter and exposition end. I would not, however, wish to conclude my work without reference to a fact that, after several conversations with the present inhabitants of Obaba, seems to me significant. It concerns the matter of Lizardi’s paternity. Many of those who spoke to me state that Javier was, without a doubt, his son, a belief that, in my view, a second reading of the document certainly tends to substantiate. That fact would also explain why the letter never left the rectory where it was written. A canon like Lizardi would never dare send a confession from which, in the end, he had omitted the one essential detail.