… for, you know as well as I, that life pounds us with the relentlessness and force of the ocean wave upon the rocks. But I’m straying from my subject and I can imagine you growing impatient and asking yourself what is it exactly that troubles me, what lies behind all these complaints and preambles of mine. For I well remember how restless and passionate you were and how you hated procrastination. But remember too my weakness for rhetoric and forgive me: I will now explain the events that have led to my writing this letter. I hope with all my heart that you will listen to what I have to say with an open mind and ponder as you do so the lament in Ecclesiastes: “Vae soli!” Yes, the fate of a man alone is a most bitter one, even more so if that man, like the last mosquitoes of summer, can barely stagger to his feet and can only totter through what little remains of his life. But enough of my ills; I will turn my attention to the events I promised to recount to you.
Nine months ago last January, an eleven-year-old boy disappeared into the Obaba woods, forever, as we now know. At first, no one was much concerned by his absence, since Javier — that was the boy’s name, that of our most beloved martyr — had been in the habit of running away from home and remaining in the woods for days on end. In that sense he was special and his escapes bore no resemblance to the tantrums that, at some point in their lives, drive all boys to run away from home; like that time you and I, in protest at an unjust punishment at school, escaped the watchful eyes of our parents and spent the night out in the open, hidden in a maize field… but, as I said, this was not the case with Javier.
I should at this point explain that Javier was of unknown parentage or, to use the mocking phrase so often used here to describe him, “born on the wrong side of the blanket.” For that reason he lived at the inn in Obaba, where he was fed and clothed in exchange for the silver coins furnished to the innkeepers — vox populi dixit — by his true progenitors.
It is not my intention in this letter to clear up the mystery of the poor boy’s continual flights, but I am sure Javier’s behavior was ruled by the same instinct that drives a dying dog to flee its masters and head for the snowy mountain slopes. It is there, sharing as he does the same origins as the wolves, that he will find his real brothers, his true family. In just the same way, I believe, Javier went off to the woods in search of the love his guardians failed to give him at home, and I have some reason to think that it was then, when he was walking alone among the trees and the ferns, that he felt happiest.
Hardly anyone noticed Javier’s absences, hardly anyone sighed or suffered over them, not even the people who looked after him. With the cruelty one tends to find among the ill-read, they washed their hands of him saying that “he would come back when he was good and hungry.” In fact, only I and one other person bothered to search for him, that other person being Matías, an old man who, having been born outside of Obaba, also lived at the inn.
The last time Javier disappeared was different, though, for so fierce was my insistence that they look for him, a whole gang of men got together to form a search party. But, as I said before, nine months have now passed and poor Javier has still not reappeared. There is, therefore, no hope now of him returning.
Consider, dear friend, the tender hearts of children and the innocence in which, being beloved of God, they always act. For that is how our children are in Obaba and it gives one joy to see them always together, always running around, indeed, running around the church itself, for they are convinced that if they run around it eleven times in succession the gargoyle on the tower will burst into song. And when they see that, despite all their efforts, it still refuses to sing, they do not lose hope but attribute the failure to an error in their counting or to the speed with which they ran, and they persevere in their enterprise.
Javier, however, never joined in, neither then nor at any other time. He lived alongside them, but apart. The reasons for his avoidance of them lay perhaps in his character, too serious and silent for his age. Perhaps too it was his fear of their mockery, for a purple stain covered half his face, considerably disfiguring him. Whatever the reason, the conclusion …
The third page ends there. Unfortunately the top of the following page, page four, is badly affected by mold and none of my efforts to clean it up have met with much success. I have only been able to salvage a couple of lines.
Reading them, one has the impression that Canon Lizardi has once more abandoned the story and returned to the sad reflections of the beginning of the letter. At least so I deduce from the presence there of a word like santateresa, the local word for the praying mantis, an insect that, according to the nature guide I consulted, is unique in the natural world for the way in which it torments its victims. The author of the guide comments: “It devours them slowly, taking care not to let them die at once, as if its real hunger were for torture not for food.”
Was Lizardi comparing the behavior of that insect with the way life had treated the boy? For my part, I believe he was. But let us leave these lucubrations and look at what Lizardi did in fact write in the legible part of that fourth page.
… do not think, dear friend, that I ever abandoned or neglected him. I visited him often, always with a kind word on my lips. All in vain.
I was still caught up in these thoughts when, at the beginning of February, one month after Javier had run away, a pure white boar appeared in the main street of Obaba. To the great amazement of those watching, it did not withdraw before the presence of people, but trotted in front of them with such calm and gentleness that it seemed more like an angelic being than a wild beast. It stopped in the square and stayed there for a while, quite still, watching a group of children playing with what remained of the previous night’s fall of snow.
The upper part of the fifth page is also damaged but not as badly as the page I have just transcribed. The dampness only affects the first three lines. It goes on:
… but you know what our people are like. They feel no love for animals, not even for the smallest, which, being too weak to defend themselves, deserve their care and attention. In respect of this, I recall an incident that occurred shortly after my arrival in Obaba. A brilliantly colored bird alighted on the church tower and I was looking up at it and rejoicing to think that it was our Father Himself, who, in His infinite kindness, had sent me that most beautiful of His creatures as a sign of welcome, when, lo and behold, three men arrived with rifles on their shoulders… they had shot the poor bird down before I had a chance to stop them. Such is the coldness of our people’s hearts, which in no way resembles that of our good Saint Francis.
They reacted in just the same way toward the white boar. They began shooting at it from windows, the braver among them from the square itself, and the racket they made so startled me that I came running out of the church, where I happened to be at the time. They only managed to wound the animal, however, and in the midst of loud squeals, it fled back to the woods.
Since it was a white boar, and therefore most unusual, the hunters were in a state of high excitement; they could already imagine it as a trophy. But that was not to be, at least not that day. They returned empty-handed, and, faint with exhaustion, they all ended up at the inn, drinking and laughing and with great hopes for the next day. And it was then, on that first day of the hunt, that Matías confronted them with these grim words: “What you’re doing is wrong. He came here with no intention of harming anyone yet you greet him with bullets. You’d be well advised to consider the consequences of your actions.”