Yesterday I remembered that, before birth I lived in a small village, divided in two by a secondary road in very poor condition. Was once a much larger and quite prosperous for its excellent vineyards, but with the construction of the dam, the river swallowed most of the people.
Now we had to be less than eighty people and we all lived in stone houses with slate roofs more or less care. I was the village idiot, But my neighbors seemed to be estimated by my sense of humor and my ability to work for what ever they got me.
We were all elderly, young people had gone to the cities for some time and our life was rigid, inflexible and with very little room for idleness. If not we were never invaded by the monotony was due solely to the extreme hardness of our day to day.
One morning we woke up and discovered that we were all lame. One had lost a foot because the pig (who narrowly escaped the night of his pen) he ate while he slept. Another felt terrible rheumatic pains in the leg. To some he had gangrenous toes, another had it frozen. To me, my left foot withering sleep, slightly drunk, off the fire. A cut him with the ax from the wood and his sister stepped on the old mare. More than one just felt severe cramping when your foot.
At first, despite the tragedy, all joked at the situation unusual. Our lives were made of similar calamities, so I overcame the feeling of strangeness that loss. All were jokes and laughter. All a show of black humor that the peasants of the neighboring village never tired of praising. The mayor (they were, but not us) was even talk of a sort of immunity from self-pity. " It seemed that we had lameness community provided a new perspective.
But the days passed, weeks and gradually began to feel a little irritable. All we knew that standing cojeábamos others. That was something predictable to disgust. When you saw your neighbor limp in the same way, day after day, again and again, no matter what happened you could not help feeling anger.
course others will cause the same feelings when you were limping.
soon started the insults, threats and squabbles. Of course, if we put any more or less plausible excuse that had nothing to do with the lameness, but we all knew perfectly the real cause. One evening they came to lynch the baker to have a parrot that swore in dead languages. They threw his body into the river and was eaten by the lampreys. After that episode of brutality decided to meet all the neighbors to try to find a solution to the crisis.
As often happens among the simple, natural and geographical almost into two sides with very different proposals. The left side of the road work to limp also defended the good foot for a change. The others decided to undertake a stomp with healthy feet of others. The situation far from improving, grew worse.
I chose to bite my tongue and so well made me dumb lame. In my people left me alone, stupid. When they all killed each other, some villagers from the neighboring village thought I took my position out of respect for others. As always wrong. I did it because he did not share any of their proposals. I did it because I was too lazy to articulate in a comprehensible manner the solution I felt right. I did, perhaps, for fear of rejection. I did, ultimately, because it gave me the same.
