Before afternoon classes began, someone had torn up the amusement park tickets he had been showing off to his classmates. Suddenly, one of them decided to put an end to the boasting, snatched them from his hands, and ripped them to pieces. The little boy was so furious that he got into a fight that continued in his head long after he was back at his desk. During the lesson, the teacher said:
“We’ll put on some music. That soothes the savage beasts.”
She was clearly referring to the boy, who had had to be gagged to stop him from interrupting her.
On top of everything else, this latest conflict meant another disciplinary note in his school diary, already full of reports of other misbehaviour. He had been kindly signing them on his parents’ behalf for quite some time—something they would discover when they attended the meeting the teacher had also requested.
He probably thought it was all terribly unfair and that, at nine years old, he was already tired of life beating him down like this. So indignation took hold of his feet as he left school, and he walked straight past his house with the brilliant idea that he would make it on his own. Any other way of living would surely be better than continuing to put up with all those injustices.
His journey began that afternoon at the foot of the leeward side of the mountain beside his home and ended, as night fell, on the windward side. He had made a kind of loop through some of the towns bordering Barcelona. A hint that this plan was not going to take him very far.
The mountain had divided the scene into two cinemas: on one side, his parents and the neighbours were searching desperately for him; on the other, the boy was losing himself among the trees on the far side of the mountain. In the first cinema, the film was about fear, abduction, and death; in the other, it was about adventure, recklessness, and arrogance.
At some point, the boy realised he really was lost. It began to grow dark, and bravado turned to fear. Tears welled up and rolled down his young cheeks until he felt an overwhelming need to ask the wind for help. A moment of surrender, or humility, that did not go unanswered. A little later, he found a walkable path and came face to face with a man. The boy must have thought:
“Well, that’s it. The worst is over. I’m safe.”
He then asked the man how to get off the mountain, since that was his greatest concern at the time. Puzzled by the situation, the man kept asking questions until he persuaded the boy to go to a nearby police station.
When the police took his statement, the boy clung to his best version of events:
“I got lost on my way home.”
It was either that or admit he had had a terrible idea. By then, the boy was already aware of the commotion he had caused and had to build a chain of lies to try to delay the inevitable: the drama and the severe punishment awaiting him. In other words, the very things he had tried to escape with the first step that sent him on that hare-brained adventure.
In the end, the whole experience managed to straighten a branch that had been growing a little crooked, and that boy went from a glaring red to a soft pastel red.