The kid was born with all his features in the right place. It was only when he started to try and walk that they noticed a defect, his little feet turned inwards, each one distinct from the other. Grandmother gave her verdict on his squinting footprints.
—This child will walk into his own self.
Then, there was another additional inconvenience: the boy muddled and chewed his speech. The others understood little more than splutters and whistles, and even his relatives only listened to him with a dopey smile that feigned comprehension. There’s nothing scarier than when one human person doesn’t understand the human in another person’s voice.
The mother took the child to hospital. The doctor put his ear next to his chest and was deafened by his loud heartbeat. The child’s pulse was on the surface of his skin. The doctor seemed fascinated by this unusual case.
—We need him to stay for some more tests …
—No way! This child came here with me, and he’ll leave with me.
—But, Madam, you must understand … we need to find a name for his illness.
—What do you mean, a name?
—His illness: I’ve got to find a name for it!
—But this name, is a name going to cure his illness?
The doctor smiled. Ah, these simple folk, so accomplished at being thought so by others. And as his smile slowly faded from his lips, he watched mother and child walking away down the corridor. The child was carrying in his hand, drooping like a faded petal, a letter that he himself had written. He had wanted to give the doctor this little piece of paper that his inabilities had filled with writing. With careless concern, the mother took the paper from him and threw it in the trash can. The little fantasist and his obsessions! It must be one of the many letters the crazy little fellow pretended to write to his beloved girl cousin.
—Are you still writing letters to Marlisa?
The little boy was vehement in his denial. His mother shook her head. How hard she’d tried, but to no avail. Was it worth trying to teach someone things they’d never learned? It wasn’t as if Marlisa, her niece to whom the letters were addressed, had ever deigned to open them. It wasn’t even worth taking a peep at the moonstruck little chap’s handwriting. Some folks live in the moon. In his case, it was the moon that lived in him.
Then the scribbler of all that scrawling collapsed into the bottomless pit of time. The little boy died, his skin all blue, as cold as if no light wanted to shine on him. The doctors rushed to take his body and carry out an autopsy. They pulled out his heart, the universatile muscle, vast like some fleshy planet. The organ was placed behind glass, on show for science and the news agencies. Cardiologists argued, in endless colloquia, over the appropriate term for such an abnormality.
The days went by, unnoticed. It was late one afternoon when his cousin Marlisa was dusting the house and came across the pile of useless letters. She weighed them in her hand before throwing them in the fire. She hesitated for a split second: had the little boy known how to write a single line of letters? She decided to take a peep inside the first envelope. And there she sat in astonishment, a single furrow on her brow, curling her hair slowly with a finger. She sat on the step for hours. They weren’t letters but verses of a beauty that had no place in the present world. Marlisa’s sadness flooded out, blotching the handwriting. The more the cousin became absorbed in her reading the more her thoughts rhymed with those of no other woman, so removed from her daily existence had she become. Was the girl falling in posthumous love?
But sprawled there across the stairs, not even Marlisa could imagine what was happening simultaneously to her cousin’s heart that was being guarded by God and science. Indeed, behind the icy glass in the hospital, hardly had the first envelope been torn open than her cousin’s heart bounded upwards in shock. Visitors let out an ear-shattering gasp. And as Marlisa, more than a thousand walls away, gradually leafed through the verses, the heart began to unravel even more, all glittering and shimmering. Until an arm could be seen emerging from that tight red ball, and then later a foot and the roundness of a knee and even more evidence of what was clearly occurring: the heart was flagrantly giving birth! And this was confirmed when a complete newborn child emerged from that cardiac uterus.
When the birth was at last complete, one could see that the newborn child was identical to his thoracic progenitor. It was scary how one was the carbon copy of the other. They were alike in every aspect except for the shape of the foot. The newly born infant’s feet pointed outwards, as if it had come seeking people from other stories outside itself.