The boy who never was

Prologue

It is said that life is but a dream. Often we don’t know the difference between that which is real and that which is not. Not one of us remembers our first days before we came to consciousness, and no one remembers how we were before we were born, nor will we know how we were after we have died. Such is the life of the human being, and our very self is so limited that we understand very little.

We die bit by bit every day so that, without knowing it, we can wake up dead one day, without realizing it. The flesh dies, but our spirit keeps living on through the other lives that we have touched. These memories are all the richer for they guard all that is positive and confines all that is negative to oblivion. If someone is an ordinary person, he goes through the same cycles as everyone else. There are, however, certain elect ones, chosen by the Creator to taste richer ways of living than the ordinary, and to join their lives to certain elements not seen by the rest. Thus was the life of the boy who never was.

Fifty years ago, we came to realize this concept of life. It was the tale that was lived out by an unknown boy who was not very popular. He could see things that the rest of his colleagues could not see. He was a boy whose life was accentuated by madness or poetry. His chosen cycles sometimes included those of El Cid Campeador, or sometimes those of Don Quixote de la Mancha and at times those of Saint Theresa of Avila. His personality would change depending on the mask of the character that took hold of him.

Masks are very deceiving, making us believe that we put them on by our own free wills. But the truth of the matter is that they use us to infuse life into them, transforming ordinary people into extraordinary beings. Masks are more reflections of reality than reality itself, which is a mask. Masks do not dream, nor do they worry about the personalities that put them on, but rather, they complete those lives that were born half-empty.

The boy who never was had no name. His title was an insulting reference to his incompleteness. He was not good-looking, nor did he have a stately-bearing. He always felt as if he were “among the left-overs of the great banquet of life,” like the crumbs that were thrown to the dogs. But his life did bear out the fact that whenever the Creator gives one special talents, there is always a heavy price attached to them. His imagination was for him as much his greatest possession as his greatest downfall.

He would cry and groan at night, afraid of the unknown spirits that he would see between shadows and mirrors. But by slow degrees he came to understand that the invisible world is much more generous and kind than the world of human men. The invisible world is also richer in its variety as well. The living and the dead mix freely with those who were and shall be. Animals can speak in human voices and humans can speak in animal. Nothing is extinct; it all lives now. The Creator made animals for innocence, and he made plants for simplicity.

However, He endowed certain people with the ability to pierce His holy will and to see everything with eyes of mercy and charity. The boy who never was, had begun to take his first steps in this realm, like a toddler who stands for the first time and realizes that things that he thought were beyond his reach are now closer than ever before. Everything was new; everything was there to experience. He looked around to see if his dog was ready to go with him. Soon they were both making their way toward a very high mountain.