Conejo's Tale

Now, years later, I can look back and see the desperation of my childhood but at the time it was all so commonplace, so normal. Funny how the greatest pain, the worst terror was so much a part of my everyday life that I had become immune to it. When my family was murdered I went into a kind of trance. Wondering the jungle for days with no food or water and no need for them. The soldiers took me in and I was grateful. I was grateful for the food and water, grateful for a place to sleep, grateful to have a roof over my head. Above all, I think I was most grateful to be around other people. It did not matter what they did to me, or what they said to me. I survived.

But then the soldiers left. Throwing a few coins my way, they left me behind. At first I was angry. And once again I was scared, left with no food and no one to help me. Days, or was it weeks, later a woman in a nearby village began to feed me. Soon I started to think that I would again, survive. Still, I kept my coins with me always. Thinking, I suppose, that they would buy me freedom – that somewhere there was a place I could stay and that the coins would take me there.

I met the doctor by chance, he was looking for something, something I thought I could find. The woman in the village did not care if I stayed or went, so together the doctor and I set out. I liked the doctor. He spoke kindly to me. He gave me food and never hit or yelled at me. I had someone to talk to. But as we met other people on the journey I grew worried. No matter who we met, no matter how far we had gone the doctor always wanted to go, “further”. He was always searching, hoping to find answers I suppose, looking for his old students. He died before he found them.

For a long time I thought him a fool. Only a fool would leave a home, a job and a family in the city to travel through the jungle looking for people he had not seen in years. Only a fool would keep climbing up a mountain in the heat looking for people who were no longer there. As I get older, however, I see the doctor in a different light. For years I have lived in the same village where he died. I have married, have two children and most of the time I feel contented. There is something missing though, that something that the doctor had – a purpose, a connection with someone or something outside of himself. I do not have that. I help the soldier when the villagers are ill; I hunt and gather food for my family but when I am gone what will be my legacy? The doctor left a legacy of healing, if not for him my wife and second son would be dead. It was the doctor who gave the soldier the strength to heal and the soldier who healed my family. I do not have those gifts. I survive day to day but my legacy will be my children who will simply continue to fight to survive as I have done. I want to leave more. The doctor made me want to leave more. I often go for long walks through the jungle - searching, looking. When my wife asks where I am going I tell her, “Further.”