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JULY 2012 -
SEXY X2
MAGAZINE -
49
Women there, midwife included,
spread the news through the vil-
lage. The son of the policeman’s
wife, the sister of the schoolteach-
er, had had a son that cried in
whispers.
There was somebody in town who,
knowing the details of that labor,
blamed the mother for the child’s
unusual feature because she did
not want to emit a groan during
labor. She only allowed herself an
almost inaudible moan that saved
the boy from total dumbness but
was not strong enough to grant
him all the voice power required to
cry normally.
As months went by, the time when
children start to say their first words
soon came. The little boy, how-
ever, only whispered a shy “dad”
that nobody was able to hear,
except for the smarter persons
who knew he had said that word
because they saw the movement
of the child’s mouth. As with dumb
people, they believed to have read
the uttered word on the baby’s
lips.
Everybody feigned normalcy in
front of the novelty represented
by the child. When the child was
about three or four, the entire vil-
lage knew about him and people
talked about a brilliant and excep-
tional mind trapped inside that
whispering body, since the child,
in the baby’s talk of any infant (or
baby’s whisper would be the right
expression for the case), while
emitting his unintelligible and
almost inaudible whisper, ges-
ticulated with his tiny arms, shook
his head and made funny faces
so everybody interpreted his odd
language as if he was delivering a
secret erudite speech.
Popular wisdom always says that,
when a physical skill is missing,
some other develops exponentially.
It was obvious that gesticulation
and theatricality were the little
child’s most stimulated gifts.
When the noiseless talker was
twelve, his house received the fre-
quent visits of distinguished adults
coming not just from the village but
from neighboring cities. His reputa-
tion of scholar and intellectually
highly-gifted person had spread
thanks to radio journalists and the
incipient television, far beyond the
boundaries of what geography in
the past marked out as the dis-
tance to be covered by train after
a one-day trip.
The intellectuals of all branches of
science interviewing the boy inad-
vertently followed an almost identi-
cal ritual: They cautiously got the
address where the new Pythoness
who seemed to know everything
lived. They asked whoever opened
the door for the adolescent who
many times kept them waiting for
hours as he was at school or sim-
ply playing as any boy of that age
does. Once the play or school
activities allowed it, the young
boy met his occasional visitor.
More than one of these visitors felt
stupid seeing his modern Oracle
at Delphis who arrived with his
shirt outside his pants, the shoes
full of dust after playing a football
game on the dusty field next to the
railroad, sweaty and smelly. Nev-
ertheless, the discomfort quickly
vanished when, after a question,
the boy started talking noiselessly,
gesticulating and flapping his
arms frantically and explaining the
answer to the most intricate and
difficult matters.
Occasionally, the boy came
closer to his interlocutor’s ear and
whispered long and complicated
long-winded speeches that only
the owner of that ear could hear
due to the soft sound of the boy’s
voice. Nevertheless, for precisely
that softness and low voice vol-
ume, the listeners never managed
to understand more than a couple
of single words they put into the
context of their questions, along
with the boy’s gestures and facial
expressions they saw out of the
corner of their eyes.
On one occasion, a prominent
physicist born in Ukraine arrived
at the boy’s house and asked him
his opinion about the origin of the
universe. The boy’s eyes lit up as
if he had been waiting for that
question from his own silent birth.
He started whispering, making
hand gestures, grimaces and arm
movements with more than usual
vehemence. The scientist franti-
cally tried to understand, rather to
interpret those lips moving in front
of him at unparalleled speed, the
muffled though continuous sounds
that were barely heard and those
hands and arms like disjointed
windmills that were dancing in