The first signs of its existence are mysterious knocks, at night, on the walls of the fishermen's houses in a coastal town, accompanied by distressing grunts. When the fishermen leave, alarmed, the animal disappears in the dark. One morning, a farmer finds him lying on the ground, in the grass, covered in mud, by the side of a road. What kind of beast can it be? After a while, some children arrive at the school in a hurry, saying that they have seen him not far from there. The teacher comes out to scare him. A driver, to prevent him from approaching the horse, throws a blow of his whip in his face; the horse, frightened, starts to run and the driver does not manage to stop it until half a mile further.
Children throw stones at him. A woman waves him away with an umbrella. Nobody wants to know anything about it, until one day – and I ask the reader to excuse me, but everything that follows is a spoiler – a farmer manages to lock him in a cabin. Someone doubts: what if it turns out to be no animal? He's not: he's a man and he's dirty, half shaved. Her hair, very long, covers her face. From the noises he emits, some incomprehensible grunts, he must be mentally deficient, or a madman who has escaped from the asylum. The wife of the farmer who captured him locks herself in the room so as not to hear his grunts. The farmer's daughter, a very ugly and uninformed girl named Amy Foster, is the only one who is not afraid of him. He approaches him and gives him a slice of bread. Grateful, he kisses her hand with tears in his eyes.
The villagers ask the doctor to examine him. They think it might be Indian (or Basque!). They try to speak to him with the four words of Spanish and French they know, but he doesn't understand them. A lady who has a German dictionary and another who has been trying to read Dante in Italian for years also try to talk to him, without success. No one thinks about a merchant ship that, not long ago, was wrecked near the coast.
A neighbor - Mr. Swaffer - takes him home with the idea of making him work on his land. Little by little, as the man learns English, the villagers learn that he comes from an Eastern European country and that his parents sold a cow so that he could immigrate to America . Amy Foster, the farmer's daughter, continues to see him frequently. Little by little, he falls in love with her.
time passes One day, Mr. Swaffer's very young son falls into a pool of water. Luckily, the man sees it and is in time to pull it out before it drowns. Mr. Swaffer, grateful, gives him a small house with a small piece of land. He asks Amy Foster if she will marry him and Amy Foster, ignoring her parents' advice, agrees.
The story (Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster, published more than a century ago) could end here and it would end well, but it wouldn't be the masterpiece it is. The man and Amy Foster have a child. One day Amy Foster discovers that he is teaching the boy to pray in his language and he doesn't say anything, but inside he rejects it in a visceral way. The possibility of not understanding them when they talk to each other horrifies him. This causes relations with him to be poisoned.
One day, he falls ill. Feverish, he shouts for water in his language. Amy Foster doesn't understand him; frightened by his imperious growls, she takes the child and runs away. The doctor arrives too late and finds him dead.
Like many of the Polish author's narratives, this story is confusing, messy, but it causes a moral earthquake in the reader. This poor nameless emigrant, a man who is first taken for an animal, then for a madman, then exploited and, years later, when they have already accepted him because he saved a child's life, they deny him his right to teach the child to pray in his language, it could be any of the people from all over the world who take care of our parents or grandparents or who take care of the household chores that we don't want to do.
It could be any of the characters in Francesc Serés' formidable book La pell de la frontera, any of these immigrants who cross countries, who throw themselves into the sea to reach the Canary Islands or Almeria and who, once in the Peninsula, go from village to village in the village, hiding, starving and sleeping rough, until they find work picking fruit or, the luckiest, cleaning houses and caring for the elderly. The argument is repeated every time a boat comes ashore. Along the way, drowned, remain those who have not been lucky.
They say that Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and was born in what is now Ukraine, one day, already grown up and married to an English woman, fell ill and, feverish, started raving in his mother tongue. His wife, unable to understand him, was frightened, and Conrad, when he recovered, wrote this story thinking of her reaction.
We can see the drama it portrays around us every day. The fear of foreigners is as old as the world. Today we don't throw out immigrants with stones or with umbrellas, but we have as much difficulty as the inhabitants of the English coastal village imagined by Conrad to recognize them as men with the same rights and aspirations as us.
This story by the Polish writer should be read in every school in Europe. Many children would continue to succumb to the fears and prejudices that cloud the immigration debate, because literature works miracles, but it works one at a time, never wholesale. However, there would be children - and perhaps some adults, incidentally - who would be vaccinated forever against all forms of xenophobia. Even if they weren't many, it would be worth it.
