The first signs of its existence are mysterious knocks, at night, on the walls of the fishermen's houses in a town on the coast, accompanied by anguished growls. When the fishermen come out, alarmed, the animal disappears into the darkness. One morning, a peasant finds him lying on the ground, in the grass, covered in mud, next to a path. What kind of beast can it be? After a while, some frightened children arrive at the school saying that they have seen him hanging around not far from there. The teacher comes out to chase him away. A cartman, to prevent him from approaching the horse, gives him a whip across the face; the frightened horse breaks into a run, and the carter fails to stop him for another half mile.
The children throw stones at him. A woman scares him away with her umbrella. Nobody wants to know anything about him, 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 that he is not an animal? He is not: he is a man and he is dirty, half skinned. His hair, very long, covers his face. From the noises he makes, some incomprehensible grunts, he must be mentally deficient, or a madman who has escaped from the asylum. The peasant's wife who has captured him locks herself in the room so as not to hear his growls. The farmer's daughter, a plain and clueless girl named Amy Foster, is the only one who isn't afraid of him. She walks over to him and gives him a slice of bread. Grateful, he tearfully kisses her hand.
The residents of the town ask the doctor to examine him. They think that he may be Indian (or Basque!). They try to speak to him with the four words of Spanish and French that they know, but he doesn't understand them. A lady who owns 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 of a merchant ship that, not long ago, was wrecked off the coast.
A neighbor – Mr. Swaffer – takes him home with the idea of putting him to work on his land. Little by little, as the man learns English, the townspeople learn that he comes from a country in eastern Europe and that his parents sold a cow so he could emigrate to America. Amy Foster, the farmer's daughter, continues to see him frequently. Little by little, she falls in love with him.
Time passes. One day, Mr. Swaffer's son, very young, falls into a pool. Luckily, the man sees him and is in time to get him out before he drowns. Mr. Swaffer, grateful, gives him a small house with a small piece of land. He asks Amy Foster to marry him and Amy Foster, ignoring her parents' advice, agrees.
The tale (Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster, published over a century ago) could end here and end well, but it wouldn't be the masterpiece it is. The man and Amy Foster have a son. One day, Amy Foster discovers that he is teaching the boy to pray in her language and says nothing, but inwardly rejects him in a visceral way. The possibility of not understanding them when they talk to each other horrifies him. This causes relations with him to become poisoned.
One day, he falls ill. Feverish, he calls for water in his language. Amy Foster doesn't understand him; frightened by her imperious growls, she takes the child and runs away. The doctor arrives too late and finds him dead.
Like many stories by the Polish author, this story is confusing, messy, but it causes a moral earthquake in the reader. This poor nameless immigrant, a man who is first taken for an animal, then for a madman, then exploited and, after years, when they have accepted him because he has saved the life of a child, they deny him the right to teach your child to pray in their language, it could be any of the people who come from all over the world who take care of our parents or grandparents or who take care of domestic work that we do not want to do.
It could be any of the characters in the formidable book by Francesc Serés The skin of the border, any of those immigrants who cross countries, who go to sea to reach the Canary Islands or Almería and who, once in the Peninsula, go to town in town, hiding, starving and sleeping rough, until they find a job picking fruit or, the luckiest, cleaning houses and caring for the elderly. The argument is repeated every time a boat reaches the mainland. Along the way, drowned, those who have not had luck remain.
They say that Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and was born in the territory of present-day Ukraine, one day, as an adult, after marrying an Englishwoman, fell ill and, feverish, began to rave in his mother tongue. Her wife, unable to understand him, was frightened, and Conrad, when he recovered, wrote that story thinking of her reaction.
The drama that it portrays can be seen daily around us. The fear of foreigners is as old as the world. Today we do not throw immigrants away with stones or umbrellas, but it is as difficult for us as it is for the inhabitants of the town on the English coast imagined by Conrad to recognize them as men with the same rights and desires as us.
This tale by the Polish writer should be read in all schools in Europe. Many children would continue to succumb to the fears and prejudices that darken the immigration debate, because literature works miracles, but it does them one by one, never in bulk. However, there would be children – and perhaps some adults, incidentally – who would be vaccinated forever against all forms of xenophobia. Even if there weren't many, it would be worth it.
