The unusual kiss
I learnt the story of a man who was bitten by a viper, but didn’t die. He was running along the footbridge that skirted the small wooded park near his house. It was around five o’clock in the morning and there were few people in the area, giving it an almost feral atmosphere. This man, now in his fifties, revelled in his solitude. As a fearless explorer, he imagined himself like many of the heroes of his childhood, who didn’t fly, didn’t have super strength and didn’t shoot lasers out of their eyes, but faced tremendous dangers, using little more than their cunning and intrepidity. These brave men ran through valleys and mountains, overcoming terrible distances, like the dauntless Tarzan, capable of overcoming the fearsome wild crocodile. Or they faced pirates and cruel mercenaries like the clever Corto Maltese. Either way, they were always brave survivors.
Such was the enthusiasm of this athlete of the wooded parks that, leaving aside the necessary precautions, he would sometimes enter the inviting greenery and cross part of the scrubland, leaving the track, only to return at the next bend in the road. The performative journey lasted no more than five minutes, but it happened in such a way that, once inside, you couldn’t see who was on the road and vice versa. This very moment was the peak of our inadvertent adventurer’s adrenaline, as he trotted and jumped over bushes, leaves, branches and nettles.
It was on one of these runs through the woods that he did not notice a stealth viper, bright green, waiting for him with its mouth open. Sneaky, she was willing to defend her territory, inherited by the species many generations ago, conquered at the cost of a lot of poison and many deaths.
The withering and precise blow had been delivered right above the heel, where the flesh appears soft above the shoe. Soon after came the pain, which despite being the usual company of heroes, saints and football players, quickly turned that walk into torment. He had to stop to check what had happened and quickly realized that he had been the victim of a cruel murderer. He was sloppy and fell into a fatal trap, prepared by a villain full of evil! They even exchanged a look, cold and suspicious of death, in an ominous farewell. With its little split tongue, it waved a satisfied goodbye to the ghastly deed, while our explorer felt the weight of the turpitude falling upon him, greedily. He tried to scream, but his voice stopped, he tried to walk, but his strength was gone. He plummeted to the ground, feeling paralysed, tense, compressed by invisible shackles, boxed in with fear, and annihilated.
Sweating coldly in his desperation, he could hear the voices and footsteps of passers-by on the nearby pavement, some nine immense metres away. He tried to scream for help, but only uttered inexpressible moans as he was consumed with dread. The ants were already planning their feast, and the mosquitoes were quick to oblige. Beetles, small annelids and arachnids also seemed to rejoice at finding a promising shelter for the coming rainy season. Goblins and mystical beings, if they hadn’t been driven out of these woods long ago, would have been furtively observing the novelty of that morning.
Forgetting the heroes of the seventies and eighties, who never gave up and who always found a way out of trouble, our protagonist decided to die for lack of alternatives (or imagination). Here, it is important to analyse the issue. Firstly, it’s imperative that we always know that there is an alternative! Never give up would certainly be the maxim on an occasion like this. Perhaps rolling through the bush?He had end up somewhere, right? Or, by emitting louder and louder grunts, it would be heard by someone. On the other hand, I try to put myself in the shoes of the unfortunate man, paralysed and abandoned in the middle of a tragedy about jungle men and devouring snakes. His family would never see him again, nor would he be able to stroke the hair of his little child, who was still asleep in her cot when he left the house in the morning. The poison was spreading through his system. Would it be better to die for good?
Would no-one have found him in time? Was there not a single good and auspicious soul who could have sensed that a man might have decided to pass through those paths just to satisfy his morning craving for adrenaline, but was now fallen and hopeless? But that’s the modern world, which has so few spirits left to come to the aid of adventurers. They were all at the mercy of new technologies, but not even the most advanced AI could locate a man dying in the forest. “Damn the latitudes and longitudes that are useless at a time like this,” thought our dying hero.
He closed his eyes and fell asleep in the sleep of death, letting his cortex project the scenes of his ordinary, mediocre life (he thought this because he was going through a rather negative phase, even more so now with this aggravated guilt of having put his heel in the grasp of a snake). He remembered the woman of his youth, whom he let slip through his fingers because of his chronic insecurity. Furthermore, he remembered his pubescent and unsuccessful love life, with disappointments, betrayals, fights, vulgar desires and platonic loves.
He woke up startled, remembering when his older sister used to tease him, scaring him with stories of ghosts and hauntings. Suddenly, he realized he was sitting in the woods, dirty and sore, but as alive as ever, as if he had never been stung.
He got up and brushed off the dust, the weeds and the ants. He began his return to the conventional route and city life, with the disconcerting gait of someone who didn’t die to tell the tale! But what? It’s best that no-one ever finds out about this miserable, dying scene. Let it remain hidden in the woods, with only the snake as a mute witness. He still remembered to thank God for the miracle. “Should I?”, he thought. A fatal bite that, after all, doesn’t kill? It looks like a miracle, but this way, with no rescue, cameras or special effects, it also looked like a mixture of tragedy and comedy from a fifth-rate film, or from some unsavoury chronicle.
Even so, considering the escape, he thanked the heavens and returned to his monotonous life, in which he had been paralysed for many years by selfishness and narcissism. A few days later, he even began to feel the absence of his viper friend and her unusual cold-blooded kiss. A chilling and freezing act, but also engaging and psychoanalytical, which made him dive into the unconscious and see beyond the archetypes, in the antidote to anguish, an incomplete and dissatisfied being. Was it possible to perceive life from a new perspective? He began to feel an increasingly strong desire to tread other paths and experience other dangers. “After all, not all poisons are meant to kill,” he thought to himself. And there’s always something in us that’s better left to die.
