Las calles de Moscú fueron testigos del pequeño
mendigo que junto a su padre pedían algunas monedas para sobrevivir. Al
acomodarse frente al restaurant esperaban llamar la atención de los comensales
que entraban y salían del lugar. Un cuento de Antón
Chekhov, Oysters
I NEED no great
effort of memory to recall, in every detail, the rainy autumn evening when I
stood with my father in one of the more frequented streets of Moscow, and felt
that I was gradually being overcome by a strange illness. I had no pain at all,
but my legs were giving way under me, the words stuck in my throat, my head
slipped weakly on one side . . . It seemed as though, in a moment, I must fall
down and lose consciousness.
If I had been
taken into a hospital at that minute, the doctors would have had to write over
my bed: Fames, a disease which is not in the manuals of medicine.
Beside me on the
pavement stood my father in a worn out summer overcoat and a serge cap, from which a bit of white
padding was sticking out. On his feet he had big heavy goloshes. Afraid, vain man, that people would see that his feet
were bare under his goloshes, he had drawn the tops of some old boots up round
the calves of his legs.
This poor,
foolish, queer creature, whom I loved the more warmly the more ragged and dirty
his smart summer overcoat became, had come to Moscow, five months before, to
look for a job as copying-clerk. For those five months he had been walking
about Moscow looking for work, and it was only on that day that he had brought
himself to go into the street to beg for assistance.