Protect your good image from the eyes of negative viewers, who may look at your good appearance with an ugly fiendish eye, and ruin your positive qualities with their chemical infested tongues
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In 2014, I was twenty-three years old and was studying to become a high school language and literature teacher. An early, September spring was in the air, and very, very early one morning, I was studying in my room. My house was the only apartment building in that block, and we lived on the sixth floor.
I was feeling sort of lazy, and every now and then I'd let my gaze wander out the window. From there I could see the street and, just beyond the sidewalk across the street, the manicured garden of old Don Cesareo whose house occupied the corner lot, the one which was cut off diagonally at the corner; hence, his house had the shape of an irregular pentagon.
Next to Don Cesareo's stood the beautiful home of the Bernasconi family, lovely people who used to do nice, kind things. They had three daughters, and I was in love with the eldest, Adriana. So, every once in a while I cast a glance toward the sidewalk across the way, more out of a habit of the heart than because I expected to see her at such an early hour.
As was his custom, old Don Cesareo was watering and caring for his beloved garden which was separated from the street level by a low iron fence and three stone steps.
The street was deserted, so my attention was unavoidably drawn to a man who appeared in the next block and was advancing toward ours along the same sidewalk that ran in front of the homes of Don Cesareo and the Bernasconis. Why wouldn't my attention be attracted by that man, since he was a beggar or a tramp, a veritable rainbow of dark-colored rags?
Bearded and skinny, his head was covered by a yellowish hat. Despite the heat, he was enveloped in grayish overcoat. In addition, he was carrying a huge, dirty sack, and I assumed he kept in it the alms and remains of food he collected.
I continued to observe. The tramp stopped in front of Don Cesareo's house and asked him for something through the iron bars of the fence. Don Cesareo was a mean old man with an unpleasant personality; without acknowledging anything, he simply made a gesture with his hand as if to send the fellow on his way. But the beggar seemed to be insisting in a low voice, and then I did hear the old man shout clearly:
"Go on, you, get out of here, and don't bother me!"
Nevertheless, the tramp again persisted, and now he even went up the three stone steps and struggled a bit with the iron gate. Then, losing his patience completely, Don Cesareo pushed him away with a fierce shove. The beggar slipped on the wet stone, tried unsuccessfully to grab hold of a bar, and fell violently to the ground. In the same, lightning-flash instant, I saw his legs splayed upward toward the sky, and I heard the sharp crack of his skull as it struck the first step.
