A CHRISTMAS VISIT
Fable of the existence of a personal guardian angel... or something similar...
INTRODUCTION
Allow me to introduce myself... My name is Maxifhoulopolus (Max for short) and I am a little devil.
That is, I have a small, sausage-red body, bulging eyes, protruding teeth, an arrow-headed tail and funny little horns. Come on, I'm not bad at all. I beg your pardon? You think I'm hideous? You think I'm ugly as hell? Hey, I'm not being mean to you! And I don't find you at all pleasing to the eye either! We're off to a bad start already... Well, let's go on with this story...
After a series of misunderstandings and several skirt affairs, I was imprisoned in a crystal ball by the great Devil Pazazu, but one fine day, he summoned me to his throne room to entrust me with a simple task in exchange for my longed-for freedom. The misunderstandings that led me to this painful situation? I'll tell you about them later.
The fact is that this old Devil was very unsettled these days because, like any self-respecting devil, these dates are very bad. It was Christmas, and everything is joy and happiness. People become relatives and give each other presents (although he was a little envious too, by the way), and of course, that made him very unhappy, since all he wanted to do was to season and roast those same people in their juices, in a big pot to make them al dente, with their little potatoes and carrots, and so on.
But if there was someone who was especially detestable and hated by my boss, it was a guy who lived near an old lighthouse in an unknown seafaring village abandoned for several decades and who even living alone and poorer than rats, when Christmas came, he decorated and lit a large fir tree with a thousand lights and balls; and whose light illuminated and caused the other coastal towns and nearby boats to see that torrent of light and hope, and reminded their miserable lives that Christmas had arrived, damn it a thousand times.
That, of course, gave us in Hell a rash of such dimensions that we were the ones who went into the pot to try to soothe a little of that dreadful itch. The task entrusted by Pazazu was simple, he had to prevent the tree from being lit this year. All this he was telling me in my ear while nervously looking everywhere, as if the lighthouse scoundrel had extrasensory powers, could hear us and somehow thwart our evil plans.
Sounds like an easy task, doesn't it? Well, it wasn't at all.
I
The first thing I did, upon arriving at the subject's house, was to study the area and the situation. The individual in question lived alone, with the exception of a lazy cat of an unclassifiable species, four letters that arrived once or twice a year and a strange activity that consisted of going every day to the lighthouse to do whatever, then returning at night to his shack (since you can not call otherwise that house half collapsed and dilapidated) and stood in the warmth of the fireplace touching the ears of the cat, almost always waking him up. The strange thing was that he hadn't died of disgust and ostracism quite some time ago all by himself.
Anyway, I had just three days left to make this little man's existence even more horrible, if possible, before I lit the damn tree. It seemed easy, just take away everything that could bring him any joy. So, according to my extremely evil and simple rhetoric, the little man would not light the tree this year for lack of motivation.
Good luck (bad luck for him) was with me. That day, while he was leaving early for the lighthouse, the letter carrier came riding a bicycle. With the wisdom that the centuries have given me, I added two and two equals five and deduced that, by destroying the coming letters and the mailbox, I would achieve my noble purpose.
The letter carrier got off his bicycle, parked it against the fence and then, after looking all around in fear, put the letters in the mailbox at the edge of the street and went like a bat out of hell (an expression that seems to me a complete cultural appropriation. That's enough, damn it!).
The truth is that I was a bit surprised, since I hadn't made my appearance yet, as I was in the middle of disguising myself as a tax inspector to scare the hell out of him.
I twisted my nose, snickered, walked over to the mailbox and opened it. I was still laughing when a glimpse of yellow eyes appeared inside the mailbox and a terrifying meow came out of it, which made the few hairs on my head stand on end. Out of the interior shot the meowing, scratching cat who, waiting for the mailman, found this servant of evil on his face. This poor devil.
Let it be said that cats are among the few animals on earth capable of sensing the little devils. If not, why do you think witches are always accompanied by cats if it were not because they serve as sentinels of our presence? If not, of what?
The cat engaged me in a fight to the death from which only one could be left alive and, after fighting tooth and nail for almost ten seconds for my life, I had to flee. Not without cursing the aforementioned cat, fist in fist, at the top of a distant hill, to its eighth generation and promising it that it had earned that morning a sworn enemy for its entire life (including the other six). The cat answered me with a terrifying snort that will accompany me to my deathbed.
Soon after, the little man came alarmed by the fuss and was delighted to find that he had received letters with happy news from a close relative. This mortified me in the highest degree, for, but for my nefarious action, the man might not have noticed the arrival of the mail for a long time (even after Christmas!).
II
After patching up the various wounds behind a tree, I deduced that we had to move on to plan B, which consisted of... destroying the LIGHTHOUSE. Even if it was stone by stone.
The following night, after the guy left the lighthouse, which left the way clear for my plans, I decided to go to the lighthouse and finish once and for all with the illusions of the little man and at the same time alleviate the pains of Pazazu who was quite annoyed with this thorny matter.
So I approached the lighthouse at night walking along a winding dusty road.
The lighthouse stood dark on top of the hill. Certainly the contemplation of this tower gave me a certain respect and awe. There it stood erect, blind, battered by the waves and the inclement weather without seeming to be affected by anything in this world.... For a short time, of course. Heh heh.
After the action of my hand that was going to change slightly. The access door to the lighthouse was naturally open.... CLOSED!
After turning the knob several times futilely, I caught a glimpse of an open window about 20 feet from the ground. For a normal level 3 imp, that would be no problem at all. With its small wings, a few flaps of the wings would be enough to climb up to the window without difficulty. But for an imp like me: stocky, lacking in agility and with a life of excess that had taken its toll, the window could well be 150 meters away. But a forwarned little devil is worth two, and I had a steerable rocket loaded in my backpack. So I jumped on it and, after igniting it with my breath, I shot toward the window. I maneuvered at the last second, slipped through it, backed up a bit inside the lighthouse, skinned my whole back against a wall, climbed out of another window (closed with bars), backed up again, climbed through another window, crawled at full speed through the guy's entire tool shop (hammers, screwdrivers, nails, pliers, etc.) to climb out another window (also closed of course) and finally, with a bang, I managed to crash through the top of the lighthouse.
Ten minutes after picking my teeth (and not finding all of them) I was in front of the huge lens of the lighthouse. The greatest utility of a lighthouse being its light, which was projected to help ships avoid the rocks approaching the shore, I deduced again that by destroying the lens, the lighthouse was of as much use to the little man as a bath with perfumed salts was to me.
After several futile attempts to open the container that housed the lens, I decided to do something easier, a full-fledged sabotage of the wiring. With a fingernail I opened the wiring box and thoughtfully scanned the colored wires (as if I understood), rubbing my chin. I made a mental plan and started mixing wires. Red with blue, blue with yellow, black with white, green with nothing, gray with polka dot green with striped red, brown with donkey-belly yellow, etc.
Twenty minutes later I had finished, no wires remained the same, or so I hoped, and after locating the switch that activated the lens, I flicked it to see firsthand how the lens was forever blinded, although at the time I thought it was a bit odd that it wasn't already on before my arrival.
The stream of light from the lighthouse blinded me for almost an hour. Time in which I understood what the little man's task was every day at the lighthouse. He was fixing the wiring that had been broken for decades, and night after night he returned home sadly unable to repair it. And I, in 20 minutes, trying to sabotage it, had fixed it. Half-blind (or completely blind), I heard footsteps hurrying up the stairs to the top of the lighthouse. It was the guy who, laughing, was climbing up, thanking God for the miracle of the light. In order not to be discovered, I jumped (fell) head first over the railing into the raging sea. I bounced several times against some cliffs before I plunged half unconscious into the cold waters. When I came out of the sea, I dropped exhausted on the shore, covered with seaweed, several shark bites (greedy for tourists) on my leg, a broken buoy and a one-and-a-half-pound manta ray in my underpants. Meanwhile the light of the huge lighthouse cyclically illuminated me and seemed to mock my misfortune.
III
The Emergency Plan, or also called C, consisted of CUTTING DOWN THE DAMN TREE. Come to think of it, maybe that was the first thing I should have done from the beginning. The night before Christmas, armed with a sizable axe I had borrowed (stolen) from a tool shed next to the lighthouse (which I had been dragging from there), I headed for the tree.
With a quick glance out the window I made sure that the guy was sleeping next to the cat by the fireplace and set out to chop the damn tree down.
It took me several attempts to realize that I couldn't lift the axe and that I had to get one more suited to my size (evidently a hand axe for small children).
Small axe in hand, I delivered several furious blows to the base of the fir tree, a few to the trunk, and cut several branches of the low ones, for not reaching the highest ones because of my short stature, and I contemplated my work. It remained almost the same. More axes to the base of the trunk. Nothing. Others more, nothing. I couldn't go on, I was exhausted, very tired. With my little boy's axe, the work I had done could not be appreciated. The damn tree would not fall that night. And the next one was already Christmas. I was desperate.
A hellish idea occurred to me. In a shed attached to the house there was a big bottle of poison marked with a skull, I would take it and smear it all over the base of the fir tree so that tomorrow night the tree would fall to pieces when the little man went to put up the lights and balls. What an evil plan, what a plan worthy of me!
I did as I said and went back to Avernus to rest and await developments. I woke up late on Christmas Day, it was almost night on Earth and I went to see Pazazu. A guardian imp told me that he was in a rather bad mood, stuck in a big pot, plotting torments for a certain clumsy little devil who had failed in everything he had been ordered to do.
I took a sly farewell to the keeper and returned to Earth to see the unhappiness of the lighthouse fellow. With a Poof! I stood in front of the tree. HORROR! It was lit. And brighter and shinier than ever. I couldn't believe it. The light from the tree blinded me (or was it from the lighthouse?) and mad with rage I wanted to bite the tree down, only to realize that, the night before, I had sprayed the poison on a nest of highly voracious African termites that were killing the fir tree if I had not exterminated them the day before with the poison.
I collapsed on the ground in surrender. There was a piece of paper nailed to the base of the tree. I tore it off. Surprise: it was for me. It was a letter with a pretty red ribbon and it read: "Dear Guardian Angel. This year I was not going to light the tree because I was in a great state of melancholy, as you already knew. But you made me see that I had no reason to be. You gave me happy letters that I hadn't received in years, you fixed my lighthouse that I couldn't repair, and you eliminated that termite infestation that I didn't even know existed on my Christmas tree. This year I have lit it for you. Thank you and please accept this humble gift."
A package wrapped with colorful paper rested next to the tree. It was a gift. It was a gift for me! My heart pounding in my chest, I squeezed the package against it, crying with joy that someone had remembered me at this time of year.
EPILOGUE
If you ever have the opportunity to go to a certain unknown fishing village abandoned for several decades, do not fail to go to a certain house on the coast, the light of a lighthouse will illuminate the way, with a large Christmas tree. And, if you look a little, next to this fir tree grows a smaller one, one that a certain clumsy little devil is in charge of decorating every year at that time. And sometimes it shines brighter than the lighthouse and the other tree put together.
Reg. SafeCreative. All rights reserved. 2102046822108
Max is the guardian devil we always wanted to have by our side. I love him
ResponderEliminar