![]() ![]() In his company, you cannot help realising that our daily interactions are eased by a stream of invisible signals – a kind of silent language we all understand, which you don’t even notice until it’s absent. He always seemed to be anticipating his interlocutor’s scorn. He was friendly and talkative, but he seemed overly conscious of my reaction to everything he said: if I looked confused, he was visibly discouraged if I was enthusiastic, he was suddenly excited and energetic. He would make a joke, and laugh at himself, only to lose his confidence almost immediatelyand retreat behind a sheepish, diffident grin. He found it difficult to look me in the eye, and stared intensely at the ground whenever he spoke. But within moments of meeting him, I could sense something different in his demeanour. A cigarette habitually protrudes from his thin lips. Nothing about his appearance suggests an unusual past: he looks like a typical Spanish septuagenarian, thin, with salt-and-pepper hair and ruddy cheeks. Talking with Rodríguez is somewhat uncanny. There were dirty plates in the kitchen sink, a half-made bed, wooden cupboards, a deskand a TV. “Before, when I first started living among people, I didn’t even have a bed– I slept on piles of newspapers.” The small, ordinary house was given to him six years ago by one of his friends in the village. The walls were plastered with photographs, old magazine pages and calendars of naked women. I met Rodríguez in his cramped, cold living room. “They’re nice, better than those I met before.” “The people keep an eye out for me here,” he told me. For the first time since he left the mountains, his life was quiet and peaceful. Rodríguez moved here in the late 1990s, when he was taken in by a retired policeman, who brought him to Galiciaand gave him a job doing farm work and a place to live. ![]() The rest of the time, he stays home, watching daytime TV for hours. He is retired, and spends his time walking in the countryside, at the bar – “where he likes to play the clown,” a waitress told me – or hunting wild boar with a friend. He lives in Rante, a sleepy hamlet of 60 or so families in Galicia, in north-westSpain. Marcos Rodríguez still finds it hard to be human. “For most of my life,” Rodríguez told me, “I had a very bad time among humans”. Some people did try to help him, but most found him awkward and uncommunicative, and he was largely shunned by society. ![]() He worked odd jobs on construction sites, in bars, nightclubs and hotels he was robbed and exploited: people took advantage of his unworldliness. He lived in convents, abandoned buildings and hostels all over Spain. In the 50 years since he was found in the wilderness, Rodríguez has struggled to get a handle on society’s expectations. One day he went into a church, where an acquaintance had told him God lived. The first time he ate in a restaurant, he was surprised he had to pay for his food. When he first went to the cinema – to see a Western – he ran out of the theatre because he was terrified of the cowboys galloping toward the camera. When he left the convent hospital, adjusting to life among humans brought with it a series of shocks. It is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to emerge into adulthood without any of the socialisation that the rest of us unconsciously absorb, via a million imperceptible cues and incidents, as children and teenagers. Eventually a young priest brought him to the hospital ward of a convent in Madrid, where he stayed for a year and received a remedial education from the nuns. He tried to flee, but the officers caught him, tied his hands and brought him to the nearest village. Twelve years later, police found him hiding in the mountains, wrapped in a deerskin and with long, matted hair. With no one to talk to, he lost the use of language, and began to bark, chirp, screech and howl. Alone in the wild, as he tells it, he was raised by wolves, who protected and sheltered him. His story is that he was abandoned as a child of seven, in 1953, and left to fend for himself. ![]()
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