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The story of the lamb -- of the man who stole a lamb -- is about the man named Don, but it will take me a long while to get there. I hope you will be patient.
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I have to tell you that I don't understand reality enough to describe it to my own satisfaction. But I do have a sense that our little domain of true and false -- of the verified and the refuted -- makes a very small sub-domain inside the much more vital domain of what's fully real. By which I only mean that most of what surrounds us, though very clear to God's eyes, is mere speculation for our own eyes. As for what surrounds our little human world of "true" and "false", the rationalists and cogitators can call it a land of myth or of hypothesis -- my only point is how far it extends, not merely around us but within us as well. We don't know much aside from this one immense thing.
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In the wide domain of mythology (?) that surrounds us, we ourselves, without God's help, could never figure out what is true and what is false. We are like that poor monkey typing Shakespeare. Scientific trials seem to have the same feeling of blindness as that animal typing.
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As for the story, the use of the story. Whenever pain destabilizes me, I panic and reach for the pain relief that is the spirit gazing over the pain at something else more edifying. What I mean is that when my soul hurts, I need a story, quickly. Entering the story releases some small part of the pressure on me of forever inhabiting this one particular self with its pain and panic. Sometimes the otherness of the story looks back from a place without pain. Now does the story have to be true in order to work this magic? Well, the characters do not need to have entries in the phone book. But there is a certain kind of truth that the story must have or else it is useless and relieves nothing. I am so tired of hearing literary critics and Sunday school teachers tell me that the truth of a story is irrelevant. When I need it, the story's truth matters immensely and persistently. When it is not literally true then sometimes it becomes truer than true. When you need a story, you will feel this too. You will be glad that the story becomes as true as it can.
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Take the famous story from Second Samuel of the man who stole the lamb. He was a rich man but he stole his poor neighbor's lamb, his only lamb. Did this man, this thief, exist and does he exist now? Did this crime happen, did it perhaps happen many times? Today. people don't own animals in that way, they don't depend for their life on its ownership, not in America anyway. Yet oddly enough, the story seems even more deeply true without its original locale. It does seem truer than true, if I'm allowed to say that. It is like the bare outline of a person that had been drawn upon a transparency but that you step into without warning and then suddenly it's really you. In its current state it can be lain over anyone (and oddly seems to fit nearly anyone). You say this thing is like a decal, then you try to take it off. But it won't come off. "You are the man!" Now its truth can be seen to be true for you too. Yet they said it was only a story. Only.
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Who has stolen what lamb from whom? Oh, there are so many crimes! In the novel Lolita, the molester narrator hears the sound of children playing and realizes that his crime has been to steal a little girl from the space where that sound is made. But in a way that space doesn't have a locale. We have all heard that sound at many different times in many different places. It is hyper-localized, its place is bigger than place (the delimited one that we know) and it lives in a wider place than our physical space, where it becomes truer than true. Not less true but more. So that is what I mean about my difficulty in placing a reality, in pinning it down. The truth is that I neither can nor ever would describe reality "to my own satisfaction" because in the end reality isn't mine, after all. But that is still not enough to say.
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But now to move on to Don, the protagonist of this story, the man who (almost) stole a lamb.
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To Don the other teachers had seemed so indifferent to the people they taught, so involved were they in their own intermural games of precedence (always in the context of the general unhappiness that came from the low pay and low respect they received). The big issue was always who got the copier first and who was the poor soul who had to replace the paper. Don, on the other hand, was proud of his "good works", of how dedicated he felt and was, of how much good he did for la communidad in general. People at church on Sundays would stand near him as if to bask in the warmth of his good feeling. He felt he had finally learned how to walk the Christian walk.
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Then one day as he reached forward to correct some homework submitted by Luisa, his best student, his hand accidentally grazed her breast. It was a very slight contact, it hardly happened, and he didn't talk about it, she didn't talk about it, it seemed not to have happened at all, really; nevertheless, the movement of his arm had been like someone wiping the condensation from a window so that you could suddenly see what was on the far side. You could see whether you wanted to or not, you could see things that really you didn't want to see at all.
Nothing had happened and yet the whole notion of "good works" had disappeared in an instant and could not be retrieved.
It turned out that "he was the man!"
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