After a lifetime of imparting knowledge from the classroom, the master, ever since his retirement, had not been happy. Although he had often entertained himself dreaming of that moment—especially during his final years, when he had noticed an alarming decline in academic standards that filled him with desolation—now that he possessed all the time in the world to read, reflect, and continue learning, he was bored. Fortunately, chance had placed in his hands a small laptop forgotten in a corner by his apathetic nephew—whose sole ambition in life seemed to be nothing more than excelling before a video game screen—and suddenly a resplendent new world had opened before him: one in which he realized he could help others eager to learn, sharing with them his experience and wisdom.
The master was happy once again, and for over a month he had been enjoying every morning with enthusiasm before that small screen, immersing himself in deep, high-brow debates without being bothered much by his foul family, who were always roaming about the house up to no good and making his life a misery.
Wonderful days of peace they were: days when, upon returning from his morning walk, he would squeeze himself an orange juice in the kitchen—for, lest I have forgotten to mention it, the master neither smoked nor drank—and would then sit in the living room to navigate the world from that old, empty, and solitary house, as clean and tidy as he had left it when going out, without having to worry about the mischief and destruction that any of those deformed beings, whom he kept locked away in a closet in an upstairs room, might have caused in the neighbourhood.
Unfortunately, this morning, after enthusiastically and faultlessly rebutting the flawed conclusions reached by another fellow academic, the latter failed to rise to the dignity of his position. He merely offered a brief and concise response to the master's rebuttal—a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reply that did not conceal, beneath its presumed correctness, a certain resentment felt toward its author.
Upon reading it, feeling somewhat surprised and vexed, the master withdrew from the discussion and took the opportunity to visit the bathroom—a duty his prostate had been forcing him to perform with excessive frequency for the past few months. But as he stepped out, despite having been away for only a few minutes, the din of grotesque laughter coming from the living room alarmed him, and as he hurried anxiously down the corridor, he already feared the worst.
Indeed, there before the screen sat the dwarf, drinking and smoking as usual, typing at top speed with deformed fingers caked in pizza remnants, belching as a trail of ketchup and mayonnaise dripped from one corner of his lips, dirtying the entire keyboard. The master could not believe his eyes. They had all suddenly returned: the brawler and the foul one were there too, staring at what the dwarf was typing on the screen while laughing like two madmen; and atop the mousepad, the slutty one was taking suggestive, half-naked selfies, which the horny one was uploading to the network while uttering deep gasps.
The master, beholding such a Dantesque spectacle, could do nothing but start shouting, railing against them to return to the closet from which they should never have emerged. But the dwarf—who had always been the most brazen of them all ever since he appeared on a fateful, distant winter night shortly after the death of the master's father, introducing himself as an old friend of the deceased from drunken nights and brothel visits—looked at him with that malicious, idiotic expression he always wore. He told him that if they were there, it was because he himself had summoned them to spit a few truths into the face of that bumpkin of a pretentious professor, who had not known how to conduct himself properly in an academic debate.
The master, who despite his wisdom and composure always felt helpless against the dwarf's petulance, glared at him with contained rage and, with a slam of the door, locked himself in his room, longing for a moment of peace. That night, as on so many others in his life, he was unable to sleep, pondering what those acolytes—who so admired him when he generously scattered his wisdom from his virtual pulpit—would think of him if they were also to discover the foul family that had accompanied him everywhere for so many years.
Accessed 1 times