“I feel like I’ve learned a lot from wolves and little from men. “This is the phrase that perfectly defines much of the life of Marcos RodrÃguez Pantoja, the boy of Cazorla, who lived in the desert during the post-war period, with the wolves as the only companion.
For twelve years of his life, Mark was forced to survive and succeeded: he learned to hunt his own food, to make his clothes and live in herd.
- His father.
- Who had no means to support him.
- Sold it to a dead shepherd in the forest.
- Leaving him completely alone at the age of seven.
- No one could have imagined that twelve years later.
- This child would have managed to survive and become a child.
- 19-year-old strong man.
To this day, Marcos feels that he has not fully adapted to society and believes that the world of men is very superficial: “people care about the clothes we wear, let’s do a good combination of pieces or not. “
He can’t understand why human beings complain so much, when they actually have everything to get ahead, survive and be happy, he says his time in the woods was the happiest time of his life, especially since he learned to hunt and never ran. no food.
When Mark was alone in the woods, he never imagined that he would find another family to welcome him, however, a herd of wolves decided to adopt him, they began delivering the food scraps they had hunted and gradually older wolves began to appear. Treat him like a lion cub.
Contrary to what you might believe, little Marcos didn’t want to go back to society. As a child he had suffered the mistreatment of his stepmother and the abandonment of his father. He felt hatred, cruelty, hunger, poverty in his skin and that’s why he rejected everything to do with this world.
In nature, he felt loved by animals: foxes, rats and especially wolves cared for him like no one had before.
The anthropologist who wrote the thesis on this case, Gabriel Janer, says that Mark invents nothing, but imagines a love that can meet his need for affection, the love he did not receive as a child.
And the wolves managed to stock up. Thanks to them, Mark felt loved, cared for, and that contributed to his happiness in nature. When he recalls the day when the Civil Guard found him and brought him back to society, he does not know whether they did something right or wrong, for from there the harsh life of man began for him; in his opinion, harder than in nature.
Returning to society means doing things you may not want to do: work to make money and buy food, suffer the envy, resentment, and ridicule of other men. According to Marcos, living with wolves didn’t have to deal with any of them.
Since his arrival in the world of humans, they have always tried to deceive him, taking advantage of his naivety. “I didn’t know what the money was and I didn’t care. Didn’t you understand why I needed money to eat?” An apple?
Society, as we know it, is characterized by the instillation in man of a series of needs that he does not really have, they are false needs.
People suffer from these pseudo-needs, when we actually already have everything we need to live well, the misleading advertising with which we are bombarded is largely to blame, but we reinforce their effect when we support ideas that others defend and that only promote their interests.
Marcos doesn’t understand why people complain so much in a world of such abundance, there’s no need to hunt, we buy real clothes, we have clean water and it’s easy to live indoors, so what?
We live in a society that seeks to control us, manipulate us into doing what it wants: consuming, saying when we should be, how we should dress, or what work we can do. . This denaturation of the human being brings deep feelings of anxiety.
Mark says this didn’t happen with him, he lived alone in the present. “I only knew that the sun would rise and, after a while, the darkness would come, nothing more. Has this way of life made you free and that’s why?”Happy?.
It is true that none of us will live Mark’s life, but it would do us good if we began to get rid of absurd needs; we will be able to walk faster with lighter luggage and observe the abundance that we have around us, all this will give us wings and lucidity to get away from a lot of unnecessary suffering.