The Company - 3

I presume (since I know that Turd´s parents were not sorcerers, nor astrologists, nor any of those shams), that chance was a main protagonist in their vile naming, and that it was a fortuity that their parents named him Turd, and not Tubercle, Abortion, Stupid, Impotent, or Nightmare; precisely Turd among such an infinity of imaginable ignominies, precisely Turd, a name that much later would become so accurate. How could they have known that when they atheistically baptized him with that absurd name, when he was no more than a piece of meat of four kilograms without any expectations, how could they have known that their son would ironically turn out to live many years later in the sewers, being the most outstanding King that ever governed among such a rabble of veridical and diverse turds?

It is indeed time to recite that my comrade Turd has his place of residence in one of the huge sewers that pour their contents over the dry banks of the wide riverbed that carries the weak river that sadly traverses our city. In the antechamber of one of these sewers, twenty meters from its end, Turd enjoys a sanctuary that nobody is willing to steal from him, a dragon lair where he can hide all of his silly belongings, all those stupid treasures that over the years he has fished from his river of moving waste. Twenty meters that allow Turd only to be touched by the sun rays indirectly, while remaining hidden from the sky and the world; Turd´s desire is not to be too outside nor too inside, and in this way not to live entirely like a man, but neither like a black rat of the profundities. The stuffiness of his putrid kingdom (my opinion about the stench is one that Turd, obstinate and opposed to agreements, will never share with me) he partly avoids by sleeping on a platform that he constructed with five wooden doors and some steel chains, a platform that hangs, always swinging, over the shining current of his river.

Retracing our steps: how did Turd´s parents know how to baptize their son so appropriately? How did they know (they never knew) that their son would end up living among excrements, almost converted in one of them? In other words, how to respond (aside from the proper skepticism) against the follies of chance, against the incredible results of luck and misfortune? This is our second principal question.