did keep as a sign of their identity were their practices and ceremonies, like when they were getting married or when they said goodbye to loved ones who had passed away. I had gone to their funerals more than once, first out of curiosity, and later out of friendship.
CHAPTER 2. THE FIRST SURPRISE
We walked through those ancient streets, many of them cobbled, for what it was supposed to be a short visit, but there were endless and countless tourist sights, at least that is how they looked to the rest of the group, who got excited every time we turned a corner and discovered an outstanding old building.
To me, so many visits to historic buildings seemed endless, so I was a little exhausted and tired, perhaps because I had been walking all morning from one place to another. Maybe it was due to the heat and the change of hour, because it was still night in my country and here it was close to noon, or maybe because I had not had enough sleep because of our failed exploration of the city’s nightlife. Maybe it was a combination of both.
Besides, everything we saw had been here for hundreds of years, and for sure it would remain like that for many more.
That is why I did not understand the need of the rest of the group to go to every single place that seemed remarkable to them, documenting it with photographs or in their notebooks, as if they were the first discoverers of some ancient ruins.
I sat by a stone fountain, in the middle of a square, waiting for my classmates to leave a church they were in. I was absent-minded, looking at the bottom of a pond formed by the water falling from the fountain, when a little girl approached me.
By how tall she was, I do not think she was more than six or seven. She had a white dress and a yellow scarf on her head, and with a broad smile she offered me a flower of great white petals.
After receiving that precious and delicate object in my hands, and not knowing the reason for that gift, I wanted to pay her, taking some coins out of my wallet and showing them to her so she would receive them. However, she shook her head, told me something that I did not understand, and raising her right hand as a goodbye gesture, turned and ran away.
I did not know what to do with that little wonder, and I put it on my lapel. In other occasions I would not have done it, since I knew flowers as a decoration were only used at weddings or other social events, and that they were more an ornament for women.
When I looked up after placing the flower, I saw the girl walking away through one of the many alleys that led to this square. Sincerely I was somewhat disoriented with this rather chaotic urban distribution. I was used to big cities, where from the main streets, of larger size, parted the rest of the smaller secondary streets. However, here the size of the road was not an indication of anything, since from any of them could emerge another and later another one of different size, and of these other new avenues and roads.
In addition to that, the few indications that had the names of the places where we went were written in that strange language, which despite sharing a similar alphabet was quite enigmatic to me.
Perhaps if I had paid a little more attention to the classes of ancient languages, during which my teacher wasted so much effort trying to instill in me the love of classical culture. However, since that subject did not count too much for the final grades, I did not consider it with much interest. That now prevented me from being able to make the most of this trip, not only because the city was full of inscriptions on doors, lintels and on other archaeological remains, in the ancient and already forgotten Latin language, but because the language spoken by the citizens here, the Italians, was a derivation or evolution of it.
In addition to that, the guide the embassy had assigned us served as our translator, talking to the merchants and sellers who approached the group to try to sell us something, or when we wanted to enter some private building to look at the architectural or historical remains in those villas.
By the way, it was not clear to me how art was related to the city. It seemed that ancient benefactors, the patrons of arts of the time, paid generously to the artists to produce their work. That way they made the city a cultural center of reference.
Although in my country we certainly had some patrons that donated part of their wealth to young talents, their generosity was not enough to obtain benefits decade after decade, as an incentive to new generations.
In addition, the government itself provided through various mechanisms, direct aids or scholarships to those that stood out from the rest, but these aids did not focus exclusively on artists. They rather tried to reward those who best performed on a given specialty, so that they would continue to train and progress.
Besides, the government rewarded with financial help young promises in science, research, the arts, and even sports, so they could dedicate their time to them, without having to worry about a job to pay for their studies.
Fortunately for me, I was among those lucky young people, who had scholarships from their government, and on whom depended the progress and future of our country. This government’s scholarship allowed me to study in the same center as others, without having to have a father with a high political office or a great fortune, like some of my fellow travelers had, or without having a remarkable and outstanding sports career that others had as well.
My specialty, on which I had stood out, was mathematics. Since I was a child, I loved to discover the relationship elements had in nature, or guess events before they happened, or predict the behavior of animals and people.
Of all of this I had no idea, but when I started to study mathematics I understood this was the language of the future, since I could use it to put forward theories about present and upcoming events, I could understand the associations of sets and their behavior, and apply this to ordinary life.
Perhaps it was somehow presumptuous, as some professor had discussed with me, to try to find some logic in the world around us, not taking into account instinctive behaviors. Likewise, some of my fellow classmates criticized me as arrogant, since as far as them they preferred to trust on something as intangible as good or bad luck. In my case, however, I was sure that behind every fact and every behavior there was a formula that could explain it.
I then specialized myself in economic theories, with which I was able to predict the behavior of governments with respect to their domestic and foreign trade.
The main theory I had supported was that the population would expand or contract based on the availability of food. So, it was not so much about having a good or bad harvest in the fields, but about the ease or difficulty of the interchange through commerce.
I then reread history from that hypothesis, and I could explain why some peoples were doomed to their disappearance because they did not have a raw material to offer to the neighbor country. Therefore, they were not be able to trade with anything other people needed.
Some of my professors, when I had to defend my thesis, accused me of forcing reality to fit my mathematical model, but I was sure they said that only due to skepticism on their part.
If I could know all the economic variables of a certain population, or at least the most important ones, I could predict without too many errors how many years of subsistence they would have, and whether these people would become dominant or dominated.
Therefore, if a given population, who cultivated and generated raw materials, did not have around them others who converted and manufactured them, they had no chance of growth. It was for me a perfect symbiosis, beneficial to both, where the producer survived thanks to the manufacture of raw materials.
It is true that this led to a rather significant economic difference. Once a product was manufactured, the original producers had to
