The attributes that are human in Lope are completely ignored by his foster parent. Emeterio provides Lope with a trade that will help him live and have enough to eat, but for the rest, isolates him and refuses to give him an education even if he is advised to do so by the boy’s former teacher. The positive gesture is only done halfway. The act of sending him as a shepherd to earn his own money, although seemingly a good deed to an orphan boy, is in fact a great injustice. Emeterio and his family, with a wife that had “ a sharp tongue” and a twenty years old daughter already form a hostile environment for the Lope: “ even if he took him in when he became an orphan, without inheritance or trade”, Emeterio and his family didn’t treat him right. There is a long list of omissions that, even if it is not given by the author, can be intuitively understood by the reader. Lope sees in the other boy the things that he has been deprived of by being sent as a shepherd in the mountains: a career, the possibility of cultivating his mind and his sensibility. The sharp contrast between the two boys, Lope a shepherd and Manuel a lawyer dressed in an elegant suit, is what generates the conflict of the story and brings it to its climax. After he had been a shepherd for five years, Emeterio Ruiz Heredia calls him back to the village for a medical control and Lope accidentally meets on of his former school colleagues, Manuel Enriquez.
The story already mentions that he hadn’t been to school for three years, which is one of the “omissions” in the boy’s life. He is thirteen when the story begins when his mother dies. The teenager is sent by a distant relative, a cousin of his father to be a shepherd in Sagrado. Thus, the story is a brief overview of an orphan boy’s life, named Lope. It is Emeterio’s omission to provide anything else than the strictly necessary material needs for Lope, something which is not unlike murder in a figurative sense. The true sin is that of “omission”, therefore a sin which is not related to any performed act but precisely to what has not been done. The title indicates however that this is not so.
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