The Old man walked slowly, as if he were dragging time behind him. He was blind, but the legend goes that he could see a snake of light before him. He had earth coloured clothes and tufts of wheat beneath his hat. He was approaching the ragged hamlet.
“Look! The dogs are following him in a row, forming a line!” said the youngest Ruben, stopping the spinning top and spinning his eyes around. The other Rubens, crouching down, watched.
“That old man must have been crossed with a bug,” the oldest neighbour Mandarán stopped his gesture, paralysed those beside him, speaking with a hoarse voice.
“I’m going to ask him what he wants,” three trees further on, the middle Debiané’s betrothed grew bolder.
The man came up a long slope, leading a line of dogs and other people. Slow, solemn.
The air was different in the Talado, (1) and if night were to fall at midday, no one would notice. They had never all been together, neither at the start of a new year nor when one the elders died, and that only happened after the storms, as if it were another phenomenon of Thunder god of rain. They were all old, because the men take our father’s name and the women our mother’s. They became ageless and knew from Mystery, alone, that water blesses the crop, but that human beings are far from blessing. A bad crop. For this reason they had large wells to collect water, and when it did not rain they would start to lose faith in everything and, resigned, they would drink animal blood. During the times of the great droughts, they had to drink the blood of their grandparents and the hermits. For this reason and eternal law dictated that each ranch must be at half way to the horizon from the next, so there was more room for the wells.
The Debiané ranch had the most wells, because they were many brothers, without a woman, who constantly made and expanded them, and because the middle Debiané man kept the custom of offering one every new moon, to win his brothers’ favour.
The children played at digging wells, they made them small, evidently
useless, one beside the other – “and who makes the deepest one”. Afterwards the men would merge them forming one well, shallow and wide, which was in turn used as a playground by the children to make small separated wells “and who makes the deepest one”, and so on. The ground seemed to be a rocky ravine, teeming with the wells, separating the ranches even more.
Fifty thatched mud brick ranches, each with ten or fifteen inhabitants, was the world for those of the Talado, who all walked behind the Old man and beside the dogs.
Madarán, who is first, says that the Old man is muttering through his teeth.
“Madarán says that the Old man is muttering through his teeth.”
“The Old man is muttering,” was what reached the last in line, when the sun had almost travelled half a day.
[1] Tomado de Leonardo Garet Los hombres del agua, Montevideo, Destabanda, 1988.
The Old man stopped at the highest part of the Cerro Pelado (2) and those who were arriving formed a semicircle around him, broken only by the dogs that sniffed and withdrew. They had walked with the sun in their face, and they looked at the Old man in the last rays. The only thing capable of satisfying such silence seemed to be if he flew. Instead of doing that, he said: “A river will be born here,” and he set off towards where the sun had disappeared.
Mandarán took a step back to look beneath his feet. They all did the same and then fell into a mute prayer. A river is water from the ground the same as from the sky. They returned to the Talado very late at night, each family leaving a representative to see the miracle. This is the Story, the words that spoke life in the Talado. The guard was continuous because “we have to leave two women and one man, day and night.”
“How will we do it, Mandarán, no one wants to stay without a brother or sister.”
“We will take turns, every time the moon changes.” Was the response and what has been done ever since our grandparents remember that their grandparents told them. The made a raised stone ring, semicircular, with an open face towards where the sun rises, around the spot pointed out by the Old man, to help the river’s birth. We all went to the changing of the guard and we brought a pot of water to throw on the spot.
The water from the sky will call the river. The hamlet gradually changed orientation; the ranches and even the wells looked on to the sacred place. The doors and windows were made on that side; the Talado ended up divided in two, looking at itself in the mirror of the non-existent river.
Time must have passed as slowly as on the sunny days without an island of cloud. They were the days of the men of fire, the demons that have now become complete legends.
Therefore, when the Negro Mandarán came running and the dogs on his tail, when we all gathered looking at his faraway eyes, we understood without being able to hear a word that the Old man had appeared. He came in the direction of the Cerro del Río (3), slowly, as if he were dragging time behind him. History unfurled before us, as if it had been no more that a prophecy that was being fulfilled at this moment. When we realised that we would repeat already trodden steps, we decided to go out to meet him. Naquías stayed in his ranch, mocking. Mandarán asked the Negro if he had said the a river would be born on the Hill, the Old man told him that his wife would have twins, who would also have twins and the a negro race would be born.
The mother of the Debianés insisted:
“Do you bring the river?”
With staring eyes, dry from watching the sun, without lowering his head, he answered that her eldest daughter was sleeping with the man who looked after the river altar; she would flee to the east and would never be seen again.
“The river! The river! The river!” went the threatening chorus of mouths tired of repeating rituals, “the river!” with the joy of discovering the shout. With no inheritance, without joint agreement, forgetting ourselves and our fear of the Old man, we shouted.
Uncountable thirsty generations with us. And each of us received in turn, as if the Old man had infinite mouths, the map of our future laid out to the tenth generation. We submissively followed him. The Old man bumped into a rock and said: “Tomorrow it will rain; the man from this ranch will drown; a river will be born here.”
He disappeared on the horizon chasing the sun.
When we returned to the Taldado, the middle Debiané did not find his sister, and the east, the place to which she would flee, captured our gaze until a noise never heard before nor since, announced the river that was coming down the mountainside; once Naquías’ ranch was flattened it went into the condemned forest, and following our grandparents route it stayed there, as if it had always been there.
Many arboreal creatures have become isolated in the earth. When they fell they kissed jellyfish to leave their faces smooth and glistening. They can no longer reach their nests but they now throw stones, eat fallen fruit and they are starting to believe that they come from the earth.