And if a horse barks we will never know it because the horses do not bark.
Every February 5, for the last 20 years, after a week and a day touring the mountains and eroding their voices in two or more daily functions, the Crusaders leave for Vega del Toro: a hole that lays at the foot of a restless mountains to hide this place that nobody knows very well from what increased imagination flows. The Toa tucks around for a very short runway crashing, but carefully equipped with twinkling stones, sometimes green or blue or black, which eventually fade out of water in a harmless mate, as some certainties when you breathe almost upon them.
Mornings are slowly lifting, arrived here exhausted you do not know exactly why. The babies go together and loose around. Sometimes a male disappears for a couple of months and then return, emaciated and battered as the prodigal son, determined to negotiate his food at a oil drum cut in half. The mountains are silhouetted against the sky at the darkest nights. One could stay and live here forever. This is not, although I would like to take this opportunity and drop it, a convenient place to shock you shoulder to death, but one could stay and live here forever.
February 6th is the first day of rest of the actors, who will fly on the seventh to the village of San Antonio del Sur to continue working at an insane pace. In this area, it is understood, the phones do not reach a single line of coverage, and after dark we went looking quite some height on the truck every day we moved from one place to another. We are five bouncing on the load area while the vehicle runs along some four miles on these hills. We got, finally, to the middle of nowhere. The truck turned off the lights and we could only distinguish flashing helpless our cell phones.
Yet. For a long, long time in which I had to travel at any time to reach a pre-university boarding school or a college boarding school or a city that is not mine to begin working at dawn, I kept asking me a question, inconsequential if you want, rotating, moreover, about unsophisticated fear. What to do in the middle of the night, on any given night, in the middle of the mountain, a mountain either, alone, without light, without a hint of light, no sound but the sharp sound of the mountain? What to do there, here, alone, under a moonlit night without trace? And there we are five around our phones, as we do as we seek coverage when we’re actually licking the edge of our common fears. We have been resolutely there, in the middle of nowhere, to pretend we buried our disturbances while under the flashing smile of our phones.
Then suddenly, a voice threaded a song. A voice is not the voice of the self or the voice of any of the four subjects that surround each of us. And it’s not do I need to say it? the voice of the driver on duty. A topic of Cuban trova from the twenties, I’m sure. And we all do as we did not hear, we cannot explain it and do as we did not hear, of course. Who does not know this trick? In the same way that horses will not bark ever, nor will men be alone, in the heart of the hills, threading a so unfortunate song. Without a single hut around, not a single astronomical object visible to beat it and not a vestige of civilization, but at least reality. Then we, without saying anything, without scratching our eyes and under the absolute certainty of individual invention, each of our calls on this site that we have, indeed, to confirm our human lineage, our proximity to mothers, brothers, sons now resting in the bosom venerated of possible.
We hung one after another until there is no voice on the side of a longing beyond that impunity we now thank. The truck turned on its yellow lights and moves a little to open and move back. And this yellow light discovers, under a very black sky against the mountains are barely distinguishable, a work without threshold and without end, a piece with the scenery I have described and do not get a definite place in our brains long and carefully mutilated in our ancestral memories. The spectrum thin line lost coverage. The truck, in fact, moving toward the voice that bends shirtless full force emaciated and battered body and resurfaces with a machete that traces diffuse movements in the air. The man in question moves his head to one side and the other. He is drunk and that reaches us. Perhaps in that state one can, leaving behind a broken heart that bleed the common sense and the most elementary instincts, throw a moonless sea or throw up a hill without stars … look, if you can hear your voice dying maybe after being dead I will answer you… the mornings here, I say, must be raised with such difficulty because night stays for hours without giving credit to these bravery feats, this free will.
It follows, unexpected, a stout rain is not simply the accurate judgment of the motion blur of his weapon. And the truck turns sharply at the exact junction to Vega del Toro, where they remain our most immediate contact with all the known, where forget in one or two quarters of an hour any lag histrionics. Turn at the right time, because behind the man who probably has not had a single drop alcohol in blood, the unnamable rushed. The infinity rushed, without curtains. And it is too late to imagine such a theater.
