Damned Words

Damned Words

Chapter 6: Devil's Land.

The original version with all images could be read and purchased at:

       richardguerrabooks.info .

Traducir al Español. (Original)

— Still remains the ghost of what has already gone and the shadow of what is soon to go—he said, without listening to me, concentrated on the smoke that came out from the earth.

That, he must have said, sentencing "smoke that must go".

—Do you see what's in there? —He said again, pointing to a ruined building rising about a hundred yards away.

—That was the church. Look at it! .There was God in it. That God who people say helps men. There is nothing left. No one here ever believed in that God or any other. They did not believe in anything.

The man spoke without looking at me.

He was a man of about sixty, according to my calculation, with his dark skin, beaten by the sun and time. Undoubtedly he was a man who had walked many roads, looking dismal. His mouth deflected one of its ends as who thinks and later, does not reveal what could wander his judgment.

I had arrived there by pure chance. I stopped to buy water, to put fuel, refill my tank. I stared at that desolate town, where the wind was crawling with a wild sound.

I went into a ramshackle station where this man was, he told me that there was no water bottles. We went out to pump an old well of which at least I could drink water that had a strange taste.

I was just quenched my thirst. In front of the station was a street in which the stones shone, on the other side a rustic place where people seemed to have sometime gathered.

At one of its side was another construction in bare blocks, inside which were tools, bits of tin, nuts and bolts on the floor.

The sun roared, like all the suns of July, drawing things with colors, but that sun was not the one I'm used to seeing.

I sat in the coarse park, shortly the man sat next to me. He stared at the smoke that silently emanated from the earth.

— There's no water— I said— by miracle there is fuel yet.

Then was when he said that there was nothing left, about the ghost and the other things. Anyway, I was not going to fix the world. Also, as circumstances indicated, I should have to be strayed,

I had gone to look for some photos, that is to try to make some pictures of a certain place that someone described like "very picturesque".

I left very early. I drove about fifty miles. I was thinking that it was not smart or economical to look for any photo that was so far away. I noticed that I had run out of gas. I grabbed the first exit I saw to fill the tank.

I needed to get some water, because I had a burning thirst.

—Where are the people here? —I asked.

— Somewhere, over there around.

I looked along that street of white stones. I thought I saw people crossing from side to side, but I realized that it was an illusion, because I'm always full of illusions.

—What else there is here? — I inquired again. My words rolled alone.

The man got up, went to the station. He came back with a newspaper.

—This was the village, the same.

I looked at the newspaper, which was streaked with gray spots. It illustrated a village with moored oxen and old cars, so I noticed the date. Nineteen twenty-one.

—This was almost a century ago! — I teased astonished, thinking that this document could have some value.

I was going to take a picture about it when the man snatched the newspaper from me.

— There is also the cemetery. If you follow the street, you will find the cemetery. It is not the same. It must be empty. The dead already are gone where they had to go. The others do not need to die, they are already dead.

I thought about my cohabitants, those who are close to me. I remembered their empty smiles, their paradoxically cheerful simulations, their false truths, their paths to success; as misleading and deserted as that street of stones.

I was tired. The time I had been driving had left a chill pain in my knees.

I took the camera. I began to walk up the street to stretch my feet, which took some effort. I felt as if that damn smoke had gotten me tangled up to not to let me walk.

After a little bit of walk I looked back. I did not see the man, he possibly have gotten into the cabin again. I walked hearing the dry stones tracheateing, like if a warning came out, like if the steps I was slopping on that path were unearthing a message.

I woke up early. At the time to leave, the steering wheel of my car was frozen. I had to be rubbing my hands for a while before I started driving. I do not usually get up so early in the days I have to rest. Maybe that's why my head was full of foam.

It seemed to me to hear voices, which was illogical, because no one could be seen at least five hundred yards away, I cannot say more distance, because that diameter was all I could see clearly.

The road led to a skeletal forest where the leftovers of the cemetery were, lying in its solitude.

I could not explain why my sensory perceptions announced danger.

Over there was more intense the reverberation of the sounds. I gave no importance to it, but I stopped to listen, where the shouts came from.

Could be people hiding among the rickety trees. I would have liked to have some other dialogue, because although it was not the place that I had been described, it was a singular area that afflicted territory.

The area had everything less than picturesque, but it was curious.

The steam wobbled lethargic, enveloping the echo, intoxicating the atmosphere that liquefied into the clamor.

It was not my weariness, from these ruins came voices, opaque screams that were interwoven with smoke.

I seemed to me I saw a woman crouched at the end of the road and I shouted:

—Hola, Hello!—She only disappeared.

I took out my camera and got a couple of photos, it is a vice, a custom of taking pictures of everything, to tie to my memory anything that may seem flashy. Reality is divided into several levels, I call them dimensions. One of them can be booted from the images that come to us occasionally.

Images, like dreams, reveal secrets if we know to discover them, can help us to interpret life, which seems incomprehensible.

It is hard to understand. We do not know when or why we came or when or to where we leave. The best we can do is try to live without pretensions, without harming anyone, without waiting to receive more than what is given, or better, without expecting anything.

In any case, to be prepared for the end, that can at any time to comes, inexorably.

It is laughable how big we measure ourselves and how little we are.

It would be good to know if small animals really do not know the world or if they consider their self the main axis on which the reasoning revolves.

If they give thanks without thanking, they ask forgiveness for looking delicate, if they triturate their bones, each other, with gallantry, phlegmatically and decently.

I was walking distracted in my recurring philosophy. I crossed with a bird that fled quickly making a ... yeck, yeck, yeck, beating its wings like if detaching from something, seemed to want to shake, to open a gap to get out of that red sun which was beginning to cover its stain with clouds.

I heard the distant whistle of a train, there should have been a railway line somewhere. I walked to where there were no graves, but remains of an abandoned building. There were rails, old lines on the ground. Those evidently could not be the rails from which came the sound I had heard, the Puff, Puff, Puff. It sounded miles away.

The sky had been closed with dusty clouds. Up to them rose the smoke that even there came out of the crossbars, the grass, of the dry land. There was nothing else to see.

I turned back. I crossed back the way. For a stretch I found myself in a tangle of weeds where it could be seen as a piece of road or concrete trail that was lost in a thicket of fallen branches. I could not see beyond. I could not cross, or know where the cement shortcut leaded. It ended in a green impassable rot.

I looked for the way to go forward, to surround, to see that there could be behind that knead of branch and leaves. It was difficult.

Men had done that path, but they did not use it any more.

It is good to know the end of the roads, especially if we think about abandoning them, although it is not always wise to follow a path that it is shown to us as inaccessible.

I bordered the dying vegetation trying to find a route that would let me cross. I tried to make a complicated detour from which I had to give up, I could not follow.

"All roads lead to God," someone said, but I had already been told me that God had gone from that village.

Since childhood I have kept the habit of persevering in my things. I do not give up easily. Always finding options to accomplish what is planned, even when life has taught me that it is not good to be infatuated in carrying out every plan we think.

However, I chose to leave it that way.

Behind the shrubs blocking the passageway, clarity could be seen as a hope. I would not go looking for such an uncertain promise.

Hope is not imaginable at a point that does not suggest hope.

I avoided the complicated route. I passed through the cemetery again, through the crosses and mossy moles that preserved ancient engravings.

I approached and tried to read. It could not read, it was a script in an unknown language. It looked like Eastern cryptography; my fertile fantasy imagined that it could be a dead language.

With my lens for that type of photography, I took one or two photos. The engraving was...

I copied: मेरे पास आओ, जब आप धुआं की तरह हो

I went on, not understanding to what the hell spot I'd been going to.

I took the photos not only to capture the image of the tombstones, but also planned to investigate what the epitaph said.

In spite of the primitive appearance of the sepulchers, the signs protruded, detailed enough to specify the characters.

I made my respective notes. I continued my exploration.

Then, I saw her, like a flash or the sound of a harp in the most absolute silence, that girl was lying in the middle of the tombs that had no color or anything other than the rough texture of the stone.

I saw her looking at me as if she were looking at a specter, but without fear.

—Hi!—I told. She smiled slightly.

It was a different smile, without the brightness of the art, genuine, different from the ones I usually see, normally accompanied by tender expressions, a lyrical gesture of pain with the words: "I'm sorry; I have to slice your neck."

A noble smile I could believe.

The language of men has no words to explain certain things, but I have no doubt that what I felt when I saw that angel on the dead earth could not be explained by any system of communication that might exist.

She stayed like that, folded, kept in my memory, with her faint smile, enigmatic, with her incredible sporting clothes that contrasted with the surrounding murkiness.

I feared it was another illusion, so I came close to being in front of her. I asked her if she spoke Spanish. She nodded, folded her hand holding it on one of her shoulders.

I took my camera. I doubted that I could say exactly what I meant, so, I suggested that I wanted to take a picture about her.

She stood motionless waiting; I took the picture, kept my camera; closed my eyes.

I cannot explain why my dimensions are linked, combined.

I must be in the wrong world; I do not know who I am, due to too much walking I've forgotten where I was going.

I could not go back either, I do not remember where I come from. From what I lived in other former life, where infamous mirages revolved hallucinated by cracking the reason into pieces of glass.

The images are piled up, confused, making me doubt about what real space of the unreality they proceed from and proposing me to merge into the miniature universes that encapsulate.

I opened my eyes. She was there, in the position where I had left her, looking at me in silence.

It seemed to me she expected me to explain, with the calm and naturalness that I no longer believe they exist, seemed to wait.

But I have forgotten how to explain, it is no longer useful or understandable in my world of models.

— I hate who i am— I told my dead.

I have to have lived too many lives, that are why they overlap, mix with each other. I must also have to have died too many deaths.

The air was liquid; it ran avoiding the branches not to move them, to don't discover the stillness subject to a static mantle.

I was going to ask her what she was doing in that sad place, when another bird with the shrill sound; the ... "yeck", "yeck", "yeck", tugged my eyes away with its flight to the sky that had turned gray.

The zigzag bird was lost in those grayish blue stained cumulus.

I've always liked to see the stars of the day. The morning star at dawn or in the sunset, when there is still light and its presence looks implausible.

Over there was Venus, between the fluffy clouds, even in that forgotten nook could be seen, reflecting its radiant truth over the earth.

Was it dusking? It could not been that late. It could not have been passed that much time.

I got down the look. I did not see her.

— My brain is fatigued.

To make sure, I went rounding between those tumulus, the cold stone hulks. I found nothing but smoke, absence, yet I was sure I had seen her.

I looked at my phone; five and forty minutes. Amazing!

Time to go back; time had passed in a surprising way.

One of my friends is an expert researcher specializing in dead languages. I sent to him this message:

“Joe, please, could you tell me which language is this and more or less tell me what it means?”

It took a few minutes. The response was as follows:

“It's an Indian language, it means something like this: ‘Come to me, when you're like smoke.’

From where the hell did you get that?”

“Come to me, when you're like smoke.”

I went down the rocky street to the rough benches were. I found the man at the station dozing in one of them.

He got up. After talking a few irrelevant things, he went to the booth. I thought he was going to bring me another memory of what that settlement without houses or people had been in the past, but what he brought was a beer.

— Miracles happen— I said, pretending calm while the old man pulled out a cigar. He offered me another that I gladly accepted.

I drank anxiously. My thirst had not gone out at all.

— Ease, ease, there's no more! — He said patting my shoulder, just like any ordinary person on the planet.

— I'm sick of seeing mock-ups. — I talked to my dead— I hate the stench of hypocrisy.

I was going to tell him about my pilgrimage, about the girl, about the writings on the tombs, about the strange inscription, but I did not do it.

I told him I had not been able to see a person. He added:

—You saw them, sir; you have to have seen them.

I told him there was only smoke coming off from the ground. I wanted to ask why. He anticipated.

—Smoke, sir, they’re smoke. I was going to follow you, to alert you about not to fall in the swamp, in the shifting sands that are hidden by the thicket.

I thought that man was crazy. That I had ran lucky. I looked at the phone. No signal.

— What I have to do is to go. It has become very late; I cannot explain how the stars are coming out already.

—Time helps, sir, it's the only one that helps us, to end quickly.

I did not say anything, I saw him throw away his empty bottle, to sit down. Say:

— To leave? I do not know if may. Long ago no one was coming. This land of the devil welcomes those who come. Then they leave when they are smoke.

I was looking for where I had left my car, which did not appear. The street was longer than I suspected, as if spinning, going in circles.

The birds that emitted the "yeck", "yeck", "yeck" that was sounding to me dull, crossed me without revealing the way to escape.

I was dizzy, stunned, hallucinating.

I saw crosses, graves with rare inscriptions, coming, going away. I knew they were false, they were mirages, illusions; the girl in the tomb.

—You've always been lost—my dead said.

I wandered around for another hour. I passed by five times where the old man had settled back on the bench.

I was able to find my car. I threw myself in. I ripped it off and shot myself in a sincere escape.

I had to lower the car windows. The interior was filled with smoke. They were the dead who wanted to go with me.

— Crazy shit! — I said, turning on the radio.

That fateful day I was predestined to succumb to dementia. I heard the lyrics of a song from my youth.

“Last thing I remember, I was running for the door 
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before 
— Good night— said the night man— we are programmed to receive 
You can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave”.

— Damn! — I turned off the music.

I had an instant of reflection in which an idea I came up to me. I stopped.

It occurred to me to check. I took out my camera. I checked the photos taken. In the images saved I found one that verified to me that it had not been a mirage, I had actually seen the girl.

The speedometer marks ninety miles. The endless street goes round again, again, again. It has begun to rain.

If all roads lead to God, He estimated that my conformity should be... diluting me in the rain without knowing the end of this road. Another life piled up, another useless existence.

I watch the big raindrops falling.

I threw out the phone, in case some hiker finds it and it occurs to him to inspect, to see what I recorded before I convert, to rise in spirals.