Hermann Bellinghausen: Ravine (Metztitlán Ravine)

T

I climbed the silence that descends stony and transparent to the very core of burning solitude, the emptiness full of thorns, cliffs and shuddering ravines that in the telluric eternity were the ones shaken, when there was nothing to shake besides rocks, not even vipers.

Intoxicated by bad oil, nauseous and dying, the descent was like a circular wheel like the lenses of the eye, like the wheels at the foot of the hill, of the Sun now and the Moon then in its asymmetrical orbit with features of a madwoman embedded in the cliff.

The spring we lost, the ravine that confused our vertigo, the silence that unites silence with silence, settled flat… the only flatness in the blatant stone-throwing zone, if you go up, if you go down, if you know where you are.

You bet everything on paper, and today you write in the air. Here you could draw, if you knew how, a rosary of thorns. The ravine unnerves you and overwhelms you even if you faint. You don't take precautions. Don't take precautions.

Scorched desert. The fire passed millions of years ago, and since then a tense army of cacti has stood guard, waiting, steadfast, for the Universe's orders.

Don't expect shade. There isn't any for a hundred miles around, unless you come across a black cave. Trees in some corners. Mesquites only. Everything is alive, even if nothing seems so. The veins of the hillside are green with mineral, the tectonic layers of forgotten cosmic nightmares.

At this point, no one in the diffuse world of beings appears on the burning rock of the day, no iguana, no spider, no ringtail, only passing swallows and eagles that do not approach.

I don't even seem alive, and you see. Ashes also emit light, however ancient and hard they may be. Minerals redden the black stones.

Fortunately, there is the mercy of the breeze, but it is stingy; the dry ravines don't spare it. It visits them because it relaxes it, it takes away the excessive pressure of its father, the wind. In the ravines, blowing is easy. Nothing prevents it. In a heat stroke, the sun is hard to breathe. Stay away from the thistles; don't be fooled by their white flowers; they aren't white, they are thorns that are in the bones.

The gravel and dust of the gap bind me to the world; in their terrifying curves, they give meaning to the delirium of malaise and marvel at it, smiling. No headache can overcome the impact of a primordial earth, intact despite the centuries, just as I begin to walk through my life as they say the dying do, those who fall into the void, those who suddenly stumble upon the bald spot.

The heat turns everything to rock. Night will freeze the pebbles. From cactus to cactus, the circumference remains preserved, though thorny, against a landscape of sharp axes and gigantic cosmic scissor blades.

One foot in the infirmary and the other on the next Space Odyssey, I carry on my back those who will carry me when we leave this endless and portentous trap, fit only for hares.

Only the night will admit bugs and beasts of the land and air, moles and owls, bats and chameleons, worms as hard as mud, mosquitoes thirsty beyond hope. When skulls phosphoresce on the rocks and the constellations are allowed to peek into the freshness. Not that by day the splendor scorches, it leaves no memory intact. The milky gravity of the stones blues the folds of the sierra and the bald patches of the prickly pear cactus, lonelier than one, drier than my scruffy mouth, hairy as a gallows rope.

Dead, I reached the orchards of the valley and surrendered to the fainting of my remaining strength, which in the thicket was confused with an abyss of crumbled stones.