Ask me about the night and the gloom. Ask me about the brief, about everything that passes away. About what falls silent and then lights up. About the words that leave their echo inside the houses after people have gone. The eclipse is a brief dream. It is a Segismundo’s speech in which the cosmos is contained. A poetic act where our cycle of living and fading is resolved with a wink, and again appears in another light, in a consciousness that is another and the same.
The Sun flickers with the Moon’s patch. The Earth, dazed, has freed itself from its own business. It is a timeless place. It is a vast cinema hall, where the spectators crowd before the sky’s screen.
The Sun bubbles, letting itself be drawn to what it illuminates, while the Moon takes center stage for an hour when it is normally invisible. It projects onto the Earth’s surface, and the Moon’s shadow manages to become our light. All that we ignore happens within us. We cannot do anything to avoid it, and we only aspire to remember what we have forgotten inside our labyrinth. There is more. Much more. The light hides on purpose to speak softly.
The silence begins to permeate all of nature. In the tower, it comes gradually as the golden diaphragm closes into a twilight that loses all clamor in favor of purple: an aura that enveloped the entire valley, from the nearby olive groves to the distant steppe, beyond the river. The shadow penetrated everything. Everything was a threshold. It was the moment to take a step.
The swallows stopped tracing their arcs and disappeared in search of the light that was fading. A flock of bee-eaters came from the horizon, speckling the air with austere little bells as they hurried back to the banks where they live in holes. Although dusk accelerated at a dizzying speed, they would achieve it in a single breath.
That is why, when the shadow enveloped the visible space, the silence of beings became prodigious. It was a respect for darkness within light, for the evanescent sense, yet universal in that moment, of a single energy that penetrated all of us and had made us lift our heads from our busy burrows. Even the stones seemed to emanate a radiance that touched our skin, as the air cooled. The door of meaning, opened for a moment, in the blink of the cosmos.
Then, from the Eastern hill, a group of youths began to shout. They cried labyrinthine slogans and fashionable songs. Arrogant, they did not know that the simplest olive tree could leave them in ridicule. Snakes, foxes. Again the discord arose from those who chose not to notice anything: human beings.
The Shadow still drenched the Earth with its sacred vastness. The Sun quickened its blush in the west. The swallows had returned and were once again catching insects.