Читать книгу The Journey - Miguel Collazo - Страница 14

The days went by. There were things the men didn’t want to talk about with him. He thought this would pass, over time they would assimilate and destroy this hurdle. Yet over time, what was blocking them gradually became more distressing and harder to define. But Catal didn’t appear worried, or didn’t want to appear worried. Maybe whatever he was leaving in their hands was something beyond his powers of discernment, as if he were testing them, or letting them finish a business he had started. It would have been easy enough to give the marching orders if Catal had been absolutely convinced that his men, on their own, understood the situation. Man’s haste counted for nothing in comparison with the infinite patience of the cosmos. In part Catal knew that the men wanted to talk with him and that, if they didn’t, it was because the topic hadn’t ripened yet in their heads, and it wasn’t up to him to force events; on this point no one could say he had acted with insufficient tact.

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The man halted and saw Catal’s eyes fixed on him, but those eyes were filled with nothing but kindly attention.

“What is it?” Catal asked quietly.

The man was suddenly unable to explain himself.

Catal looked at the base, then turned back to look calmly at the man. The man saw nothing demanding about that look. He felt slightly annoyed with himself.

Catal smiled and took him by the arm. They walked in silence over the thick, sand-spattered grass, as if on a stroll. When they passed the borders of the base and reached the top of a hill, Catal stopped.

Far off, past quartz formations glinting in the sunlight, the flowers stood. For a moment the man was afraid the leader would keep moving forward, but Catal turned to face him, his whole head alert, as if he were trying to hear something inaudible through the silence. The desert spread out stark before them, not a bird or a reptile, under a stormy sky pierced by wide beams of blinding light. Perhaps Catal knew everything; perhaps he even had an explanation. Why wouldn’t he help him?

“Catal,” he nearly begged, “we tried to do things as well as could be done.”

He waited for Catal’s reply, but the leader didn’t speak; he didn’t even show signs of being willing to do so. His face had lost that attentive expression. It still looked friendly, but was completely impenetrable.

The man took a deep breath.

He glanced furtively at the quartz formations beyond which the flowers hid, way over there, far off in the distance, on the edge of the horizon, on the dead, burnt plain; to him it seemed an immense cemetery crowded with corpses, with irascible entombed mummies, the great cemetery of the universe where all the charred and twisted, wicked, intractable, ancient remains of the planets would come to rest.

He closed his eyes. Suddenly he heard, at last, his leader’s voice.

He felt as if a finger were tracing, with each word he spoke, the lines of his cerebral cortex and pressing down on specific spots. Catal’s eyes studied his face. In the bottomless and tempestuous emptiness of those eyes, cold but full of life, a small, trembling flame suddenly flared: a melody was drifting in from distant places, through the mists of time, becoming audible as it moved forward through Catal’s pupils. Suddenly the image of the flower arose in the man’s memory, full-blown, from the roots on up, connected to other brilliant, fleeting recollections.

The melody merged with a human voice crying out in anguish, almost like an endless lament. He didn’t know whether he wanted to run away or let himself be drawn in and chase after the recollection. The novel familiarity of the flower, of the symbol of the sphere, pierced the original tragedy of the Ellipse in the primordial world of the Ammes.

The man slowly began raising his arms, and his hands instinctively covered his ears.

Catal looked away; he observed the wind whipping the sand and a blue, fossilized leaf twisted into a spiral rolling past his feet. The silence at that moment was so deep, Catal thought he could hear the distant rustling of the giant petals as they fluttered in the breeze.… The other man managed to open his eyes and look around in astonishment.

“It’s exactly what we had thought,” said Catal.

Actually, the flashes of lightning when they had landed could not be taken as evidence; right now, however, they assumed great significance.

Catal remained silent for a moment.

A ray of light touched the hilltop, and the mist pooled around his feet quickly fled; perhaps that was the only ray that would break through the clouds, like a light beam deliberately aimed in their direction, purposefully pointing them out.

Catal turned to face the man; his gaze again grew friendly and attentive: something huge beyond measure was moving in the fathomless vastness of his mind. He began to speak, letting his words betray no hint of worry, as if he were discussing something that they had no say in.

The Ellipse had always been a true symbol for them, and its origins were very clear. A bemused smile passed over the leader’s lips: man’s pride would have to suffer many more setbacks still. The false image created by the Ammes ethos surrounding the origin of their symbol was now crumbling—because there was something else behind that supposed origin.

The flower, the symbol of the sphere, had touched the Ammes world in the most unimaginably distant past, and the Ellipse was the product of that encounter. That was its real origin, but something must have gone horribly wrong back then, only to endure in this form throughout time. The flower drove them away and attracted them with a force they were unable to resist. Catal had no doubt that someday, in the future, they’d be ready to break down these psychological barriers and pierce the mystery. The man felt overawed in the presence of his leader. He remained silent. Then he looked out across the desert and, at three widely spaced points in the distance, through the afternoon mist that was rising up from the sand, he seemed to see three long silver threads swiftly intertwining.

Then, a short while later, he heard the rumbling of thunder.