Читать книгу The Book of Gratitudes - Pablo R. Andiñach - Страница 15

For Alicia Casas

On that day he understood the value and the drama of words. They have flavor when we know them, but are an unsurmountable barrier when they are strange to us. That is why the growing noise and their modulations made them seem drunk; at times, he also thought they were intoxicated until, among the multitude of sounds, he heard one that was familiar. From the vortex of confusing voices, a string of words arose which he was able to identify. He heard Elamite.

He had arrived from Elam the previous afternoon and did not expect to hear his language in Jerusalem. Like all the Jews of his country, he spoke and communicated in Aramaic, the common tongue of the entire region. But he proudly kept to himself the articulation of Elamite, the tongue of his ancestors. A language uncontaminated by Hindu or Semitic words, similar to Sumerian, the first tongue human beings ever put into writing. Elamite was of the lineage of the first traces of letters ever written in the mud to represent a sound. With its elder Sumerian brothers, they had invented history, recorded memory, and filled libraries.

His blood still rankled against the vile warrior Alexander the Great, who mutilated the Elamite language and replaced it with the crude Greek symbols. Since then, the treasure of the words of his land had gradually been relegated to the heart, to the intimacy of home, and, without meaning to, each generation allowed their words to be defeated and buried by the passage of time.

For this reason he was surprised to hear Elamite amid the murmur. But it grew clearer and stronger. There was a strong wind in the room and a clamor, but neither the wind nor the clamor bothered him. In the midst of the emotion that engulfed him, he had a vision of graves opening up and springing out words that inaugurated names; he felt that which only happens in dreams and consists of hearing new words, but feeling that we have known them forever. It was as though the words knew him. What they were saying to him came from the origins of time and projected strongly into the future.

Then he saw the brightness descend upon them.

(Acts 2:1–13)