The worst thing on the highway are the crosses. The figure left after the subtraction: the year of death is taken away from the digits in which the person named on the cross came to the world. The result is always a small figure, or a single number at worst. A life that ended there prematurely, on that same spot where those who survived put a piece of metal with a name and some flowers that almost always have already withered. Just by seining them one can smell the stagnant water that those wet and black lilies emanate at the foot of the cross. Meanwhile, next to it, our car goes by fast as if unharmed by death and damage. One can barely see the name, one can barely make the subtraction.
Then: the run-over dogs that the sun wears out, how the light dissolves them as clothes forgotten in a land lot where nobody lives anymore, those black clothes that have turned a universal brown hanging from a washing line or a rod. Those dogs.
The highway always renders visible the hand of a giant being that turns what is inhabited into an exposed exterior, the same hand that wears out the velvet of the saints.
But inside the car, two girls keep asking if they are there yet, and the hand that turns everything into an exposed exterior does not touch their nausea, or hunger, and withdraws with their urge of stopping somewhere to eat just something.
There, the highway selfishly divides a whole territory. For me, this blackened asphalt pushes my yearnings forward, but ringtails, tiger cats, lizards and serpents already see their life divided, their homeland split by metallic gusts.
Then, mom suggests, troubled by the obsessive counting of her thoughts (and crosses and dogs and bags lifted by the wind along the road), to seek her consolation by seeing the interior of a church. Or maybe itʼs not the church what mom wants to look at to seek calm, it is the stones. Their perennial quality that is patient with the world.
So much work to cut the mountains into bricks, to mould the shadows together under the bell tower, to inaugurate the rope and anoint the acolyte.
The huge and white smudge on the edge of the asphalt stops next to the car, takes form and gains eyes. It reshapes its ribcage, the cracks on the holy bone can now be rubbed. The car has stopped, now things are sharp for the girls; dizzy, they get out and stretch.
The family closes the car doors and comes down to the lawn. In front of them, the walls, made of the kernel of a planet. Stone. Walls made of the kernel of thousands of humans. Bones. The centuryʼs work distributed in a few dark-skinned hands.
The girl goes over the white hands, crossed, or hammered to the nail—they remind her of a piece of bread.
And if things, all things, were to reflect one another, the world would be a place full of radiance. Specters of ferns and wild animals that were never named.
