JOSEOONOSO
33
useless? What was he but a poor clerk who worked for an import
company and lived in a boarding house that smelled of moth-eaten
curtains? The dream, on the other hand, although he couldn't
remember it yet, would give him a whole rainbow of clarity with
which he, Sebastian Rengifo, would be able to drive the edge of
darkness back. Yes, now he was sure. What he had given a few
spare moments
to
before would be the vocation of his entire life . He
would live in such a way as to sleep as many hours as possible, and
would not permit any obligations of real life
to
interfere . He no
longer had any reason
to
care about things that
to
him had never
been more than shadows: food, clothing, entertainment, people.
This way, living near the door constantly, he would be ready,
whenever the light shone through.
The only way to achieve this was to strip himself of every–
thing. And, since he had never liked the city, especially now with
the approach of spring, he sold his furniture and got rid of all his
belongings. He said goodbye forever
to
Mrs. Mechita, and she,
choking on her tears, exclaimed: "Son, you are crazy, you are
crazy!"
Then he left the city by a road that led north.
The landscape took him in immediately, easing his vigil with
a dreamy breeze. The willows rocked their manes beside slow, dark
streams, and the same wind that tangled their sad locks gave a
different vocabulary
to
each plant, branch, leaf. Over there, a hill
blue with tender eucalyptus trees. The paths of rich brown earth,
where poor children played with innumerable dogs, carried him
toward an inn that announced itself from afar with delicious aromas,
or toward a plume of smoke that waved to him from the roof of a
cottage half hidden in the trees. The bark of every tree displayed a
map of a different age and function . Sebastian, in the midst of all
this, felt that the distance which before had separated daily reality
from the other reality, the more real reality, was shrinking. To him
all this rich external world was becoming one with the hidden
reality of his dream.
Sebastian, young and strong and happy as the summer began,
went along working a ·while here and a while there, on the farms
and in the fields. One place, he helped wash the sheep and was
allowed to sleep on the porch. Then he worked in the sunflower
