27/11/2024
.. ✍THE DIVER'S PRAYER
1
On the same day that I turned eighteen, my father called me sweetly and said with due gravity:
-The Lord, God, wants every man to do, on earth, a work. He does not want those who watch, sitting on the edge of the fields, the work of the sower and the laborers. It is necessary, then, that you choose without delay an art that gives your life meaning and purpose. Whatever your choice is, I promise not to stand in the way. So, decide and talk.
And I, who revered greatly the Lord God, and obeyed my father always, answered:
-My choice is made: I will be a diver.
My dad went a little pale, but he replied right away:
-Thy will be done!
2
So, since that day, I was a diver. For many and long years I have lived, alone and in silence, under the great waters. I have lived in all seas, explored all oceans, descended into all abyss. I have found skeletons of ships, necks of old bare anchors, arches full of gold coins whose effigies were corroded by the water; large; large luminous monsters, with huge white eyes, have enlightened me with their unreal glow; long green bodies, similar to those of mermaids, have caressed me; I have penetrated the dark mouths of submerged volcanoes; I have trampled the soil of the disappeared Atlantis; I have stumbled upon the inflated corpses of shipwrecks; I have debated among the tentacles of colossal octopus; I have brought to light heaps of marvelous pearls, of strange seashells phosphorescent trees, the daggers thrown in the night the tremendous murders, the rings of the Dogos and the golden cup of the King of Tule...
Then the day came when I knew all the depths of the sea, all the ocean valleys, and all the darkest gulfs and the most hidden treasures. There came a day when I was soaked in all the salty perfumes and I knew all the rhythms of the waves and all the symphonies of the storms, and then I thought that the Lord, God, could already be satisfied with my work and I decided to live again in my city, between the earthly beings that I had left for a long time.
3
But as soon as I arrived in the city where I was born and where I wanted to die, I had such a feeling of terrible disgust and stormy stupor. I no longer recognized or loved everything I had seen as a child. Accustomed to the great underwater solitude, illuminated by miraculous reflections and intense lights that seem to come from the depths, I couldn’t get used to the narrow muddy beehive called city. I longed for the sky like a strange prison, grooved by narrow and dirty corridors, in which little animals ran looking at each other cruelly or lasciviously. Noisy mobile giggles crawled through the corridors, carrying trapped, curled critters inside; the air weighed with smoke and dust, and weighed with infected breaths and suffocating smells. Men gave me the idea of death rowdies, mad in futile waiting for grace. Their faces seemed hateful to me, like those of white reptiles that lay their eggs near graves; their eyes seemed empty to me, as if the soul had abandoned them; their words sounded in my ears like canteenels of eternally hungry beggars or like decomposed cries of eagles to the ones who are clipping their wings. In their dark and narrow houses I saw beds thrown in at night as if they were to die, and tables covered with remains of corpses and leaves brutally torn to the coolness of the earth. They had manufactured large rooms, in which some pretended to love and die, moving with dresses of many colors and embroidery under the false light of round lamps, and large rooms, where some of them, dressed grotesquely from black simulated to save the homeland and the world screaming with great seriousness. And other rooms, on whose walls were hanging pieces of fabric covered in colors and lines, with the intention of dreaming of a better world than the one in which they live.
But I did not understand, accustomed to the dazzling silences of the depths, many of their gestures and many of their words. All that life, in the midst of which, however, I had been born and raised, seemed meaningless to me: empty, fearful, clumsy, sob, putrid, like that of an underground cubil inhabited by blind, weak and filthy beasts. It seemed to me that I had fallen into a well inhabited by walking, stinking corpses, and at night I had no strength to raise my eyes, fearing that from that sky, too citizen, even the stars had fled.
And I thought to myself, “Who could have reduced me to this state?” Who could have changed my soul so terribly that now discovers the ridiculous, the dark and the ugly everywhere I look? The city is like I left it when I was young.
It's more, they say that since then he has made a lot of progress of all kinds. Why, then, does she appear before me, returning from the seas, so strange and nauseating, to me that, however, I loved her as a child with all my soul and found her more beautiful, more majestic and more hospitable than any? ”
But I did not know how to answer such questions. A man, who assisted me in that terrible state, advised me to read the books of the doctors of soul and body to find the source and remedy of that which he called, with sincere sadness, my alienation.
And I read hundreds and thousands of books, day and night, always awake and always anxious in search of health. But in no book did I find what I was looking for. So, locked up in my parent's house, I thought and suffered for hundreds and thousands of hours, always awake and always attentive to tremendous health anxiety. But I still haven't found what I was looking for.
Now I turn to you, man who stands before me with your wicked smile of idle murderer and with your eyes that have never looked to the sky; I turn to you man of premature and insatiable perversities and of well-guarded secrets, and I beseech you, in the name of the land you were born from, the land you nurture, the land you crawl through, I beg you to tell me why I don't understand and love the life of men.
And, if you answer me, I will give you a pearl that I picked one day in the most wonderful valley of the sea, which no eye but mine has seen.
