Perpetual planetarium

It's eleven p.m. and everybody is still up in the farm's house. I, for one, don't intend to sleep so early tonight. Andrés is officially apologizing to his elder brother. Strange how far from being a moment of reconciliation, it is a tense one, feels like it is revested of something heavy that won't allow it to move on in time. As though Andrés was performing a ritual he needed to get something he held dear back to him: the running across wide open fields after the huge black animals at once constrained and loose on an almost infinite grassland.

He has me divided between someone who has a clear obsession and someone that sees the bulls as a lifetime project. Does it seem normal and orderly that he falls to his knees before someone he hardly knows about to beg for intercession on a matter that seems to be the heart of the matter for him? No more than two days were necessary to bring the little bully to his knees. Literally. Is this perhaps a clear sign of how devastating the effects of this ban have been on Andrés in such a short period of time?

I go out to the porch, to the perpetual planetarium night of Taurinos. Carnival that starts boiling all over Brazil as I walk on this porch has no shadow of presence here. Not that the Conselheiro family is not in the living room, enjoying the Carnival on the TV news shows everywhere. But here, everything is silence. The sounds of the living room, TV included, can't make their way to the porch. All is the wide sea of wavy elevations around, the sound of the curiangos breaking the silence, crickets and the eternal frog percussion ensemble.The wild landscapes of the cerrado, the gnarled congonha and candeia groves that lend the vegetation its shape and color. In the sky a full-blown Milky Way in all of its widest extension. The Three Marias, making up Orion's belt. The constellation of the Celestial Hunter that reveals itself to view from his belt of stars. The stance of one who is shooting an arrow, the tiny head represented by a single star.

"Do you know about these drawings in the sky? The constellations?"

I was a bit frightened by the suddenness. Turned my eyes back to the lighted porch, what took the stars for a ride. Andrés sat down on the chair at my side. This time he didn't set the chair away from me nor did he get it any closer.

"I know that one", I was pointing at Orion.

"The Three Marias?"

"Actually they're not a constellation, but a part of one."

"Really? What constellation?" He seemed to get interested.

"Orion, the Celestial Hunter."

I showed him the stars around that made up the constellaton, the hunter's stance at shooting and he whistled, admired.

"I could only tell the Southern Cross and the Three Marias from the rest", he said while looking at the sky, "now this Celestial Hunter you taught me is way cool. Hadn't you told me I'd never have seen these details."

He was being so flexible and cool to me. How nice of him. I smiled and said people should share knowledge as much as possible, no matter what the time of the day was. He seemed to have his doubts about it, because he was not very enthusiastic when he heard this.

"Not all", he said, "there are secrets we shouldn't give away."

"And you're a guy full of secrets…"

"I'm not full of secrets", he looked slightly impatient, "but some of them you can and must keep."

Speechless | A for Andrés

Radio Universal: A Love Like Blood