CAMANCHACA 2.

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Horacio Lobos Luna

Outside the camanchaca remains. Resilient in its most fierce resiliency, it hovers on
mornings and nights, delaying the arriving of better times. With its cold breathe made of
tiny and glassy splinters, eats away the contours of everything it touches, dissolving the
resistance of concrete and stone, the mineral matter of the soil, the soft texture of leaves
and flowers, the helpless warm of the skin. It seems rooted into days and months, as a
persistent ivy devouring bright moons and red-hot suns.
There it is. Stalking from the other side of the window. Nocking gently on the glass
panel, drawing watery forms outlined in frail liquid threads, barely visible. A secret
message for the cold spring days that seem to be presaged, unmercifully.
And the sun? Not even a sign. Upon this land barren of songs and colors, the light
seems to have lost its path forever. The hubbub of rivers and watercourses, of kites
swirling in the afternoon wind, appear as a pale remembrance of another life. Beyond.
Far beyond of this meandering wall of mist, pregnant of whiteness.
Do you hear that? “The blue days has gone”, it sings, with its thin voice of relentless
steam. “They have returned to corners intact from asphalt and concrete, away from the
roar of engines feeding the daily rage”. But it is not a singing, actually. It is rather a litany.
Sad and grey. A shadow diluted among forms that it draws along the streets of Vallenar;
over the residual waters of a river that is not a river anymore, but a riverbed willing to
take the wastes of what was snatched, hobbling through the narrow valley, as an old man
trying to reach the sea with its last breath of water.
What to do? Giving in to its endless invasion of aerial foam? Lingering among the
sheets a little bit more, until a shy first sunray rips the immaculate fabric of its
interminable vaporous canvas? No. No time for that. We have to go out and sinking into
that white whale belly, made of dew and silk. Let it swallow us, trembling, willing to the
last battle before getting stuck forever in its compact fog of vague cetacean, numb among
moistened, invisible cords, condemned to yearn for suns and springs throbbing behind its
white darkness.