Allá por 2017, aún en plena crisis migratoria en Grecia sobre todo, escribí un breve relato incluído en este blog. sobre las personas migrantes y refugiadas, como mi particular homenaje a ell@s (16/8/17). Hoy la situación no ha mejorado sensiblemente y tras el viaje que hemos hecho este verano, donde hemos podido constatar en Lesbos las lamentables condiciones de vida que aún sufren, las continuas llegadas desesperadas a estas costas, consideramos que nuestros políticos europeos no han estado ni están a la altura humana que se les supone/exige (incrementado todo ello por el auge de la ultraderecha en muchos países).
Hemos conocido a muchas personas, sobre todo mujeres y niñ@s, que necesitan hoy más que nunca el apoyo de las esforzadas ONGs, de los solidarios voluntarios y colaboradoras, de la sufrida pero generosa ciudadanía de Mitilene, y por ello, para que se pueda leer aquel relato lo dejamos traducido aquí al inglés (gracias a nuestra jubilosa traductora familiar), idioma que se esfuerzan por aprender y en el que expresarse. Ánimo y mucha suerte en vuestras solicitudes para obtener la condición de refugiad@s y para emprender una nueva vida en nuestra «elitista» y egoísta Europa.
.
The horizon breathes to the sound of the last lights of the day and time, which settles the fleeing, and poses the memory of that night full of shadows and sunsets on me. The second horse of the Apocalypse gallops over already barren and dilapidated fields because of the horror and I flee my country because I no longer belong to the land, I don’t belong to this moon, to these roots, to this century…
My steps are long now, my bare legs bump into each other, brushing against the fatigue of the long journey undertaken from home, several months ago. I get myself into the tiredness of an almost deserted beach, in the color of this night when I am going to cross the sea that Ulysses, who did not know as much misery as I have had to retain, once travelled.
«Don’t sleep, don’t sleep!» It is the only motto that I impose on myself every minute, every second of this journey that I will begin shortly. The chest is not capable of inhale all the uncertainty that is carrying the air and my breathing becomes broken, slow, very slow, similar to the silence of the night, of our night, of every night. The time is near and I am getting closer to the planned place, in the beach, in that cove from where we would reach the promised land, the sweet promised shore, the gold bread of all our dreams of light.
There was a possibility that you still showed up at the last minute. But there I am alone waiting for you, and when I lower the eyelids for a moment, the light goes out and the night comes sooner than other times, as soon as the clouds clear. Then the silence widens and scratches, one by one, the fingers of my hands…
In the distance, the beach and the promise of boarding. In the right place, I find our raft of the Medusa and without delay I enter it and cuddle, silently, to port. It’s cold, the last blows of winter act today as a wounding punch in the aching looms of our bodies. Several eyes were watching me vehemently, helpless, slightly sewn to life by a thread of hope. Time goes by, little by little, and the stragglers of this odyssey are arriving hurriedly…
Time stretches and the skipper of the barge calms us saying that we will leave in a few minutes. Two women, who seem unreal to me (without imagination it is not possible to live this nightmare), get on board, women who seem to be going up the river of their own anxiety, and that take me back to those days when I met Her, still unripe fruit, spotless cloud. It is true that we mold our own memories, that we give shape to the stored materials and that remembering is nothing more than a work of art subject to continuous review, but seeing those two women – one visibly pregnant – disturbs and upsets me more than necessary.
After a while a single woman enters and my heart skips a beat. But no, it’s not her. She has large, violet eyes with small golden iridescences and black hair, abundant, collected on the neck with a clip in the shape of a butterfly. To be a woman, her hight is tall, her proportions are graceful, her eyes are already rimmed with wrinkles, in a black dress, without decorations, and a slight enigmatic touch in all her walls. All of this contributes to giving a false appearance of fragility, but having reached here already reveals greatness of character and having survived… In the distance, between mountains, a vibrant landscape blurs under the intense light of the moon and the ocher of the night. The light dazzles and the suffocating heat wraps me and fills me like an aura. I feel thirsty, I feel distress. The moment is near.
The last group of people arrives before setting sail. The shadow-man (Abdel) and the depleted-woman (Yasmine), along with her two children, climb aboard the barge. Behind them, half a dozen thin and martial youths come out of nowhere, or rather from behind the darkness, as if they were a squad with no memory or members of a primitive tribe who were hunting. The boat rocks, slowly but relentlessly, and the nightmare of the shipwreck grows like a tree that sprouts in slow motion, like a canvas that draws itself. The odyssey begins. Ulysses will not return to Íthaca…
An aged man nestles his young son in a corner of the barge while a woman in a hijab drags a sleeping baby with her hands and a couple of stout boys reaches, almost swimming, the rickety boat that will serve as our shelter until the Greek dawn. It seems that there is a strange smell in the environment, a smell acid and cracked. To one side a group of five people, three almost children, with very dirty faces with the same black sand in which they have sunk their brown feet, they sniff the surface of the first waves among a swarm of fish. I have never seen such ruthless and fragile faces like those, they are beautiful orphans with torn clothes by the wind. One of them contemplates the line of the horizon, the distant saving island, with hieratic expression. It is impossible to guess what they think or what plastic dreams nest in their head behind their impenetrable eyes.
After a few minutes of startling silence, a murmur is heard over the frost from the sky, a splash in the sea, a desolating cry that freezes the night. «Aylan, Aylan, my little Aylan”. A mother’s voice torn by having lost the son she was carrying in her sleeping arms, a body that in the depth of the night has been slipping of those exhausted arms and has fallen into the sea, entering the abyss. Her father jumps into the water trying to rescue him. An endless minute and the jaws… have swallowed both in a few seconds…, inhuman, while the barge’s grunt engine followed going into the sea. (The next day the photo of a little boy upside down, with his face sunk in the sand, exanimate, lifeless, the produce of this collective madness, hits the pages of all newspapers).
The night is becoming iridescent with exhaustion and agony. The minutes go by like an infernal carousel and the moon has been breaking and now she floats wounded like a lotus whose third petal had been plucked from it. It seems pierced by an agonizing light that makes the stars flee. Fate is cunning and paradoxical, because when we believe we are interpreting it correctly, it still shows us another possible solution…
A lacerating reveille is heard, forward, produced by the heartbroken lament of a young Syrian who has just witnessed the last breath of his childhood friend. All we try to find out what is happening and the barge sways again, wounded in its structure. The first impression is a glow of flesh on the other side of the boat, a glow dotted with purple spots that contrast with the paleness of the early morning. The deceased has uttered his last words and the friend’s emotional fissures strike our eardrums, while some who are next to him discover the purple color of the bruises on his body, mortal hits from a flight across an entire country of hatred and misery, and they slowly throw him into the sea. At first, the stillness of the body lying on the water refers to the image of a lake, in which the visible bruises look like water lilies floating on calm water. But reality prevails and the body disappears under the water, leaving only the wavy trace of the kiss of death. A new pawn sacrificed, and the woman next to me whispers a few unintelligible words, perhaps a prayer ringed to her breathing…
The journey goes on. The mere possibility of letting myself pass out now, of closing my eyes from exhaustion, abandoned by strength, makes my heart shake and I try to recharge my body of the necessary energy to stay awake, with hollowed out eyelids fixed on the faint line of the reddened horizon.
So the purpose of all of us is to open the double doors of everything that separates and unites us, from all the misunderstandings and joys, and between one bang and another, the wonderful flutter of solidarity and the fact of helping each other. Time passes, the minutes go by like an infernal carousel. The shore is getting closer and everything rushes like in a suspense movie. I have to breathe slowly, I tell myself. Take a deep breath. Breathe.
We are startled, sleepy, by something that seems like the noise of the waves breaking on the beach, but they are rather damp words that announce to us that we have arrived at our destination. Adverbs, interjections and names are intermingled in the collective joy of reaching the goal. The first dunes very close, the redemptive sand , the music of the song of the mermaids… We all disembark quickly, and we enter this welcoming land in different directions like a flock of disorientated birds, black heralds fleeing towards salvation. I walk with all my wounds on my back, with all my cracks and I anoint myself with all the oils, with all my memories, but I no longer belong to myself. I don’t know who I am any more.
Upon crossing the first hill, the landscape is bleak, with red and white scales that spring up everywhere, infesting the land. I look up and I can only see the colour of the wire fences of that refugee camp and feel the agony smell of having lost freedom, once again, while in the background a new labyrinth opens up, difficult to transit, a new game of the chess that we embody in the new land of promise, in that Greece that awaits us to the sound of the silent sirtaki of a new wall of dangers.
Meanwhile, a word, only one word chokes me and is fraying from my mouth: E-u-r-o-p-e!, E-u-r-o-…! But this continent has betrayed itself, it turns inhospitable and cruel, while their governments spawn the promises. Now I know that we only are the sacrificed and invisible pawns of a new and hellish lie.
(Sic transit glory EU…)
METÁFORAS XXI 