Pedro’s Pastoral

I don’t know where or when I saw you. I don’t know if it was in a picture or in the actual countryside, with real grass and trees growing around your body; but perhaps it was in a picture, so idyllic and legible is my memory of you. And although I don’t know when this happened or if it really did happen (for it may be that I didn’t even see you in a picture), I know with all my mind’s feeling that it was the most peaceful moment of my life.

You calmly came down the wide stretch of road, a graceful herdswoman with a huge, gentle ox. I seem to remember seeing you from afar, and you came towards me and passed on by. You didn’t seem to notice me. You walked slowly and unmindful of the large ox. Your gaze had forgotten all memory, and it revealed a vast clearing in your inner life: your consciousness of self had abandoned you. In that moment you were nothing more than a.....

Seeing you, I remembered that cities change but the fields are eternal. If we call rocks and mountains ‘biblical’, it’s because they’re surely just like the ones from biblical times. It’s in the fleeting image of your anonymous figure that I place all that the country evokes for me, and all the peace that I’ve never known fills my soul when I think of you. You walked with a light swing, a vague swaying, and a bird alighted* on each of your gestures; invisible vines wound around the ..... of your chest. Your silence – the day was sinking down, and jingling flocks bleated their weariness on the greying slopes – your silence was the song of the last shepherd, who was left out of an eclogue that Virgil never wrote and thus remained forever unsung, forever a wandering silhouette in the fields. It’s possible you were smiling – to yourself, to your soul, seeing yourself smile in your mind – but your lips were as still as the outline of the mountains, and the gesture (which I don’t remember) of your rustic hands was garlanded with flowers from the fields.

Yes, it was in a picture that I saw you. But where did I get this idea that I saw you approach and pass by me while I just kept going, never once turning around, since I could still see you, then and always? Time suddenly stops to let you pass, and I get you all wrong when I try to put you into life, or into its semblance.