Crowning the small, outwordly hill was an embracing tree. A great tree that was a shadow of a bigger shadow in the sky, each time they met, at night. From the tree, childish laughter could be heard. Yet no one could see its source. No one could distinguish the two shadows, conspiring, against the shadow of a shadow.

Well, to be honest, it has been a while since anyone dared to cross those paths. It has been a while since anyone lived on that downhill village. It has been a while all life existed and all pulse was taken. But all was built up in the circumference of our story. All belonged to it. All existed as the things that existed for ourselves. All existed for not existing. All was real because reality is what we make of it. What we make for it. What we make with it.

The Other goes as far as we allow them to. Even better than to know how to listen is to know how not to.

Under the tree, they compared their notes. They emptied their pockets out from their treasures and lighting a little lamp on the top of each other’s head started touching the small, square pieces of yellowish paper, they brought close to their hearts in the shirt pockets; close to their quick, youthful walking on the trousers´ countless drawers. And they started speaking. From one end to the other their muttered codes. Here’s what they decode about the quadrature of death:

Written in small, detailed, mimetic calligraphy, the aged notes impressed one of the Two who asked the Other:

-...

The Other answered what the other One feared:

- Yes. It was dictated.

Then the One showed the other the two pictures:

- ...

To which the One replied:

- Windows of the soul. Rightfully closed.

They carved the tree with those pictures and words. The first inscriptions made visible. They signed under it. The wind command their hands while they registered on the body of the tree what was being dictated to them from far:

• the flowers have the shape of man
• the messages under where man now steps.
• grow from them. Cut with them. Never be them.
• it is yours. You just have to take it
• I can not stop it,it might never end.
• tie a knot. There you will find Love.
• the truth coming out of a skin
• You can have it with a sweet disguise.
• the flowers have the shape man wants them to have.
• walk that way.
• Nowhere.

They left. Heading there. The tree bled with from the freshly craved revelations. The pointy arms caressed the wounds. She wore medals of recognition. She smiled. The Tree’s smile.

While seeing their backs going further downhill, she could see their fronts drawing near.

SOUTH

//end 03

It was the Other’s turn. Tonight the One will listen. Curiously they sat with their backs leaning into the tree. Feeling the safety of a strong, secular body. It is truth: you really never know.

So The Other started to unfold a pile of handwritten, supernatural pages, some other person found for him. The One started to listen to the deep toned voice coming out from the paper. Someone, something started telling its memories:

“I am from an ancient family of oaks. Of a forceful, strong breed-that already in the Antiquity dropped, from our branches, thoughts for Plato. It was a welcoming, historical family: from our bodies ships have sailed for India’s darkened defeat; spears tops for the Crusade’s hallucinated and the pier for the simple, deep ceilings that housed Savonaraola, Spinoza and Luther.

My father (...) had a lifeless existence, material and profane (...) He professed the religion of sun, sap and water. He was the great libertine of the thoughtful forest. In the summer (...) he sung, moving at the pace of Sun, welcomed the great concerts of bohemian birds, spat the rains over the kneeled, humble People of the grass and plants and, at night, enlaced by the lascivious ivy, snored under the sidereal quietness. When winter arrived, he raised his reaching arms, in the passive animal manner of a beggar, to the unmoveable blue sky’s irony.

Therefore, us, his children were not to be happy in our vegetal life. One of my brothers was taken into be the stage of a clown: a contemplative, romantic arm, and every night to be stepped upon by the noise, the scorn, the farce and the hunger. The other branch, vivid, of sun and dust, hardened solitary of life, winds and snows´warrior, strong and hardworking, torn apart from us to be the body of a coffin. Me- the sorriest of all- I came to be a gibbet!

Since as a child I have been sad and merciful. I just wanted the Good, the laughter, and the healthy expansion of fibres and souls (...) Nevertheless I had to enter the life of reality. One day one of those metallic men, who traffic vegetation, came to extort me from the tree. I was not aware of what they wanted from me (...) I went half-dead, wounded. I saw the stars with their cutting, cold gazes. I felt subtracted to the great forest. I could hear the moaning rumour, dragged and undefined from all the trees. Those were friendly voices who called me.
(...)

- I heard about the trees that founded the house of men (...)
- I heard about the trees of good faith, mast of ships (...)
- And what would I become? Me? We have arrived. And I saw the real vision of my destiny. I was meant to be a gibbet! (...)

I would be the eternal companion of agonies. Tied to me, the dead body shaking, like my once green, dew leaves. I would bear those dark fruits: the dead!
(...)

I regained conscience.
I was alone. People stepped away and went down to their villages. The voice of priests descending now, as the last waters of a tide. It was sunset. I saw. I freely saw it. Hanging from me, upright, with his head fallen and twisted out of place, laid the hanged man. I shivered.
(...)

The cold, slow ascension of putridity. I would stay there at night, alone, in that sinister open field, having in my arms that lifeless body! Nobody. (...)
God slept between his paradises of light. I lived three years under those anguishes.

-I hanged a man- a thinker, politician, son of Good Will and Truth, a beautiful soul crowded with the forms of the Ideal, a soldier of light. He was defeated. He was hanged.

-I hanged a man who loved a woman and ran away with her. His crime was love (...)

-I hanged a thief as well. This man has a labourer. He had a wife, sons, brothers and a mother. In the Wintertime he had no work, no ire, no bread. Taken by a nervous desperation he stole. He was hanged at sunset.

I hanged twenty. The ravens knew me.(...)

I got old(...)The ravens haven’t come. The executioners haven’t come.(...) Nature seemed to console me. I could feel putridity coming. One windy, foggy day, I let myself fall on the ground between the grass and the humidity, and I laid myself silently to die.

The moss and the grasses covered me and I started dissolving into the higher Matter, with an unspeakable sweetness.
My body gets cold: I have the conscience of my slow transformation from dirt into earth. I am going, going. Oh Earth, farewell! Already I shed myself out of my roots.
(...)
Goodbye! Nevermore, infamous, great ground! I see now the stars running as tears in the face of skies. Who cries like this? I feel undone, alone in the formidable life of the earth! Oh dark world of mud and gold, you a star in the infinite-farewell! Farewell! I leave YOU the heritage of my rotten rope!” (E.Q.)

-...
-...

They turned their backs to look at each other .They nailed all the hand-written pages in the flesh of the tree. Respectfully, The guessing stopped giving place to the terrible tastes and breezes of certainties. The light went higher. The ground stopped breeding. They were just waiting.

 NORTH

//end 04