I said I wasn’t going to look and I looked. And, like Lot’s wife, whom God did not consider necessary to name in Genesis –perhaps because she was a woman-, what I saw turned me into a statue. My retinas, into salt. Goosebumps. An ecstatic scream of which I was not aware until I was left hollow. A wind that swept away deep sounds and seemed to want to lift us up. A strange sensation of being outside of time.
Read more Eclipse in Mar Bella
I looked around. I looked at the eclipse. And I witnessed one of the strangest, most special, and most wonderful nights of my life.
I think I was the first in the country to buy the famous ISO glasses. I had been preparing for the event since January 9. On the summer nights of my childhood, I took it upon myself to learn all the constellations and the Catasterisms associated with them by Eratosthenes. The olive grove would darken and I would take refuge in the sky. That’s why, as soon as I knew there would be an eclipse in Spain whose totality would cross the deepest Aragón, I wrote to my friend Lucía, in charge of organizing literary meetings in Aragonese villages and revitalizing part of empty Spain with the wonderful initiative Pueblos en Arte, and begged her to save me a spot in her house in Torralba de Ribota.
“David, they call this region the Spanish Lapland. Don’t worry, we’ll be alone.” She was wrong.
The hills surrounding the village, the ones most resembling the landscape of Route 66 on the peninsula – the National 234 -, were seen in the mid-afternoon as clods darkened by a blanket of agitated ants. Just the landscape alone, halfway between Mars and the Grand Canyon, made you shiver. We climbed the Mount of Love, the highest in the region. We were a frozen frame from Terrence Malick. Once at the top, hundreds of people lay down on chairs, rugs, and cushions, and I on the bare earth and barefoot to connect with the magnetism of the event and witness from the root the event of the century.
Except for Lucía, I didn’t know anyone. But the silence that gradually surrounded us and against which we struggled to manifest our insignificant smallness before this brief and miraculous spectacle that is life, united us. Madness seemed to announce itself as the sun went out.
I remember the moments before. We shouted in unison, our throats torn; we smiled at each other, hugged; we shared water, glasses, hands… Lucía jumped because she didn’t know how to vent so much excitement, and I played Starman, Space Oddity and other stellar covers on a guitar.
Then I stood up and I swear I noticed something no one else saw, because I was looking more at the earth than at the sky: I shouted that the village was darkening behind us. Without reaching total eclipse, the landscape suddenly lost half its brightness, a giant screen that hibernates but remains on. A video game of God. And, in barely a minute, the miracle. Being under totality, we enjoyed a minute and forty seconds of ecstasy.
Read more One minute of tears in Tarraco
The hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck stood on end. I don’t remember ever feeling my skin like that so suddenly. I rubbed it, confused, and looked scared at the rest of the ants. I saw men crying and women with their mouths open, children throwing dirt into the air and chanting in other languages, perhaps new to them; and I heard myself calling God out loud. Because, if He ever could exist, He had to be there with us, and I wanted Him to know He existed.
Soon the adults were unable to stay still. We moved from side to side, like someone who has just received the news of their life and needs to get up, walk, bring such a revelation to mind again and again. I raised my voice above the others and proposed a common shout. On the count of three, the valley trembled. A reddish valley that had turned electric blue and amethyst, the color of rusted plums.
The dogs, still. The birds, absent. The trees, stopped. The peninsula holding its breath at the same time.
No one wanted to go blind, but no one wanted to miss God. And we all looked. Because, of all the mystical, unknowable, and spiritual things I have experienced, yesterday’s takes the cake. And I am sure that, whether or not there was a god behind it, that cannot be called anything else. The most sacred word we have cannot fail to name such a moment.
Feeling God is not praying on your knees a rote litany. Feeling God is experiencing love for everything around you. It is hurting your face from so much welcoming hundreds of strangers with your smile, hugging them and celebrating with them the luck and privilege of being alive.
Yesterday morning I finally stopped taking the last scheduled dose of the antidepressant. I chose the day on purpose, of course. There is no greater placebo than the eagerness to live. And last night we touched God.
Read more The eclipse enchants Spain
