As Osuna announced the Santa Rosa storm for the thirtieth, we all kept watch for the saving clouds, eager but skeptical, to see if they were approaching our assembly from the southeast, laden less with water than with hope. But not a single cloud appeared in the first days of waiting. As we watched, the empty sky changed color with the passing light and lost its aura of familiarity, a consequence of our certainty that it had always been there; it became strange, and with it the yellow earth and all that spanned the visible horizon, including ourselves. The burnt and sweaty faces, in which the eyes were almost shrunken, mouth always open and brows always furrowed, expressed a constant questioning. At times we spoke little, exchanging shy monosyllables, and at others, usually in an aside among two or three, we exchanged long, fragmentary monologues, hurried and confused, as if in the plain’s monotony we had lost the instinct or notion that separates the inner from the outer, as if the language provided in this world had also been uprooted from us and would have spoken for itself, doing without the thought and will with which we had learned to employ it on first entering this world.
At last, one afternoon, the clouds began to come. As it was still early, the first ones were large and very white, festooned with rippling edges, and when they passed too low, their own shadow would obscure their underside, as seen from the ground. We hoped before long to see them go black and part from the horizon in an endless slate-gray mass, to blot out all the sky and spill forth with rain. But for two days they paraded past in the sky, frayed and mute, coming from the southeast as I think I have said, and disappeared behind us to some point at our backs on an already-traveled horizon. They changed shape and color with the hours of the day and, above all, they floated at different speeds, as if the wind, whose absence we suffered on the ground, abounded there above. Sometimes they were yellow, orange, red, lilac, violet, but also green, gold, and even blue. Although they were all similar, there did not exist, nor had there ever existed since the origins of the world, nor would there exist either until the inconceivable end of time, two that were identical. With their varied forms and the recognizable shapes they portrayed, which dissolved little by little until they no longer looked like anything, or even assumed a shape contradictory to the one they had taken a moment before, they made me feel like a spirit of history, one that would persist through time to change along with the clouds, with the same strange similarity of such things that vanish, in the very instant they arise, to that place we call the past, where no one ever goes.
It will sound like fiction to my readers, but we awaited the water eagerly for days, and in place of water came fire. It was the twenty-ninth of August, 1804. If this precision awakens the suspicions of my potential reader, suggesting that I employ it to increase the illusion of truthfulness, I would like it to remain quite clear that this date is unforgettable for me, as it marks the most extraordinary day of my life.
For many hours, a strong smell of burning, which had grown stronger and more unmistakable, prompted comments in the caravan, but as no breeze was blowing and there were no visible signs of fire along the horizon, it proved difficult to identify the source of the smell. Osuna’s concern, and his secret meetings with Sergeant Lucero and with Sirirí, were the only tangible proof to me that the invisible yet pervasive fire was very real, so when Sirirí left to explore southward and Osuna suggested we alter the course to the east a bit, I realized that the situation appeared far more serious to our experts than I had imagined. Osuna explained to me that if there was a fire, it might be coming from the south, which was why Sirirí had ridden that way — to determine at what distance it was coming up against us — and that the caravan was going east because the fire had less chance of spreading on the wetlands near the river. According to Osuna, if there was a fire, which was all but certain, the origin was likely some thunderbolt in one of those dry storms that sometimes advance a few days before the torrential rains that sweep down on the region. With regard to the fire, and always according to Osuna, it could be a small matter or, to the contrary, form a front for many leagues; the heat and dry grass would help it spread slowly in the absence of wind, but if by chance the southeaster that came to accompany the Santa Rosa storms began to blow, the speed of propagation would multiply in no time. Thus, Osuna and Lucero had taken the precaution of altering our route toward the river.
Osuna, glancing frequently and nervously to the south, meant for us to hurry, but, if I haven’t said it before now, I believe that now is the time to point out that, though drawn by four horses and faster than ox-drawn freight wagons, even without considering the patients we were transporting, our carts moved quite slowly. Our trip had dragged on, not just because of the natural obstacles and incidents that delayed it, but also because of the slowness of the vehicles that made up the caravan, whose rhythm the horsemen escorting us had to adapt to. On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, a few black clouds, thick and motionless, began to appear at our right, to the south, as we marched east. For a time, I thought it was the long-awaited storm brewing, but when Osuna and Lucero started badgering the cart-men to increase their pace, anxiously searching the black skeins that walled the horizon, I realized they were not clouds. As it darkened, the last ruddy gleam that always lingered on the plain after the sun disappeared kept burning through the night, taking up the entire southern horizon. In the very black, even darkness, the yellow points of distant stars seemed kindlier and more familiar than the fluctuating, reddened stripe that sketched the southeastern arc of the horizon with its broad strokes. For the first time since our departure, we did not halt that night save to change the spent horses. When dawn broke, sunlight blotted out the fire, but the masses of black smoke seemed taller and appeared to rise up like stones beyond the horizon, ominously close. The sergeant scrutinized them for a moment and said that if we continued east the fire would leave us no time to reach the river, and that we had to change direction again, retreating to the north. So we began to retrace our steps with the fire at our heels, and as I checked my horse from straying too far from my patients’ wagons, the memory came to me of that enigmatic saying of the oriental sages: He who draws near, is far. It could have meant, in effect, that in some way we too were approaching our goal, backtracking a good part of the journey.
For all our speed, the wall of smoke always seemed the same distance away, and even, at times, appeared to come closer, as though it traveled more lightly than we did. In broad daylight, we could see we were not the only ones who fled: Wild animals, whose presence we constantly sensed but who rarely showed themselves, forgot age-old cautions and fled northward — and often, faster than the fire and us. There was a cloud of birds in the air above our heads, ringing continually with cries, caws, screeches, et cetera, but when I observed them for a moment I could tell that though many flew in the same direction as us, some seemed to be going to meet the fire. I thought they erred, disoriented by the blaze, but when the fire reached us a few hours later, I realized, and Osuna later confirmed, that certain birds would fly above the blaze to feed on the insects it dispersed in all directions, especially those crisped in the heat, doing so with such insistence, recklessness, and gluttony, that many of them fell, trapped in the flames.