The young man was alive, and except for tattered jeans and a few scrapes on his arms, he seemed to be all right. To make sure, the women felt his legs. He hadn't broken any bones. What did you see? his relative asked him. He wouldn't answer and covered his face with his hands. That was when I should have taken charge and stepped in, but my position as spectator kept me, how shall I say, bewitched by the play of shadows and useless gestures. Others repeated the question, with slight variations. I may have recalled aloud that occasiones namque hominem fragilem non faciunt, sed qualis sit ostendunt. This young fellow was clearly a weak character. Given a swallow of cognac, he offered no resistance and drank as if his life depended on it. What did you see? the group repeated. Then he spoke and only his relative could hear him. The relative asked him the same question again, as if he couldn't believe what he'd heard. The young man replied: I saw the devil.
From that moment on, the rescue group was seized by confusion and anarchy. Quot capita, tot sententiae: some said that they had called the Guardia Civil from the campground and the best thing we could do was wait. Others asked about the boy, whether the youth had gotten a glimpse of him or heard him on the way down, and the reply was negative. Most asked what the devil was like, whether the youth had seen all of him or just his face, what he looked like, what color he was, etc. Rumores fuge, I said to myself and gazed out at the surrounding countryside. Then the camp watchman and the bulk of the women appeared with another group from the campground, among them the mother of the vanished boy, who hadn't heard what was happening because she'd been watching a game show, as she announced to anyone who would listen. Who's down there? asked the watchman. In silence, someone pointed out the youth, who was still lying in the grass. The mother, helpless, went up to the mouth of the cave and shouted her son's name. No one answered. She shouted again. Then the cave howled, and it was as if it were answering back.
Some people turned pale. Most backed away from the hole, afraid that a foggy hand might suddenly shoot out and drag them down into the depths. More than one person said that a wolf must be living down there. Or a wild dog. Meanwhile, it had gotten dark, and the gas lanterns and flashlights competed in a macabre dance, with that open wound in the mountainside for its magnetic center. People were laughing or speaking in Galician, a language that, uprooted as I was from my origins, I no longer remembered. They kept pointing with trembling hands toward the mouth of the pit. The Guardia Civil hadn't shown up. It was imperative that a decision be made, although everything was in utter confusion. Then I saw the camp watchman tie the rope around his waist and I realized that he was preparing to go down. His behavior, I confess, struck me as admirable, and I went over to congratulate him. Xosé Lendoiro, lawyer and poet, I said as I shook his hand effusively. He looked at me and smiled as if we'd met before. Then, amid general expectation, he started down into that terrible pit.
To be honest, I and many of those gathered there feared the worst. The watchman went down as far as the rope reached. At that point we all thought he would come back up, and for a moment, I think, he pulled from below and we pulled from above and the search stalled in an ignoble series of misunderstandings and shouts. I tried to make peace, addito salis grano. If I hadn't had courtroom experience, those angry people would have thrown me down the pit headfirst. Finally, however, I seized control. With no little effort, we managed to communicate with the watchman and decipher what he was shouting. He was asking us to let go of the rope. So we did. More than one of us felt our hearts stop to see the remaining length of rope disappear into the chasm like a rat's tail into a snake's jaws. We told each other that the watchman must know what he was doing.
Suddenly, the night got darker, and the black hole got blacker, if that was possible, and those who minutes before were making brief forays around the edge of the hole, carried away by impatience, stopped, since the possibility of tripping and being swallowed up by the chasm was manifested as sins are sometimes manifested. Fainter and fainter howls escaped from within, as if the devil were retreating into the depths of the earth with his two freshly caught prey. It goes without saying that the wildest hypotheses were making the rounds of our group on the surface. Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile. There were those who couldn't stop checking their watches, as if time played a crucial role in this adventure. There were those who were chain-smoking, and others who were attending to the fainting fits of the lost boy's female relatives. There were those who cursed the Guardia Civil for taking so long. Suddenly, as I was watching the stars, it occurred to me that all of this bore an extraordinary resemblance to a story by Don Pío Baroja that I'd read in my years as a law student at the University of Salamanca. The story was called "The Chasm," and in it a little shepherd boy is lost deep inside a mountain. A lad with a rope tied securely around him is lowered in search of the boy, but the howls of the devil scare him away and he comes back up without the boy, whom he hasn't seen but whose moans of pain are clearly audible from outside. The story ends with a scene of complete powerlessness, in which fear vanquishes love, duty, and even the bonds of family. No one in the rescue group (made up, it must be said, of uncouth and superstitious Basque shepherds) dares to go down after hearing the stammered story that the first would-be rescuer tells, in which he claims to have seen the devil, or to have felt or sensed or heard him, I forget. In se semper armatus Furor. In the last scene, the shepherds go home, including the boy's terrified grandfather, and the whole night long (a windy night, I suppose) they can hear the boy's cries from the chasm. That's Don Pío's story. A youthful effort, I think, in which his glorious prose hasn't quite taken wing. A good story, nevertheless. And that was what I thought as behind me human passions roiled and my eyes counted the stars: that the story I was living was just like Baroja's story and that Spain was still Baroja's Spain, in other words a Spain where chasms weren't barricaded and children were still careless and fell into them, where people smoked and fainted in a rather excessive way, and where the Guardia Civil never showed up when it was needed.
And then we heard a shout, not an inarticulate howl but words, something like hey, you up there, hey, you bastards, and although a few fantasists said that it must be the devil, who, still unsated, wanted to carry off someone else, the rest of us crowded around the edge of the pit and saw the light of the watchman's flashlight, a beam like a firefly lost in the darkness of the mind of Polyphemus, and we asked the light whether it was all right but all the voice behind the light said was I'm fine, I'm going to toss the rope up to you, and we heard a scarcely perceptible noise against the walls of the pit, and after several failed attempts the voice said throw me another rope, and a little later we pulled up the boy who had disappeared, roped around the waist and under the armpits. His unexpected appearance was celebrated with tears and laughter, and when we had untied the boy we threw the rope down and the watchman came up, and the rest of that night, I remember this now that I have nothing to look forward to, was one long party, O quantum caliginis mentibus nostris obicit magna felicitas, a Galician party in the mountains, since the campers were Galician civil servants or office workers, and I hailed from those lands too, and the watchman, whom they called the Chilean, since that was his nationality, was also descended from hardworking Galicians, as indicated by his last name, Belano.