A lizard, look what a lizard!” It is an eleven-year-old, seventy-centimeter long, ocellated lizard. He lives in a field of pruned olive trees, in such a way that the branches grow downwards and the farmer, who is an old man – and farsighted – does not have to bend his spine. The lizard has heard the man with the two children arrive, has crossed the metal gate and has hidden under a mastic tree. The father and sons have had time to see the tail that disappeared under the plant like a spaghetti – a spaghetti as thick as an arm. “If this lizard could talk, the things it would tell” –says the father–. “This idiot thinks I’m a dinosaur” –grunts the lizard under the mastic–. He is less and less supportive of people. The kids cling to the grate of the olive grove to try to see him. They yell at him: “lizard! lizard!” The lizard remains sprawled under the plant, green and red, until they leave.
“If I could speak? Mecagüen diola”. He comes out slowly from under the mastic dragging his gut. A ray of mid-afternoon sun illuminates the ocelli, blue and green. He advances his right foreleg and then moves his left foreleg, crossing the olive grove to the land that burned a fortnight ago and that, after yesterday’s rain, smells of wet coal. The fire scorched the pines, which have remained two colors, but above all it ignited the pine leaves, and now, on the cleared ground, the dry stone walls are outlined. “What a way to work these people, and what a skill.” The entire hill, up to the top, is stepped with rustic walls. It likes scrapyards walled in with flat, tall, thin rocks that cross the vines diagonally to remove excess rainwater.
“If I could speak? Mecagüen diola ”, she comes out from under the mastic tree dragging her belly along the ground
On the other side of the forest track, three vines survive, suffering, surrounded by a continuous fence made up of formwork, chicken coop cloth and five old and rusty bedsteads. In one of the vineyards there is an old-fashioned van, of which nothing remains but the iron plate. In the other, they are the remains of a greenhouse: the plastics that covered the skeleton have disappeared. In the third, a boat with the name irene rests on a mound. All the pitas that grew there have died and the prickly pears are sick. Next to the vineyards, which miraculously did not burn, a ditch. She walks over there dragging her belly. A piece of wall comes out of the earth – four bricks with a layer of plaster and paint – and a blind torn from a chalet that was demolished. At the bottom of the ditch, a two-liter bottle of soft drink, pearled with a few transparent drops, which give the sensation of having a very bad time, two lamps, three dented packets of tobacco, with photographs of the sick and the dead. Six mineral water bottle caps. “How much crap you have come to produce, how much carelessness everywhere, under so many refinements and pretensions.” He sees a can of a white brand come rolling down the track, with the letters faded by the sun, and he lashes out at it.
