Los ríos

A man knocks on my door. I ask him what he needs. He doesn't answer. He looks at me for a few moments, with enormous eyes. He looks at me as one looks at an apparition. Rivers are born in that silence, in those hallucinated eyes, and they unfold a memory of water, a fragmented knowledge of tornadoes and banks, of creaking trees, of birds bathing in the rain, of men lost on some island, of drowning in the backwaters, of the splash of oars, of the shadow where the river narrows. A man knocks on my door. He says to me: You're not here, we're not here.