Water map

The water has been turned on, and the taps at all the fountains in Ardenya have begun to gush forth and sparkle. They are like earrings amidst the mane of trickles of water that descend from the mountain. Gullies crisscross the paths, and streams gallop toward the hollow, magnetized by the brook below. If we were to cut down the forest, we would see that these trickles of water are the luminous shadows of the trunk and branches of a great, invisible tree in the sky.

I would have had to go up with my underwater goggles. I have them in the car, waiting for good weather. The sea and the forest are refuges; here you can confront empires, wars, and urgent breaking news, which is invariably false. Sea, forest, and sky will be bunkers, as long as they exist.

These days, with that rain they said would never return, every basin, every fold in the mountainside has turned out to be a canal; the paths were water conduits; the strawberry tree trunks, black and springy, were hoses. Every stream gives meaning to a crack in the rock. If the water denies a path and won't let me pass, it wasn't a path at all.

Geography is acoustic. Listening carefully, I can trace the paths of water, its swallowing, its sobbing, its leaps, and its meteorites. I measure the valley's depth, I count the steps leading down and the trees irrigated by each irrigation ditch. In my ear, the water tells me the streets of the city beneath the forest. I feel the liquid flowing through, flooding it, the cars, the schools, and the bell towers. I'm on the deck of a boat, navigating the white foam of the heather and the blue water of the flowering rosemary.

There are seas churning beneath the sea of vegetation, water singing in the bark of the hypertensive trees, all with their feet underground and their ankles soaking. The vegetation, muscular, puffs out its chest. It lines up on the roadsides for review.

The mountain drains away. The chip-chap dries as I climb. The path becomes increasingly dry, but not my plant companions. Reaching the top, I see that aerially the geography has also adapted to the elements that pass through. From the sea, which is just behind the mountains but cannot be seen, slowly comes the newly landed fog, which floats and crawls like a snake between the hills. It fills glasses and then hoods the peaks with clouds of salt. Smoke fairies crouch down to pamper the tops of the trees and then envelop them like chrysalides, blurring them, and what an immersion and what a taste to disappear in the middle of the forest, between the steam above and the water that finds itself below.