Piringo

Dad was a master storyteller, who had the gift of intertwining reality with dreams, hopes and fantasy. I know he was passionate about history, but sometimes he made history sound so surreal…

In his book Elementary motherland (Patria elemental), Dad placed tonight’s entry immediately after his poem May the 18^th of 1875, which explains the Earthquake of Cúcuta, and gives Mr Piringo a well deserved context in history.

Piringo

While the earth shook the houses off its skin,

while the people of Cúcuta laid out in the open

now recovered from their fear

in the safety of death,

Piringo noticed that he was the only survivor

who could think of something different

from what the terror-stricken eyes

of everyone else thought of.

Piringo decided he would not die.

He turned debris upside down,

searched among the ruins, collected treasures,

moved corpses away, they were a burden

to his improvised new job of plundering.

The legend proclaims that he tied his youth

to the promise of becoming rich,

in exchange of whatever it took,

some sort of pact with the devil, who, at the end,

would come for him.

When the rope surrounded his neck

and he was hung by the hand of the righteous authority,

it was an afternoon in the month of May in 1875.

If someone started a journey

back to that afternoon, surely they would not

manage to catch Mr Piringo…

There would not be enough ropes and there would be

much to do on the way there!