Gift

Crossing the ravines, searching for a path among the already bloomed brooms, stepping on quartz stones and the ancient hoof marks of wild boars. The enormous flood of December is clearly visible on the shore. He remembers the precise steps based on the shape of a rocky outcrop or a distant tree protruding from the undergrowth. There are cracks in the rocks, treacherous sinkholes, small abysses that he crosses swiftly, fearlessly, with an ease that would frighten anyone. He trusts his memory and instinct, all those years when he descended here at dawn, almost running, when he was barely twenty years old and infinitely arrogant. He remembers these mountains full of abundant and dense flowers. Today they are dry and crackling, but the water of the tiny river is very clean and he has seen the first male golden oriole, many partridges, a fishing polecat, two roe deer, and all that infinite life of bees, oil beetles, butterflies, and tiny creatures. After reaching the mill where the current empties, he will spend the day fishing slowly upstream, savoring each moment, with a consciousness he didn’t remember, perhaps never had until now.

Today he has especially appreciated each difficult step, each descent between the precarious steps of the granite, each brush of the undergrowth, and each excited little bird singing of desire. Then he saw the golden barbel struggling with others to swim upstream. Biologists call this extremely rare golden pigmentation “xanthism,” from the Greek ξανθός, xanthos, which means yellow. It is a genetic anomaly caused by a recessive gene that is extremely difficult to see in wild fish since this color, from fry stage, marks them as easy prey without the protection of the dark mimicry that all barbels have. But this one has survived its complicated childhood and is now a splendid two-kilogram fish, perhaps more elusive than the others. It sits half-hidden behind some reeds to contemplate that chance, that marvel of the golden barbel, like the one from the Achaemenid treasure of Oxus from the 4th century BC that he saw in London and later in Madrid.

But curiosity prevails, the modern arrogance of verifying truths, and he enters the water to try to touch it or see it up close. He then understands how gods or idols are invented: a white hind, a black panther, a snow thrush, or a golden fish were once the certainty that something extraordinary and perhaps magical was pointing to a happy or gloomy chance or destiny, that wonder lived alongside us, but only the attentive or the most astute could discover it. The little swimming deity flees and returns later, when curiosity and human ambition are far away.

But he takes something with him. He considers the moment a precious gift. The sun is shining strongly, illuminating the little valley. All the time he spent learning to descend and be here in April; all that nonexistent future he wants to anticipate, secure, plan, and that amounts to nothing, suddenly disappears before this present of wonder, solitude, and freedom. After all, that is also the meaning of the word “present”: a gift.

There is no more precious gold than the time of life and the sun.

Ramón J. Soria Breña

Season 5. Chapter 10	Tocamos el barbo de oro
Date of recording	May 2023
Duration	1:16 minutes
issue date	24 mayo 2023
Image and sound	Ramón Soria, Ernesto Cardoso, Isabel Companys
Edition	Ernesto Cardoso
Opusculum	Ramón J. Soria Breña
Music	Crowander
Song	Nigth music