The shepherd

The billy goats' bells warn that the herd is near. It is cold, but she gets up from the table and opens the window to watch it go by. And he loses himself in that image that blurs the past and the present; that mixes that yesterday with this very different today. Autumn has not yet gone and she thinks of those fallen leaves that form a carpet of greens, ochres and yellows. And then children used to run over them while shouting: "They're coming, they're coming"; now it is loneliness that shouts in that silence that breaks that ringing. 

A few years ago, the dogs guided more than 300 goats. How far away that image is from the ones that remain: about fifty. They all walk together. When one stops, so do the others. They crowd together as ideas do when it is impossible to stop thinking. They often stop in front of the house to eat the shoots that grow from a freshly cut tree. There was too much life in those roots that sneak forward with no way of avoiding the damage until it is done. They find their way, little by little, breaking what they have to break without anyone noticing... until they show their face. And it is too late. Too close to the foundations that support it, to that ground that is unbalanced.  That life of the depths. That destructive silence... 

Look at the goats. The hair, the colours, the way they eat. Behind, as always, on his mule, comes the shepherd. She is tired, he is tired. Although the reasons are different. The years, the early mornings and late nights, the ups and downs of the sierra, the cold and the heat... He is also heavy with pain, the pain of his bones, battered by time and hardship, and the pain of disappointment, which hurts almost more than the others, because there is no medicine for this, nor is there any chemical or home remedy.  

He makes a gesture. A small circle with his finger with which he wants to group the handful of goats he has left. And she innocently asks if he's tired of them, of the hard work. And of course she got tired, but of the day-to-day, of this administration that for years has been demanding and demanding, rules and more rules, money and more money, until she can't take it any more. Tuberculosis, he says quietly as if he doesn't want to hear himself, remembering the sacrifice of a large part of his flock, the incomprehension of a decision he doesn't understand. No, a few euros do not compensate for the disappointment and impotence, for the belief that it is the excuse for the small farmers, the shepherds of always, to give up.  

With his head down, he goes on his way, with his pains and disappointments, and with that handful of goats that give him a life, hard, but his own, with his mountains, with his early mornings.