Knocking on the recipient's door, saying their name repeatedly until you lose your voice, leaning in hopes against a half-open window, only to be met with the barking coming from the neighboring property, was always a desolate, depressing, sad scene.
I knew the tragedy of returning to find Iría without finding her; the tragedy of not being able to deliver my last letter, of writing on the walls of my memory, hoping that one day she would pass by and find an explanation for my absence after committing to a prepaid alphabet book.
Mom sent dozens of telegrams after the war. She was looking for a small job. The current government responded to three of them; it was a source of joy until we discovered the replies were exactly the same. Then misfortune and silence fell upon us.
An ignored letter is a wound in the belly of hope; a wound caused by absurdity; a wound the sender never expected. A wound with no vocation to heal and stem the terror.
As a child, I played the guilty scribe. I wrote letters on commission to slobbering gods, illiterate suitors of love. Those were prodigious days. The replies were immediate. Nor were the penances that reached my clerical soul from the confessional.
Now, as before, I pause to write. This time to my comrades of the Dominican Liberation Party; but I won't tell you about what's in my saddlebag, I won't tell you about lost transcendence, I won't tell you about dreams in tatters, I won't tell you about dying stars or the seashells that still hold the echoes of the rite we swore to serve: the broken promise of Juan, the comrade whose last death grimace was forever trapped in my hands. I'll only tell you that I'm leaving before nightfall; that it's getting late. I'll tell you now, as before, that it's much more profitable to love man than things.
I would have loved to leave this letter in the hands of its recipients. I would have liked to have it read. Answered, if anything. But it's been a while since the broken organization responded; the letters, even when closed, pile up, competing for a meager space in the wastebasket.
It's a shame; but this letter remains here, on the slate of honor, like a love message in a bottle. Who knows if posterity will ever tell of someone even stopping to acknowledge receipt.