_Abel Jaramillo_ Volcanos with the Hands_06/09_26/10/24_dossier

“Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip […]

”

Map

W. Szymborska

A letter is an exercise in writing, and also a journey. There is something of traveling when writing, there is a latent image in each part of a vocabulary. Images and texts that drag moments from one place to another. A dialogue sustained at a distance, paused. Waiting patiently to be read, calmly anticipating being listened to. Sometimes it is the confirmation that everything has stayed just as you left it: “everything is going on as usual here”, “we are well”. And quite often there is no response, but we await a Sandor Krasna who might write to us from somewhere in the world. Even though there is no response, even if it is all a fiction.

“I was there, beside the volcano.”

Someone writes this on the back of a postcard, after visiting Pompeii. I think of the person who might read it, receiving a postcard from Naples. I was there, between the ruins and history, he might say. I think of the person who looks straight into the camera and says: I was there, in an exercise of the imagination: imagining life, the everyday scenes from that place. For now, I will tell you that I was there, imagining everyday life and scenes, that those stones are these recollections, that fire, that frieze, that column, that body. And then takes photographs. Of the volcano, of a home, of a clay receptacle, of those stones on the ground…there are more than enough images for your story.

Thousands of tourists taking pictures, writing postcards, sending messages, recalling friends and acquaintances who were there:

“We were there, beside the volcano.”

I said that myself recently, when we went up the El Gasco volcano in Las Hurdes. We got to the village and there was a group of people gathered in front of a house, just where the road ended. This is the spot. We asked a few of the villagers about the volcano. One said that there was nothing to see up there, while another said we had to go up carefully because once they had to rescue some people who got lost; another said we had to hurry because it looked like it was going to rain. They gave us various directions and bits of advice to get to the volcano. Just then an ambulance arrived and went up to the group gathered there. We did not want to ask what was happening.
We followed the directions we had been given and those we found along the way. The path up is a spiral. There are five of us. While climbing the path we found various signs in yellow paint on the rocks: an arrow, then another arrow. Over top of the latter I read “The Volcano”, and a few metres from there, a small drawing of an erupting volcano. It had the shape of what we think volcanoes look like, a kind of pyramidal or almost triangular outline, with a flat base, then a few lines at the top that represent an eruption. I also read these words: “Have a good time,” which is like getting an anonymous letter during your travels from someone who knows about your journey.

After winding up the path, we finally got to the volcano. We were not sure if it was the right place, as we were greeted by large rocks in yellow hues. Green moss wrapped itself around stones and trees that twisted against the horizon. The light filtered through the forest oddly, on its way to the damp, green ground. A spout of water was falling on the other side. You would have thought it was any place other than a volcano, and in fact it is not a volcano. We have just called it that, but it is not a volcano. Rather, it seems like the impact of a meteorite from millions of years ago. Back in the village I read on the ground: “Dolores”. And then: “crafts”. We speak to a village woman who still sells pieces done in pumice, and she tells us that there are hardly any rocks left, and very few craftspeople. I buy a pendant and one of the pipes that she makes herself. The volcanic stone of the pipe looks like a miniature volcano, and I remember that I can press volcanoes with my fingertip. It seems odd that a wooden utensil to press tobacco into a pipe [a tamper], is commonly known as an “uña”, a “fingernail”. I like to think of this smaller scale: a crater with the diameter of a finger. And that a nail could be connected to a finger, or be made of wood and be used to press tobacco into a pipe. Or put out a fire, or crush a volcano. Being a vocabulary that is diminutive and clear, veiling a broad range of possibilities, with their own way of referring to the volcano, even though it is not a volcano; and not mentioning the meteorite, just in case it is not that either. Saying something small in a low tone, like a breath, an inverted whisper, a drag on a cigarette, a straight piece of wood on the edge of your lip, and the eruption of volcanic rock between your fingers. Without saying what. Like a secret.

“We are here.”

In the impact of a meteorite, in the very crater of the volcano, inside a burning pipe, in a mistaken name, amidst trees and green moss, amongst the very ruins of fiction, making volcanoes with your hands.

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