Vine a Comala...

...porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo."

This is the opening sentence from Juan Rulfo's masterpiece, "Pedro Paramo". It translates in English to something like this "I came to Comala, because I was told that my father lived here, some guy called Pedro Paramo". The story unfolds quite quickly as the main hero, in search of his father, meets the inhabitants of Comala and as a series of logical inconsistencies slowly accumulates the reader is left to discover the secret of the village of Comala. The fact that its inhabitants are all ghosts.

Last Saturday, in the company of Julien, Eleanna and Zeynep, somewhere between Baix Pallars and Vall Fosca, I came upon my own Comala. A village called Ancs. How we got there is not a very long story. Perhaps a bit of a long drive, as Julien was trying to avoid stony bumps, dangerous mud pits and lazy cows blocking the country road. When we finally arrived in Ancs, we did not know it was going to be finally. We were supposed to be driving through it, over the mountain and towards the other side of the valley, where the rest of the company, (safe and warm in the shelter thanks to an GPS navigator) were waiting for us. But it was there, when after a good hour of tedious and dangerous driving uphill we realized that the worst part of the road still lied ahead of us as the night was slowly falling.

Wisely enough, we put half the blame on the map, the other half on our daring initiative to pick an alternative route way back and started our descent, over the same bumps and sticky mud. With the slight fear of us getting stuck up there overnight slowly dissolving after every successful turn, we started talking about what it will be living up there, in the utter desolation of Ancs. On our way past the village, we only saw a car wrecked at the side of the road and no signs of life whatsoever apart from a light on in one of the silent houses, which only half of us (Julien and Zeynep) could testify. It was then that I remembered Comala, as I had molded it in my mind while reading "Pedro Paramo" some years ago. And, even if it really isn't, Ancs looked like a ghost city to me, standing up there at the edge of a cliff, overlooking a dark valley, whose sole inhabitants are cows, their calves and the old body of car, rotting at the side of the road.

As we were cruising towards Geri de la Sal, over tarmac for the first time after almost two hours, I remembered the sight of that car, up there at the entrance of Ancs, (or was it Comala?) and tried to think of how it might have ended up there and what happened to its passengers. Then I remembered the last sentence from "Pedro Paramo".

-Voy para allá, ya voy.
(I am going over there, I am going now.)

And I felt a bit relieved as we were doing exactly that.