What the Hell is Not

Luis Ruíz Del Árbol - Love needs scorched earth and dead matter to revive life. In every generation, our forlorn gaze awaits the arrival of a faithful gardener to bring the miracle of rebirth.

I still remember the day in 1998, the year I studied in Paris, when, walking down the street, I came across a phrase painted on a wall of the Sorbonne that struck me deeply: "IL N'Y A QUE LE DÉSERT DANS VOS REGARDS," there is the only desert in your eyes. 

The children of those who made the revolution in May 1968 had not discovered the sand of the beach under the paving stones but that of the desert. Thirty years later, in a city that was beginning to normalize the outbreaks of violence in the suburbs by the new revolutionaries, the second and third-generation immigrants, it seemed that hell was still the others.

In the summer of 2022, a forest fire destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of the Sierra de la Culebra in Zamora; this impending desertification was an almost fatal blow for a region already ravaged by depopulation and aging. A few months ago, I listened to a radio interview with Nazaret Mateos, initiator, and director of Refosetas, a project for the regeneration of the Sierra de la Culebra, "through the treatment of burned soil, combining saprophytic and mycorrhizal fungi, taking advantage of the trees and dead matter to have the first mushroom productions this spring, regenerating the soil microbiota and the mycology of the forest for the future".

The idea is based on the fact that "mushrooms generate moisture in the soil, help plants grow (...) It is a natural fertilizer that can produce economic returns in the mountains in the future." In one fell swoop, discreetly and modestly, Refosetas is contributing to the environmental recovery of its surroundings and stimulating the area's economic activity through tourism and mycological production.

This initiative reminded me of the beautiful documentary The Salt of the Earth (Win Wenders, 2014), about the life of the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. What tenderness when he recounts how, in 1997, he returned from the Congo sick after having photographed its civil war, but "not with a disease of the body, but with a disease of the soul" because he had seen "the abyss of evil that man is capable of," hell on earth. 

At that moment, he decided to stop and return to the village where he was born and spent his childhood. This former orchard had become a desert due to the brutal depletion of the forests by mining and cattle ranching. Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick, gradually began reforesting the land adjacent to his birthplace with native seeds they had grown and founded the Terra Institute as an umbrella for the project. Today, barely 25 years later, more than 700 hectares of forest have been restored, wildlife has returned, and the region has, against all odds, been economically and demographically reactivated.

The Refosetas and Terra Institute projects are an unimaginable historical realization of Jean Giono’s beautiful fable, The Man Who Planted Trees. In it, the French writer recounts the fictional life of Elzéard Bouffer, a lonely shepherd who, after losing his wife and son to an epidemic, decides to devote the rest of his life to patiently, silently‌ , and out of the limelight, selecting the most suitable seeds, one by one, and transforming a desolate valley in the Alps into a land full of life, forests‌ , and water.

“The question is not whether to be wounded or not; the question is what to do with the wound,” I often hear my wife say. And I think Italo Calvino of The Invisible Cities would agree with her: “The hell of the living isn’t something that will be; there is one, it is the one that already exists here, the hell that we inhabit every day, that we create together. There are two ways not to suffer it. The first is easy for many: to accept hell and become a part of it, to the point of no longer seeing it. The second is dangerous and requires constant attention and learning: to seek and know how to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and to make it last and give it space”.

Nazaret Mateos and the Salgado couple understood that love, like mushrooms, needs scorched earth and dead matter to revive life; that compassion, which opens the way to care, is what isn’t hell amid hell‌ and that our desert gazes, so well described by the painting I once saw on a wall at the Sorbonne, are always waiting in each generation for the arrival of a faithful gardener to bring the miracle of new beginnings.

Luis Ruíz del Árbol is the author of the book "Lo que todavía vive".
Published on paginasdigital.es

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