Antonio Machado and the Black Lagoon: journey to the heart of the myth

It would be a complete impoliteness to leave the land, real and at the same time imaginary, of Alvargonzález, without ascending to the lonely peaks of the Picos de Urbión and taking an admiring look at the true jewel of the environment: the Black Lagoon.

Of eminently glacial origin and an unknown background, such an unusual place was, in its own right, the nerve center or the Axis Mundi, where the poet Antonio Machado introduces us, through a close and popular lyric, in that 'descent ad ínferos' or 'descent into hell' -metaphorically and comparatively speaking- where the hero, far from the mystical medieval connotations, suffers in his own flesh the terrible slights of his own children, whose apparent Oedipus complex does not revolve around the figure of a mother of flesh and blood, but around another figure, archaic and maternal, by whose possession, the children are capable of committing any act, including parricide: the land.

From here, the real drama unfolds, when, through the unbearable pressure derived from the guilt of the miserable parricide sons, Antonio Machado turns the dead eyes of the father's corpse, which lies in the unfathomable depths of the Black Lagoon, in the vigilant, cunning and stalking gaze of that mythological water nymph -could be seen here, a flowery metaphor of consciousness- that tradition and popular legends have always insisted on affirming that it dwelled in its unknown depths.

Tireless seeker of the honest and faithful servant, he could come to assert himself of that Karma, which is beyond a justice, the human, generally tendentious and in many cases, partisan, Machado invites the most enlightened of the judges to make an appearance: the remorse.

That judge, plenipotentiary, who does not need a warrant to enter homes and who collapses, with absolute freedom of movement in the unconscious, exercising his own teaching from that criminal court, which are his own dreams, achieving, that, faced with the forcefulness of the evidence, conscience itself -which enchanted maiden- awakens and definitively assumes her guilt, making herself available, this time, yes, to the justice of men, who attend the drama horrified.

A justice, certainly, that will not return the betrayed father to life, but that will, however, make his spirit rest in peace, once recovered and already lying on sacred ground, that which is only dust and to dust will return, inevitably.

Drama that unfolds entirely around the explosive beauty of this Black Lagoon, whose semi-perfect oval delimits, at the same time, a physical border, on the one hand, with the undisputed capital of Old Castile - that heroic territory, which gave us to the first counts, to the first judges, to Doña Lambra and the fantastic legend of the seven infants of Lara- and another, imaginary, but no less rich in archetypes, where one always has the impression that reality, in some cases , can perfectly surpass fiction.

Because, in this case and from the wise hand of Machado, it is not difficult to determine the real meaning that animated the phrase of that other surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, when he affirmed, categorically convinced, that there are other worlds, but they are in East.

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