Literary magazine «Ágora». 2006. Illustration: Víctor Mógica Compaired.
The night marked its black hours with the quiet crackling of the wood in the fire. Eagle was looking at the stake for instructions for the combat of dawn, but his magical sense still did not manifest itself, with no news from the great Sioux spirits.
It couldn't be that the old dead Indians had abandoned him that night, when the decision to attack Fort San Francisco was in his hands. The other six wise men waited around the fire for his sign; some of them began to look up. His slanted eyes, from which his sinister war paints emanated, sought the same perplexity as his companions.
Behind the privileged wise men, the warriors impatiently awaited the harangues of their ancestors and their revelations about the enemy. The countenance of these warriors produced fear; His eyes shone at the whim that the dance of fire performed in the depths of his pupils; the same paintings as those of their elders, drew torn traces of death on them. Such distinctions were also applied to their strong chests and to the tense muscles of their crossed arms.
That handsomeness and his gloomy ceremony, was due to the fact that the magical knowledge around the bonfire had granted the Eagle tribe a warlike supremacy over many other tribes. The fighting of those implacable Sioux warriors had been born out of a natural expansive tendency. Hunting in the mountains and fishing in the Río Plata were no longer enough for a complete livelihood. The necessary nomadism made them spread out into the meadow.
It was precisely in the middle of the vast prairie that the Sioux were meeting that night. Together they formed a giant circle around the fire. Thus they avoided the incessant whistle of the valley wind. A strong current of air that struck the bare backs of the warriors stationed outside the human ring and reached softly, filtered drop by drop, to the bonfire.
Águila remained in the center of everyone; he hid his growing nervousness by taking a deep breath, as if he were close to the momentous meeting. However, he remained fully in physical condition. He perfectly felt his legs crossed and his elbows resting on his knees. He noticed how the hard bison skin rubbed the skin of his back and squeezed his armpits. He heard, saw and perceived the ascending fire, the waving fabric of the body of combustion, its color, its heat.
With great dismay, Eagle raised his voice again in the invocation. Faced with such action, a slight murmur of incomprehension could no longer be remedied. Never before had he had to call spirits Eagle three times.
However, a few seconds later, the spirits arrived, and with unusual strength. The wind, previously stopped by the crowd, rose over the heads of all of them, going up to the central hole and putting out the bonfire with a certain blow. The embers drifted around, bright but absent of fire. A growing rumor heralded impending bewilderment in the sudden dark night.
“!!The spirits want to talk!!” shouted Águila with a thunderous voice that spread throughout the valley, stopping the hurried whispering and any hint of movement. When his echo stopped, nothingness spread with the black disguise of night. The immensity of the valley seemed to have been cloistered by that strange closeness of the closed night, where some hands, violated by the events, reached out to touch only mysterious elements.
In the immensity captivated by darkness not even the wind blew, not even a bit. Only the stars could contrast that they were in an open field. For a few seconds nothing was heard, nothing was seen, nothing happened. An ineffable omen ran electrically through the darkness, transmitting a current of manifest unrest within that exclusive serenity of unpredictable events.
The firelight shone back where it had been extinguished, illuminating only Eagle with a crisp reddish hue. Everyone could gaze at the old visionary. His figure drew a long shadow outlined in a triangular shape.
The spirits had come with an unknown force that night. The six wise men looked fearfully at that special visit that possessed their great visionary. For the rest, everything happened as always, the cavernous voice from beyond came through the throat of Águila:
“The dawn of tomorrow will bring the birds of steel that will throw fire on all the great towns. The little white man will dominate the world, and will want to exterminate some races from the face of the earth. The death camps will be his last punishments. Years of death, madness and destruction will come in the old unknown continent ”.
Águila transmitted the incomprehensible message while his blind hands felt the ground, looking for one of the branches still scattered in embers. He took one of them by the intact end and directed the ember to his right forearm.
“You must stop the white man, the mark of his army is a false cross whose arms are bent at right angles. Do it before it's too late ... stop him before it's too late. "
After those last words, the fire was extinguished again and Eagle collapsed on his back to the ground. When the other six sages re-lit the bonfire, Eagle showed a swastika on his arm, he did not understand its meaning, but the spirits had declared his evil.
The wise men announced that they already had the sign, at that dawn they had to face the white man without fear to put an end to his sign. The warriors danced around the bonfire. Hours later, with dawn, many of them would die fruitlessly at the hands of the powerful Winchester rifles, before even approaching Fort San Francisco.
At the end of the massacre, the strong wind of the spirits rose again, it whistled furiously at the murder of its children. Until the bare chests of the warriors, lying and breathless, were buried by the dust.
None of those Sioux knew that their first confrontation in battle against the white man, armed with firearms, was a lost cause. They believed that the spirits had encouraged them to fight. The message of the bonfire had been clear to them.
But the spirits did not speak of that battle, or even of any battle that the Sioux might know in their entire lives. The message had been advanced many years, until 1939, the date on which the Second World War broke out at the hands of Adolf Hitler.