By The River Piedra I Sat Down & Wept

experience more of his freedom before committing himself to something so serious.

But after I reread my letter, I tore it up. Who was I to speak about freedom or commitment? Compared to him, I knew nothing about such things.

One day I learned that he had begun to give lectures. This surprised me; I thought he was too young to be able to teach anything to anyone. And then he wrote to me that he was going to speak to a small group in Madrid and he asked me to come.

So I made the four-hour trip from Zaragoza to Madrid. I wanted to see him again; I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to sit with him in a cafe and remember the old days, when we had thought the world was far too large for anyone ever to know it truly.

Saturday, December 4, 1993

The place where the conference was held was more formal than I had imagined it, and there were more people there than I had expected. How had all this come about?

He must be famous. I thought. He'd said nothing about this in his letters. I wanted to go up to the people in the audience and ask them why they were there, but I didn't have the nerve.

I was even more surprised when I saw him enter the room. He was quite different from the boy I had known—but of course, it had been twelve years; people change. Tonight his eyes were shining—he looked wonderful.

'He's giving us back what was ours,' said a woman seated next to me.

A strange thing to say.

'What is he giving back?' I asked.

'What was stolen from us. Religion.'

'No, no, he's not giving us anything back,' said a younger woman seated on my right. 'They can't return something that has always belonged to us.'

'Well, then, what are you doing here?' the first woman asked, irritated.

'I want to listen to him. I want to see how they think; they've already burned us at the stake once, and they may want to do it again.'

'He's just one voice,' said the woman. 'He's doing what he can.'

The young woman smiled sarcastically and turned away, putting an end to the conversation.

'He's taking a courageous position for a seminarian,' the other woman went on, looking to me for support.

I didn't understand any of this, and I said nothing. The woman finally gave up. The girl at my side winked at me, as if I were her ally.

But I was silent for a different reason. I was thinking, Seminarian? It can't lie! He would have told me.

When he started to speak, I couldn't concentrate. I was sure he had spotted me in the audience, and I was trying to guess what he was thinking. How did I look to him? How different was the woman of twenty-nine from the girl of seventeen?

I noticed that his voice hadn't changed. But his words certainly had.

You have to take risks, he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Every day, God gives us the sun—and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist—that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists—a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.

Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment helps us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments—but all of this is transitory; it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride andfaith at the journey we have taken.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back—and at some point everyone looks back—she will hear her heart saying, 'What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life'

Pitiful are the people who must realize this. Because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life's magic moments will have already passed them by.

After the lecture, members of the audience rushed up to him. I waited, worried about what his first impression of me would be after so many years. I felt like a child—insecure, tense because I knew none of his new friends, and jealous that he was paying more attention to the others than to me.

When he finally came up to me, he blushed. Suddenly he was no longer a man with important things to say but was once again the boy who had hidden with me at the hermitage of San Saturio, telling me of his dream to travel the world (while our parents were calling the police, sure that we had drowned in the river).

'Pilar,' he said.

I kissed him. I could have complimented him on his presentation. I could have said I was tired of being around so many people. I could have made some humorous remark about our childhood or commented on how proud I was to see him there, so admired by others.

I could have explained that I had to run and catch the last bus back to Zaragoza.

I could have. What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but didn't. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.

That's what happened to me just then. In spite of all the things I could have done or said, I asked a question that has brought me, a week later, to this river and has caused me to write these very lines.

'Can we have coffee together?' I said.

And he, turning to me, accepted the hand offered by fate.

'I really need to talk to you. Tomorrow I have a lecture in Bilbao. I have a car. Come with me.'

'I have to get back to Zaragoza,' I answered, not realizing that this was my last chance.

Then I surprised myself—perhaps because in seeing him, I had become a child again… or perhaps because we are not the ones who write the best moments of our lives. I said, 'But they're about to celebrate the holiday of the Immaculate Conception in Bilbao. I can go there with you and then continue on to Zaragoza.'

Just then, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him about his being a 'seminarian.' He must have read my expression, because he said quickly, 'Do you want to ask me something?'

'Yes. Before your lecture, a woman said that you were giving her back what had been hers. What did she mean?'

'Oh, that's nothing.'

'But it's important to me. I don't know anything about your life; I'm even surprised to see so many people here.'

He just laughed, and then he started to turn away to answer other people's questions.

'Wait,' I said, grabbing his arm. 'You didn't answer me.'

'I don't think it would interest you, Pilar.'

'I want to know anyway.'

Taking a deep breath, he led me to a corner of the room. 'All of the great religions—including Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam—are masculine. Men are in charge of the dogmas, men make the laws, and usually all the priests are men.'