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It is a wonder in this world of satellites and adventurers probing every last corner of the planet that the upper stretches of the Zagayón River remain as remote and mysterious as ever. Even today, the most detailed and reliable reports come from the logs of the first — and let it be said, last — Western explorers to make their way up the river.
Fortunately their logs have survived even though no trace of the crew was ever found. Their abandoned vessels with the logs aboard were discovered floating far downstream, mostly intact. It is thanks to those few documents that academics know anything at all about this strange river basin, wedged as it is between two parallel ranges of impassable mountains.
Reading the captain’s formal script, one senses the tension between his careful penmanship and the fascination and trepidation that was taking hold of him and his crew.
From the start, there were mysteries. They were astounded to see the riverbank lined with empty chairs for kilometers and kilometers on end. The chairs on the bank were made of woven willow branches and had sinuous, undulating lines. In many places the jungle had re-taken the chairs, swallowing them under matted vine and fallen trees.
And yet, for all the chairs, they never saw a single inhabitant. Judging by those chairs, the population must have been far greater than anyone had predicted. But they saw no sign of life. The captain wrote of their frustration at never having aprehended or even glimpsed a native of the region, though repeatedly they set traps and lay in wait.
And there was another paradox. As they climbed in altitude they expected the river to narrow and eventually become a trickle. To their surprise the river became more powerful the higher they climbed until it was a raging torrent with swirling currents and treacherous flumes. Where did all this water come from?
One day, they chanced upon a lone man sitting on one of the chairs. He was leaning out over the edge of the river, sobbing. His body heaved and he held his head in his hands.
The captain sent out a party in a rowboat to bring him back. But instead of apprehending him, the party found themselves trying to console him because in the end there is nothing that joins us as human beings like sorrow.
Eventually, he stopped sobbing.
He explained that in this part of the world there is a tradition that those whose hearts are broken go to the river. They carry with them their favorite chair and set it as close to the water as they dare. There they sit, slightly inclined, so that every tear lands upon the water — plop plop plop — replenishing the river. To do otherwise, to allow a tear to fall on dry land, is considered selfish. Your tears do not belong to you alone and must be shared.
The lone man’s face was creased by many decades. Sitting with them in a circle around the fire they had made, he told them that he had just lost his wife. At the mention of this, his eyes watered and he hurried back to the river’s edge where he sobbed for a long while, making sure his tears fell where they should. The explorers stared at the ground and kept silent.
He returned to sit with them again. Even those whose sorrow seems bottomless, he said, eventually run out of tears. When that happens, whether by light-headedness or exhaustion or just a deep yearning to join the fray again they lean even further over the water until they tumble from their chairs back into the river.
Reading through the logs in the library, I can feel the captain’s growing fascination with this man and the ways of his culture. Perhaps because it is so foreign to his own nature, the captain is in awe of the man’s deep calm in the face of misfortune.
“In the evening,”the captain wrote, “We sat around the fire smoking. Because I do not speak the language perfectly, I made the mistake of calling the long water the River of Tears. The man stared a long time at me over his pipe. The flames of the fire danced on the surface of his eyes.”
“You are mistaken, my friend,” he said. “It is not the River of Tears, it is the River of Love. Those tears have become love. Those who fall in have left their sorrow behind because they choose to swim again with the rest of us.”
But it is the last lines of the log that haunt me. The captain records how the man had turned to him at the end of this story, his eyes full of flame, and said, “Perhaps you too would like to leave your sorrow behind?”
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