Mundos Olvidados

There's only one way I can explain what "The Road" is when I'm asked. I always say the same thing. It's the story of a father and his son who embark on a journey in a post-apocalyptic world. It doesn't feel like an innovative concept. Of course, because it isn't. But Cormac McCarthy knows how to make you travel for a moment. There's nothing left in the place. To give you an idea of how desolate the world is, the silence almost makes you hear the beating of their hearts.

The days are cold, the sky is always gray, and the snow and rain are currency. The trees are burned, and what remains of the few houses and cars is dust and ash. During the day, both of them advance along the road, pushing a cart in which they put things useful. They travel through houses, supermarkets, service stations, and other abandoned places.

Even so, they find some resources: food, tools, weapons, health kits, etc. In that situation, anything is useful, right? During the night, darkness and cold are absolute. Usually what they do to pass it is light a bonfire in the middle of the forest and sleep on a plastic blanket, other times inside abandoned vehicles, and many others inside of the little that is left of a house.

With all this, they try to survive for days, for months. They lose count of how much they progress and how little they find. But the world of The Road is not really empty. There are sections where the man returns to a past that he no longer remembered. A lake where he and his uncle used to go looking for firewood in the fall. A discolored sign in a field with a ad that says "visit rock city" or the viewpoint where he used to go with his father.

The memories of those simple moments come back to mind as soon as you see those places. After a few days, they enter a house looking for resources. There, the rooms are empty. The only thing that moves is the ash from the wind that passes through the broken windows. In the dining room there is an iron bed without a mattress and a metal folding table. From the walls, the pine sheet is missing and only the enraptured slats are visible.

The man stands there, standing, and touches the chincheta holes in the main wood of the reed with his thumb, says the narration. There, where 40 years ago someone hung socks. He turns around and looks at a ruined patio, a maroon of dead flowers. On the cold winter nights when the light was going out because of a storm, says the son, we sat here, my sisters and I, in front of the fire, and we did our homework.

"What place is this, dad?" he asks, to which the man replies, "The house where I grew up." Do those things mean the same to you as the things you find in your past in the present? Do they have the same value? What does this affect fishing? The Road is a story of about 200 pages. It doesn't raise such an original concept or situations that we don't know in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

But this is one of the most visual worlds I've read in my life. You can see the gray sky all the time, the fog in the distance, that permanent absence of the sun blocked by ashes falling everywhere. You can feel the blindness at night, saved by a time fog that is nothing more than a spark in a forest in which if you look around you will only see calcined trees. You can feel the cold in the road, the burning of the cold wind in the face and the weeping of the eyes.

Every description Cormac McCarthy makes is too palpable and it brings to your mind a perfect picture of what that world is like. Now, there's no way to know what happened there, but there is something that is certain: no one remembers him.

There are specific genres of fiction that always present post-apocalyptic scenarios. It's something usual, right? Environments destroyed by some natural disaster, a civilization about to disappear due to an epidemic, a nuclear phenomenon, whatever. I've already talked many times about abandoned spaces of this style, but there's another way to understand them.

There is a reality that generates common emotions in some people. Nostalgia or sadness, above all. And something that seems curious to me is that these spaces exist physically, but in memory they can disappear. I don't think there is an explanation for how Shadow of the Colossus made me feel when I heard this. *The Colossus theme plays*

This is a game I didn't understand at first, because when I started riding through the forbidden land, I realized there was nothing around. This is possibly the most flat and empty world I've ever seen in my life, I thought. But I rode, without it caring that much.

I rode to every region of the map where there was a colossus, with the goal of knocking him down and moving on to the next one. It was an easy task: kill one, kill another, kill another, kill another, kill another, etc. The goal was clear: to bring back life to that young girl. And it was a goal that she was going to achieve despite any wind against her. A goal that was stuck in her mind. A goal that she didn't think about letting go.

The f*cking mother of... Tim Ico left many scenarios, ideas and secret endings in the draft, but one of the most interesting leaks was the one that Fumito Ueda had in his head about the universe of Shadow of the Colossus. A web page created on August 30th, 2021, left the following clarification: "This storyboard is dated July 6th, 2004. At that time, there were still 24 Colossus. This is the only storyboard that has been preserved.

The document says that in 2500 B.C. a catastrophe happened that ravaged most of the world. A natural disaster that ended almost all of humanity, killing millions of people and leaving only a few nomads, who ended up joining together to survive. The document also says that 100 years later, when the remaining half of the nomadic civilization traveled to the southeast, they arrived in the land of Sinar, colonized it and decided to stay there, making it their home.

But, exploring more deeply, they found giant beings and were amazed by their species. These were the Colossians, who became, for the people, something like gods that incarnated nature. People felt insulted by the Colossians because they considered them responsible for that catastrophe. That's why the war broke out. And they called themselves Dormin. In the graphic script that was filtered, it is written the following:

They said: "Come and let's build a great monument with the corpses of the Colossians in the center of the earth and let's make a name that reaches the heavens and we will never let ourselves be carried away by the catastrophes of the gods." The tower, which was a mass of Colossians, was called the Tower of Heaven.

The Dormin had almost finished with the Colossus, but something happened one day, says the document. It was not the bodies of the Colossus, those who were attracted to the Tower of Heaven, but those of the Dormin themselves, who joined and functioned together, forming a monstrous entity similar to that of the Colossus they killed.

This is obviously fantastic, but this is how the world of Fumito Ueda worked. The thing is that with this event, they came to believe that they had ascended to divinity and thought they could rule the Earth in a fair way, making sure that there would never be a catastrophe again. This caused a division: those who believed that the Dormin had been shared in divinities through their acts, and those who considered that the entity was cursed and possessed by the dead spirits of the innocent creatures murdered.

The website clarifies one last information. 400 years later, these two clans faced a bloody conflict, with thousands of dead. And that's why the people considered the Earth was cursed. So they sealed it, building a huge bridge to evacuate people forever. But then you hear this: And none of that exists anymore.

There are only some writings, now framed on a web page, of some documents that were leaked. The forbidden land is an inaccessible place for most, and it's full of ruins when you get there. There are only the remains of a past civilization, and colossi that don't expect to be faced by the protagonist. I myself went back to the first colossus when I finished the game. It was a mound of land. It was part of nature. I wrote that fragment of history, and now I rode to forget it.

The world of Shadow of the Colossus is one in which you perceive history when you are in it. One where you see the past in every ruin, in every colossus that awakens from its tranquility, and that the only thing that took it out of it is your presence. But the Forbidden Land is still there, forgotten, waiting for the next person to decide to visit it.

There are some places where we don't need to go back, it's the reality. But there are others that, even if we know or know about their existence, we will also forget. Simply because we don't want to go, because we can't, or why not both reasons at the same time. I've never seen a map like the one in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. It's one of the most massive.

recreates the complete planet Earth in satellite detail. This is not his game. He recreated it more precisely than a real flight in a real place. I still have a pending matter with the landing theme, but it's beautiful. However, the only moments I had in this simulator were simple.

Travelling from one place to another in which I didn't have to learn what each button did. The best thing about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 for someone who doesn't know anything about flight is to look out the window of the plane and watch the sunset. It's like crossing a cloud or moving through an intense storm. There was a moment in one of those trips where something interesting happened to me. I saw an island on the digital map of an NX plane.

It was night, so it was impossible to see anything through the windows. But even so, that small island caught my attention right away. What was in a place like that in the middle of the ocean? This model of an NX plane doesn't reach much speed, so I accelerated and had patience. I had to know what was there. And since it was 3 in the morning in the simulator and I wasn't going to be 4 hours waiting for it to drive, I changed the time on the menu and saw this. As soon as I arrived, I found what was obvious that I was going to find.

Nothing. Trees and more trees. An island like any other. I searched on Google Earth and found information that left me puzzled. Here's the conclusion, I'll tell you directly to see if I can surprise you like I surprised myself. You're never going to go to this place. You're not going to want to visit it. But not only that, you're not even going to be able to. Because entering there is forbidden.

This is Sentinel Island. There aren't many pictures on the internet, but from the ones there, you can clearly see who lives there. It's a tribe. It's not known what language they speak, or how many there are, but they are one of the last tribes that are out of contact with the rest of the world. The island is more than 1000 km from any port in India. They are so unknown that even in India itself, people are not aware of their existence.

The little we know about them is that they emigrated 60,000 years ago from Africa and live in a small forest area of the northern Sentinel. They are also distinguished by the use of bows and arrows, with which they hunt and defend themselves. And they have proven to be very hostile to foreigners. This seems to be part of a fiction story, but they didn't know what fire was until a few years ago. They don't know how to grow the land either.

They hunt and fish with spears and harpoons. They walk naked. They live completely isolated and speak an unintelligible language for the rest of the world. To see what going to this place implies, I'll give you a couple of examples. In 1974, a film director who visited the place received a slap on the leg when his crew tried to film a documentary.

After the 2004 tsunami, the Indian authorities also checked the conditions of the tribe in the helicopter. And what happened? They were received with arrows. "Their resistance to any contact with the outside world has made it impossible for anyone to approach them," one of the authorities said. The climax of this was a documentary filmmaker who planned for two years his trip to the Sentinel Island and after entering, he was murdered by the tribe.

Because of the risk that was supposed to get in touch with these people, in 2005 the Indian authorities banned any kind of approach to the island on a 5 km radius. No one ever went back to that place. When you go back to Microsoft Flight Simulator, you have other sensations after knowing this.

One of them, for example, is the one that they're going to kill you. I captured some images of the Sentinel Island before the sun set completely. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has one of the most impressive graphics I've ever seen. And I flew a little. I flew north, west, through the trees. Until I had nothing to do in that place. So I left. Crossing, again, a cluster of clouds in the middle of the sunset. I wasn't going back. Why?

The Sentinel Island has nothing for me. It's a piece of land in the middle of the ocean. And while I was thinking about this, I looked for the last time at the island behind me. It's a place that doesn't matter if it's forbidden for people, because no one will ever be interested in going. It's a place that no one would even think of getting close to. A place that, even if you've known it, after a few minutes, you'll probably forget.

"Keep in mind that the things you think about are there forever," says the man to his son one day on the road. "Maybe you should think about that." "You forget some things, don't you?" he asks. And the father replies: "Yes, you forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget." This is a phrase that stuck with me throughout the story. You could think about anything. "I never went back to my grandmother's house after her death. Now, there lives another person."

I'm not going back. There are many memories, obviously, but there are also things that I'm going to forget because the physical space gradually goes away with the passage of time, and some memories can only come back when you see them. A essay written by Fernando Soto Rolán says: "We cling to things, we identify with them to the point of believing that they are an extension of ourselves, and that, by disappearing or deteriorating, our essence goes away with them.

Of course, all this is false. It's nothing more than a projection of our wishes and beliefs. Even so, we suffer when that happens, and even more when we're alone. On the contrary, oriental philosophers tell us about detachment, the wise attitude of letting things go. Where did our beloved childhood objects go? In which corner of the world do they remain?

Maybe that's the reason why many people feel horror about abandoned places, since they reveal the flow of everything and the loss of our most precious objects. In a way, these spaces, says the writing, are the hell of collectors.

These places don't just seem to tell their own stories, but each corner is a silent witness to everything that once happened there. They were there, present, seeing everything. And whether you like it or not, even if it hurts a little, sometimes you have to go out, close the door, and not come back. That's why, as Martina Stoessel says, "She doesn't fall in love, she knows, she keeps her cora, she already has it under her key."

Here came the Triple T. As always, I would like to know if you have any anecdote or a fictional story that has made you feel that melancholy. Thanks for getting here, I send you a hug and see you next time.