1
The earth had memory.
Tomás Huinca learned that at seven years old, when his grandfather took him to a corner of the field where no one had planted anything for decades. The old man crouched, took a handful of black earth, and let it fall slowly through his fingers while the wind carried away the finest particles.
Look - the old man said - This land has not given fruit in years. But if you listen to it, it tells you why.
Tomás looked at the earth. He heard nothing.
The grandfather laughed, a dry laugh of a man who had lived many seasons under the sun.
Not with your ears, boy. With your hands. With memory. With the things your grandfather learned and you will learn too.
That was the first lesson. Then came many others: how to know if a potato was ready to harvest just by the texture of the leaves, how to read the wind's direction in the inclination of the grasses, how to find underground water by observing which trees grew greener in the middle of February.
Southern Chile was not an easy place. The winters were long and wet, the sun was scarce, and the earth, although generous, demanded patience. Tomás learned to have it. He learned that plants do not rush, that fruits come when they have to come, and that the only way to get a good harvest is to observe, wait, and understand.
That was why, when his university classmates made fun of him for preferring to spend weekends in the field instead of going to parties, Tomás just shrugged.
Suit yourselves - he said - I am learning things that books do not teach.
It was not arrogance. It was simply the truth.
2
At twenty-six, Tomás had already finished his degree in agricultural engineering at the Universidad Austral de Chile, in Valdivia. He could have stayed in the city, gotten an office job, worn a tie on Fridays. But when the offer came for a soil research project in the province of Osorno, he did not hesitate for a second.
His apartment was small, almost monastic: a bed, a table, a chair, and shelves full of books and notebooks. He had no television. He had, instead, a collection of more than forty Moleskine notebooks, each filled with annotations, drawings, measurements, hypotheses. His friends said he was obsessive. He said he was meticulous.
It's the same - they replied.
No - he denied - The obsessive repeats without learning. The meticulous observes to understand.
In the mornings, before going out to the field, he prepared his thermos with mate and put it in the thermos holder he always carried next to the driver's seat. He drank mate while driving on dirt roads, between green pastures and cows that watched him pass with that philosophical indifference of ruminants.
That day, October 14th, there was sun. A shy sun, spring sun, but sun nonetheless. Tomás was listening to a podcast about phytopathology, taking mental notes about an experiment he wanted to try with the volcanic soils of the area. He was happy.
He did not see the truck.
3
The last sensation was a dry impact, a violent spin, and the world tipping sideways.
Then, nothing.
When he regained awareness of something, it was the smell. Wet earth. Grass. Something that was not a hospital, not metal, not disinfectant.
He opened his eyes and saw a gray sky. For a moment, his brain, trained to find logical explanations, built one: he had fainted, someone had taken him to a nearby field, paramedics would come soon.
But then he saw the plants around him and knew he was wrong.
They were not Chilean plants. They were not plants he had seen in any book, in any experimental field, on any trip. They were plants with strange shapes, leaves with impossible geometric patterns, stems growing at angles that defied gravitropism.
He sat up slowly. His body responded well. Too well for someone who had collided with a truck.
He looked at his hands. They were dirty with black earth, but there was no blood. He touched his torso, his face. Everything intact.
This is not Chile - he murmured in Spanish, just to hear the sound of his own voice.
No one answered.
He stood up, shook off his clothes (his jeans, his boots, his red and black flannel shirt, everything was still there), and began to walk down the slope. He had no idea where he was going, but staying still was not an option.
The forest was dense, humid, with a filtered light that created long shadows. Every step crunched on dead leaves he did not recognize. Every tree was a mystery. Every bush, a question.
After half an hour of walking, he heard voices.
He crouched instinctively, sharpened his hearing. They were human voices, but the language was not Spanish, not English, not Mapudungun. It was something completely foreign, with tones that rose and fell like a song.
He peeked through the bushes. He saw four people, dressed in brown robes, walking along a path. They carried baskets and primitive-looking tools: stone sickles, wooden hoes.
For a moment, he hesitated. Go out? Hide? Wait?
But then one of them saw him.
The man's eyes opened wide. He let out a scream, pointed to where Tomás was, and the four ran down the path, dropping their baskets.
Tomás stood paralyzed. Did he look that bad?
He came out of the bushes, raising his hands in a sign of peace, but it was too late. The men had disappeared.
He approached the abandoned baskets. They were full of leaves, roots, flowers. Plants. Exactly what he knew how to study.
He crouched, took a leaf between his fingers, brought it close to his eyes. It was a lance-shaped leaf, a green so intense it seemed to radiate its own light, with tiny golden dots on the edges that glowed faintly under the sunlight.
He had never seen anything like it.
And despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, despite not knowing where he was or how he had arrived there, Tomás felt something unexpected.
Curiosity.
The desire to understand.
The desire to know what that plant was, how it grew, what secrets those golden dots hid.
He put the leaf in his shirt pocket, with the same care others would use for gold, and waited.
Because if he had anything, it was patience. And if he knew anything, it was that plants always ended up taking him where he needed to go.