El Sur (Víctor Erice, 1983)
My favorite quotes from Adelaida García Morales's El Sur (translated by Thomas G. Deveny):
You emptied me of everything, and you opened a desolate cavity in my soul. You left me alone, wandering aimlessly with a tedium that weighed upon me like a stone.
But you knew nothing of my suffering. It was so intense that it exceeded all words, and it submerged me into a silence similar to that in which you enclosed yourself with tenacity until your death.
How many times I wanted to approach you and embrace you in silence, cure you of that pain that I didn't know how to understand! But in your final years I was only able to address you with a few words and only words, always ineffective.
"Look," you told me, "the worst suffering is the kind that doesn't have any particular reason. It comes from everywhere and from nothing in particular. It's as if it didn't have a face.”
To me, you were an enigma, a special being who had arrived from another land, from a legendary city that I had visited only once and that I remembered like the scenery from a dream. It was a fantastic place, where the sun seemed to shine with a different light and where an obscure passion made you leave, never to return. You don't know how well I already understood the death you chose. I think I inherited not only your face, shaded with Mama's coloring, but also your enormous capacity for despair and, above all, for isolation. Even now, the greater the solitude that surrounds me, the better I feel. However, I felt so abandoned that night. I will never forget the impenetrable darkness that covered the house when you disappeared.
It's funny how what was not visible, what didn't really exist, caused me to live the most intense moments of my childhood. I remember the hours we spent in the garden dedicated to that game you invented and which only you and I played. I would hide some little object so you could find it with your pendulum.
Then I thought that whatever is left in the realm of the possible, whatever does not come to exist, is always better.