The improbable painting of Diego Berlinés

He had managed to create life from nothing. For a moment the situation made him feel like a god, then like a madman.

Diego Berlinés was born in Salamanca in 1897 and lived his entire life in a small village in that region. He worked as a painter, he was not the most talented, but he had a good intuition for art. He sold portraits and landscapes in nearby villages to get by. In bad times he helped out at the local bakery. Summer had arrived and Diego was twenty seven years old. He liked to open the windows so that the smell of rockrose and thyme filled the house and he was inspired by the landscape of Sierra de Francia. As a Spaniard, he found that name a bit uncomfortable.

He started the painting spontaneously. He used to reflect on the composition and the use of color for days before painting, but this case was an exception and he let the hand guide him. The joy of those brushstrokes was refreshing; the lack of control of his technique scared him. The chaos was taking shape and after a few minutes a landscape and a dusk began to be perceived. Inspiration demanded the presence of human figures and the hand obeyed. By noon the painting was finished. It represented an arid landscape, perhaps reminiscent of the Levant, the sky was beginning to darken and a couple of stars were beginning to show; to the left, a man looked calmly out of the painting, to the right, a seated woman contemplated the barren hills in the background. Neither the composition nor the colors deserved Diego's praise, but there was something about the painting that satisfied him. Perhaps it was the fact that it had been painted in such an anarchic way, very different from his usual technical rectitude.

It was not until the next day that he realized that he had painted more than anyone had ever painted. In the morning, in his study, he felt the presence of someone but he was alone. The feeling continued and finally Diego looked closely at the painting. He didn't understand why but the sensation came from that canvas. He studied the man's figure, specifically his eyes. He remembered the calm gaze that the wild brushstrokes had created, but now those eyes were closed. The size of the man made it difficult to appreciate the details, perhaps gravity had exerted its effect on some excessive blobs of oil, producing minimal variations. Diego doubted his memory and tried to rationalize the situation. But finding explanations became more difficult with the passing of time, with the smile that appeared on the man's face, with the delicate breath of the wind in his hair, with the grass, which was originally very sparse at the feet of the character but that was now beginning to spread. The changes were very gradual, imperceptible to the naked eye, and they didn't have the power to change the general image of the work.

Once he became used to this phenomenon, Diego accepted the impossible fact: his painting was alive. He searched for a way to communicate with it. He asked the man if he was living and the next day a smile appeared on the man's face. He asked if he was just lifeless oils, and the painting changed to a serious expression and a frown. The questions went on for days and all of them received a logical answer. Communication was slow but real.

Diego decided to show his work to several friends and family members; he still didn't fully trust his sanity. He did not tell them about the magic of the painting and none of them noticed anything out of the ordinary. The only comments were those related to the quality of the work; Diego's new technique was not well accepted. That only he felt the human presence of the painting worried him and he thought that it would be best to keep it a secret.

The conversation continued at bureaucratic speed. But the friendship arose inevitably and to celebrate it, Diego decided to introduce a small change in the painting, with the approval of its inhabitants. His artistic intuition asked for a small contrast of color. He painted an impossible red shooting star. He thought that part of the beauty of shooting stars was their brevity and he frequently repainted it, shortening its tail and extending its front to mimic movement. Finally the star disappeared from the sky and the effect was complete. The man's smile the next day seemed to convey gratitude for the gift.

Diego learned that the man could see everything that was happening in the room. He wondered if the woman in the painting, whose face he had not painted since she had her back turned and was looking into the background, could see the landscape. If so, would she only see the painted landscape or could she imagine a new world that extended beyond the borders of the canvas, a world reserved only for her? Diego asked the relevant questions.

After months of dialogue, he knew that the woman could create a landscape that extended to the limits of her vision, but she had not done so yet. The information needed for the creative process entered through the eyes of the man, and he had only seen one room. Diego took the painting all over his village, he showed it Sierra de Francia, he even took it to Salamanca and Madrid. With the information that was coming to her, the woman created a new world, unreachable for Diego, and filled it with people, who in turn created new landscapes with new people and these in turn created new landscapes, unreachable places for the woman.

Diego thought about this infinite process, how he would have liked to get into the painting and see those horizons appear successively behind the arid hills that he had painted, how he would have liked to contemplate the cities and talk with the people of that second universe that was inevitably extending. He wondered if he might not already be there, in the form of a painting imagined by another painting.

Months passed. One night Diego took the painting out to an old road on the outskirts of the village so it could see the stars. How many new worlds would have been created? How many new people? Soon the numbers became too big and they failed him. Would that place be a continuous plain sprinkled with mountains or would it end up forming a spherical planet? Would galaxies form? How far could this world within another world extend? Diego found the answer to this last question when he looked up and in the brilliant sky of Salamanca he saw an impossible red shooting star.