THE CLUMP

Who am I, the son of Laerte or the son of Anchise?
A man walks through the Salento countryside. He holds a glass jar in his hand. Empty. Fields of centuries-old olive trees exterminated by the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium parade past. The man walks towards his grandfather's olive grove. His destiny is to return to the places of his adolescence, in perpetual search of desire, fulfilling what he can imagine. To lose oneself is a condition of necessity. Strange shapes appear in the countryside. Weedy plants, inexorable in their growth and overgrowth, have cloaked the dry olive trees, creating majestic elephant-like shapes. Life suffocates death. Man passes through the olive grove as if in a dream. He feels both pain and joy at the same time in front of a landscape devastated by the Xylella plant disease. As he crosses the unique valley, the man feels observed. Wooden faces, fauns of the past, threaten him. Or perhaps they protect him? His indecisive step becomes resolute: he reaches the bank of a stream. Someone has laid out a tray of olive bark with a clod of earth on it: the Clump. The ritual is performed: the man purifies his hands with water from the stream, then slips the clod into the tray and walks away.
Meanwhile, in a nearby cave, one of the wooden fauns takes the form of his young sculptor and begins to bring the old olive trunk back to life. In an eternal present, everything begins again and is fulfilled in every single moment.
Who will I be, Odysseus or Enea?