Short story - Zahorí

The problem was with the rod. Yes. It had to be.

At 4:45 in the morning, Ruperto got up, prepared his breakfast: coffee and a bowl of oatmeal, organized his belongings, and left his house the same way he had done for the past 20 years.

Ruperto was a simple man. He had a routine, but for weeks something hadn't been working. It had been many days since he last found water. He had never taken so long to locate an underground source.

“It must be the rod,” he repeated in his mind. The very same rod he had been using all these years was reaching the end of its life. “Everything has to die at some point,” he told himself. The rod he inherited from his father, and which had previously belonged to his grandfather, had completed its cycle.

Being a dowser was a family matter. Of course, nobody ever asked him if he really wanted to dedicate himself to it. When he was 9 years old, he was told: “Here you go, it's your turn,” and there was nothing else to be done about it. And NOTHING TO BE DONE ABOUT IT.

Ruperto was very proud of it. He was proud of it because one had to take pride in something, and from the moment he could remember, belonging to a family with a dowser tradition was what gave him the most pride, though a small part of his brain wasn’t entirely convinced. That little part, which had insisted on growing larger and larger over the past few days, repeated more and more forcefully, “break the rod.”

But if he broke it, where could he find a store selling rods? He didn’t recall any shop at the nearest mall that had anything resembling his rod, or even remotely close. And if there was one place Ruperto knew well, it was the mall.

Anyway, that old and worn-out rod no longer worked, he thought, while he waited to feel a faint vibration indicating water somewhere. “It's old, and that's why it doesn't work.” “The problem is the rod,” he convinced himself repeatedly, “there's definitely no point in trying to work with it anymore, and no one would find use for a worn-out rod battered by time.” He stopped once more to see if he felt anything, even the smallest sign. He resumed walking and impulsively threw the rod far away, shook himself vigorously, and walked briskly yet quickly, disappearing down the path that led to the city.

A few minutes passed. The rod vibrated.