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For Yori Andino and Dianelis Zaldívar, who are still searching.

To have a unicorn, to know it is there, grazing, and to suddenly find out that it is not, that the unicorn is not in the garden, that it disappeared, must be terrible.

Having that indigo horse with horn and losing it must have been a great catastrophe for Silvio Rodríguez. He, who has had that ghost, who lost butterflies, who also stopped seeing Teté week after week.

Silvio told Saruski that he had the whole melody and one day, almost without realizing it, the unicorn jumped on his arm and became a text. He could not stop it; everything, without a comma, said the troubadour, was assembled on the already half-displaced blank page.

Since then, Silvio says that lament. Sometimes I imagine that he doesn't want to sing it and that, from the audience, whether at Luna Park, La Víbora or in New York, the same guy shouts, placing his two hands like a horn: "Unicornoooooooo". And Silvio says the lament again, because that blue animal is gone.

The search is incessant: "a hundred thousand or a million, I'll pay", says Silvio. And the guy yells at him to give it to the poor, but Silvio returns a verse: "of love, compadre"; and one is left harassed by the singer's expertise, because in the end, if I give him back the horse, he is not supposed to keep the money, he is supposed to pay that ransom. But there are things that only women and poets know.

The truth is that I have had that graffiti hanging in my airs for almost all my life, and it may seem like an obsession, but with the years one begins to worry. Silvio tells his; I begin to see the accumulation of almost tumultuous days.

As a child I heard that he was more like a jean; the joke seemed sappy, but I liked it. That Roque Dalton had been betrayed by his own, murdered by his own; and it may be true. Losing Dalton or Wichy Nogueras must hurt enough to talk for 40 years of disenchantment.

But time has passed, and many of us are still attached to that song of a horse with wings (did Silvio's have wings?). And with an indigo horn. We have all sought in some way or have felt the pain of the bard. The frightening thing is that, to this day, since the 1980s, the search continues, and the unicorn has not returned. The news that brings us back some certainty may no longer be good news.

The island has suffered the disenchantment, the breakup, some joys, the pain of young people on boards towards a dream, some others determined to climb the slope, the loneliness that has tried to commit suicide, the loss of Pablo Milanés or Santiago Feliú, many records, the patient and entertaining rain, the novelty of an everlasting sun, international awards, puerile awards, cries of solavaya. A little love, but no unicorn appears. Silvio must have accommodated that pain, in fact, I am told that he knows he is not coming back. And to top it all, there is talk of war; it is very likely that the unicorn is dead.

P.S: There are guys with guitars singing verses that may not sell to anyone but they keep trying. It's possible that out there someone might find that horn horse and blue years old.