La Piedra Pre?ada

Many years ago, when I painted for a living, I would carry a few canvases to a place around the middle of the Quibor desert, in midwestern Venezuela, and painted the far away hills and other desert motifs. One day, I stumbled upon an old men in his nineties, bent over with a walking stick, inside one of the gullies that traversed the desert. The old man lived alone in a rustic hut, and for a living he hunted a particularly scarce song bird, which was highly prized in the nearby town of Barquisimeto, where he travelled every three months to sell them and buy basic necessities. He also collected pebbles and rocks, which he associated with stories and image from his own and popular folklore. In my scarce visits to his hut, I would sit down on the floor and listen to his stories decribing each rock, placing to one side those rocks whose stories I found particularly interesting, and I would later would haggle a price for each one of them. The rocks and stories were an inspiration for me, and resulted in hundreds of paintings which I produced during a three year period, many of which are in public and private collections in Venezuela and abroad...
Recently I found a rock on a hill near the community of El Carril, south of San Juan de la Maguana. It had obvious human tooling marks, so I brought it home for my collection. One day, a local reknown artist and ethnomusicologist visited my home and saw the stone. He told me it was a Taino 'pregnant stone', and accused me of crafting it myself. I felt very insulted, and almost spiked his drink with 'sangre de maco'... ;-). He mentioned that 'pregnant stones' were very rare and that the local anthropological museum had one very similar. Here's a picture of the 'pregnant stone'...