A Bucolic Moribund Cadence....

The two day trip became three, then four, then five and no indication that we were ever returning to Buenos Aires. Not that it mattered much. For here is a great land. It was a balm to the spirit and mind. I was free to roam. Carolina and I gathered blooms and branches for the empty vases in the house. Alexis' wife would surely have furnished these but was in Greece touring the islands on a friend's yacht with the their two daughters. Alexis was due to join them in the coming weeks after his work at la Esperanza was finished.

One day followed another in a relaxed and quiet order. Minutes and hours noted only by the changing temperatures, cloud cover, quality of the light the coming and going of workers, meals, cups of coffee, glasses of wine. Evening falls boldly colored but fast. Then we had movies, the fireplace, backgammon.

Each of us was able to retreat into their own worlds. I would usually awake after Carolina and before Alexis who liked to linger in bed reading the daily papers. There was always a small set table for breakfast by the window overlooking the garden. Coffee, toast, an egg to your liking accompanied to the chorus of the intense, wild cry of morning birds. The ornithological bounty of the region expresses itself in a vast cacophony of birdsong, from the laconic cry of seagulls to the plaintive melancholy wails of falcons and eagles. Friendlier sounds emit from a wide variety of smaller songbirds, partridges or quail calling from the thrush and also filled the air.

I thought there was no internet access on the estancia, so I retreated into books and quietude but invariably my intranquil mind returns to the place from whence I came. The square glass box on Lloyd Road. The neighborhood friends. My garden. Are they watering it? Does my dog dream of me in his canine sleep? And I realize that so soon I am in the hands of an anxious and childish homesickness. Is my absence felt by the one I feel so distant from? I begin to feel unsure of this great leap into a country I really know so little about. I begin to worry about my task, my work. Will I be able to accomplish it all?

Alexis leaves me with Carolina and the fire, the dogs. She feels an ardor invited by so many of my kind and chivalrous words...perhaps they were seductive too, but now I balk. I quickly put up walls. My feelings are incoherent.

This pleasing envirnoment of a sudden is not comforting to me anymore.

It is as if I wandered here, an aimless voyager seeking refuge, friends; a man, who in spite of having received such a warm and caring reception, feels completely out of place. Out of sorts.

I know I cannot open myself to this woman completely. I have already said too much, explained too much, shared too many secrets. She seems a kind woman. She also has said too much. Told too much. She rarely let's me get a word in edgewise. She is determined to be bold, secure, strong, indifferent, so self-assured that the overcompensated effort drowns the flower of her delicacy and I close shop. We embrace nonetheless. Play out a pantomime. A cinematic ideal of what could have been in another place, another time. We seemed so similar. Both writers. Both idealists. A kiss, then another. But no power behind it, no arousal from me. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. Have I misled her to think I wanted more from her than I did? I did not mean too.

People are often drawn to me this way. As if I possessed an oasis, a secret garden with an answer that can be bitten like a fruit, a swallowed cure in the palm of my hand. They feel that I deny them the taste of it. That I am selfish to hold it back, to keep it for myself. There is no fruit, no balm, no reward for me to offer. There is no point in this. I feel empty. Not because of her, but because my love, my heart is already bruised and healing from a deeper wound to my pride, my sense of trust.

So many other fragile things have been marred, abused, torn and laid bare. I am too recently discharged from the surgery, the removal of so vital an organ to my hope that I can barely breathe. I suffocate. I need to escape. But is this not the escape itself, if not then what can one hope for after this? I excuse myself and go back to the room alone.

Once there, I cannot find sleep. I look out of the window framed in moonlight. I see past the patterned embroidered curtains to little twinkling lights from a distant town. I reel in disgust and mourning. I feel lost and lonely, desperate so suddenly. A fallen knight.

What has happened? Where do I really belong? Why have I agreed to this distant remedy? And the one thing that could have salvaged everything, the key to so many many things, now can not be extracted from the bottom of the sea of silence. Was the price too high to pay in shame? Or am I simply just not worth the price such battles exact, these battles for my honor? Was I ever worth a battle, a defense?

But the price cannot be paid out as easily as cash that moves from one account to another. It must be paid in bravery and putting a shield across my breast to keep all ill-intentioned swords that wish to impale me far at bay.

It requires a passion that perhaps had long sputtered and spent itself so quietly I never noticed. The false ones continue to craft and make dates and plot business deals and delight in putting brick upon brick to the house of their mendacity.

Thus, in the end, they win and I am left exposed, bared to my enemies, humiliated again at the hands of too many false friends. This was why I came so far. But how far can I really run while the metre marks the falling coins from my king's ransom?

Can I seek out my own Eldorado in this land dreamt of in the 16th century, sought out by the explorers on horseback? Can I yet again in this savage world reimagine another destiny? Can I again reinvent my story and open yet another door, another window into another future than that one I had so securely spent the seasons planting flower upon flower, rose upon rose? Year after year. For this? For empty solitude and undefended defeat?

It is too late. I cannot recover it now. I want to sleep. I want to vanquish the harrowed and worn out spirit.

I want to take a horse and gallop beneath the moon with this good woman, that opens like a queen so easily to my ardent spirit. To know in spite of all bravado and acting the part, that one is really broken in too many paramount places. It is a loathsome thing to lose one's sense of strength. To be Samson sans hair; a blind, enfeebled man, his eyes gouged, unable to make his way in the black of daylight, imprisoned with all the world at his feet and nowhere to turn for truth. Watching the legions of lessors dancing and cavorting with all the spoils of life at their whim and beckoning.

Yes, how that night I suffered. I so desperately wanted to weep and release this woe from me. I wished that I could drink from the cup of the end of days and sleep forever more. But sleep did not come and tears would not flourish and sleep wanted nothing of my slumbering company and I am left too often in this copious darkness, night after night, gazing from a window where the world never ends and yet all the roads lead back into myself, a place of endless questions and an abiding refrain from the dirge that sings of the empty ache of loss... a poor and lonely plaint born of tired blood and the hurt, the unavoidable hurt of being less than all the marvel of my dreams.