An Estancia under a Southern Cross

I arrived full of wine. Opened my door to an empty apartment. Quiet as the tomb. I was alone. Without turning on the light I went into the room and lay on the bed thinking. The sheets smelled. The pillows were flat and held the bitter sweat of other heads departed from their temporary home. The bed was hard. The darkness was hard also. Late as it was I knew sleep would avoid me passing on to the tired limbs and hopeless hearts somewhere else in the city, but sleep did not want for my company or my time. I missed my dogs. My bed. I was fighting the realization that something was forever different. If sleep had not found me, the hours certainly had and held me prisoner of my memories. If I was sad, I did not weep.

There is a place after tears, after want, after pain. Stunned and shocked our brain feels like a swollen bruise that no longer palpitates with keen and vivid lament... merely looks into itself, amazed at its own endurance and the capacity to go forward in spite of all the hollow windy rooms of one's soul.

I think I remember knowing this even as a child. Yes, I was maybe six, just back from kindergarden, not long after a small boy who was my first friend in the world was run over by a truck and killed. I was told of it without embroidery and myth. My mother, as fantastical and poetic as she was, believed the hard truths must be tasted and understood without censorship. Even to children when the fates had chosen and they had chosen then, so I must know.

I was made to clearly see that death was part of life, the secret was revealed to my young mind and thus I had already discovered the mean truth and a part of my happiness was lost forever.

But we all go on. Children. Adults. People. Human beings. We move forward even after the bitter taste of betrayal or the needless cruelty leaves its acid flavor on our tongues. And we savor the salty remains of our wretched liquid solace when it falls upon our lips. I knew. I have always known of these irremediable and terrible sadnesses. I drank early from the cup of woe.

Not long after that boy died I wandered off alone one day into the horseless paddocks of the racing fields just behind my childhood home. They lay a stone's throw from the place where the boy had been killed. In those years, we children were left to our own devices, free to roam so long as we were quick to trample home when called to dinner by our parent's echoed cries. And we always did as the twilight of those innocent evenings cast its peaceful glow of faded summer suns along the streets of my boyhood stomping grounds. We always did.

But that particular day I went off exploring, wanting to shed my lingering sulleness, alone. I made my way in to the forlorn and empty granstand by myself. All the while creating inner worlds of wonder for my singular pleasure. My buddy was after all, gone forever.

Yet somehow, I felt accompanied. There was an inexplicable sense of a presence enveloping me. It was a cloudy day, for I will never forget it possessing as I do a preternaturally photographic memory of certain things from the dusty trunks of my time in the world. There in that place. Hopping among the bleachers, watching the grass island just past the dusty dirt of the track, I felt a connection to something formless and huge. Something held me spellbound in that vast great empty space, a sense of timelessness, eternity if you will. Such as we are all apt to feel when we hear the wind grieving in fields where terrible battles have been waged, after the dead are gone and the victory or defeat forgotten in the calendat of years.

I felt just such a comfort that day. A small boy, barely seven, singing his small refrains. Trying to ignore this great if comforting unknowable thing, this all encompassing sense of totality, this unknowable force of which I had a sure and certain sense of its presence, I realized more and moe that it seeped slowly into my conscious mind, claimed my attention utterly among the dancing pines and blowing refuse of bets and tickets, popcorn bags, candy wrappers, abandoned newspapers.

And it was then I felt a sense, an indescribable sense of something very like a whisper, but not a voice in itself; it was as if a thought or the pure idea of something had lit up within me and this idea, this thought said but didn't speak the words... I am God.

I was transported and felt bodiless as if I had become a part of the emptiness and silence. Then I was suddenly compelled by this thought, this realization, this IT - to understand, that there, among the many flying bits of paper I was to retrieve a message especially for me and I moved toward one specific piece of overturned paper - knowing it was the one I was meant to lift up off the ground - I did so and turned it over.

The paper in my young and tender hands read, For I am God. No other words in the bold typeface. It was a shredded part of a larger message, but this ripped piece stood alone with those very words. My body electrified and I wanted to run for this terrfied me for some reason. It was as if I could not escape a giant's grip.

I was never able to forget it. Now it forms only one bit of the unforgettable and soul-stirring wonders one collects in a lifetime. Those indelible things. The lasting impressions and revelations of consciousness that can never quite be explained nor digested of a whole but are a kind of assurance. And thus then, as now, I never feel utterly bereft, abandoned, unloved.

Caveat: This was not a specific religious thing in my opinion. Not a denominational event. It was in my opinion nothing more than the voice of the One whole thing of which we are a part that spoke to me. In other words, I myself might have written the words on that paper through the purity and honesty of my wish in a quantum leap. But there it was in my hand. Black ink on white paper. An echo of an idea?

So in times like these, as I was that first night, alone in the darkness of my apartment, I felt as we all must feel sometimes, that desperate longing for the womb, the perfect timeless sanctuary. The warm embrace of a tender woman; our mothers, our lovers, all fated to comfort all the children of the world upon their bosoms, regardless of their age for they are the harbors of our storms, the lighthouses that guide us back toward inner peace.

When they are absent, these Godesses of safety and compassion who absorb our laments; when these sepulchres who soften our blows, caress away the dread and disillusionements of life are dead and gone, or simply not there to hold us and deliver us from our own poorly-crafted horrors, then we must bear it.

And in this manner we are by force made to learn our unknown paths toward the inevitable.

Maybe, if we are brave enough, we gather at these moments, the elements necessary to fortify our spirits and live on in spite of any harrowing facts. We reassemble ourselves, reinvent the truth to assuage the nightmares and thus force ourselves to take back from unconscious and ageless forebodings whatever makes our live's tolerable, or, if we are lucky enough, ecstatic and joyful as only a child can be.

The dog that normally occupies my bed is gone, accompanies my troubled sleep, his grumbling exhalations, sighs and company are sorely missed, my sweet furry friend. I must wait to feel again his joy at recognizing my face, my gladness to behold his exhuberance and leaping, licking, pleasure in having me back. If all goes according to plan, this will happen again. But I must complete the promised mission.

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The following day we went off without impediments and I dismissed the vistas from windows of the heir and chose to sleep away the many hours trip at lightspeed toward the estancia. When we finally arrived, I rose to gaze upon the given name of this place and its named was La Esperanza, the hope.

From in between the Eucalyptus trees that lined the road to the house I could see the endless sweep of fields and cows, newly planted crops offering just a glimmer of their promise. Those Titan pocked and mottle-barked trees framed the rising dust and carried one's vision toward the main house which of a sudden revealed itself when the trees fell behind us, as a curtain opens across a stage, and there rested the simple warmth of the main house stood in a grand simplicity.

White and green-roofed, a welcoming portico spreads itself with red clay tiles into a broad and wide U and various doors lead to various possibilities. There rested great big earthen pots, like pregnant ladies, with old and aged but still flowering red geraniums for hair. The only thing lacking would have been, to a Cuban sensibility, a chorus of creaking wooden rocking chairs that one could idle and let roam the eye and watch the land undulate into the great spaces of distance and the harmonious green of Alexis' well-planted gardens.

I was assigned a private room and the nervousness and discomfort of the sensual tension with the girl was dispersed as it was clear I would not be cast into an uncomfortable situation and be made to face the undercurrent of mutual intrigue and desire in the first evening.

Night was upon us quickly for it is winter here. The air had a cleaner, brighter bite of cold and just before dinner I strolled outside in hopes of seeing the Southern Cross, but the night was cloud-covered. Still, a swollen testicle of a moon served its bland and opalescent glow upon the earth to dream upon and I moved like a darkened firefly in the yard humming old forgotten songs of romantic movies.

Inside we began what would be the nightly feeding ritual. Alexis, mercifully, is a man of order and a genetically orchestrated understanding of the circadian rhythms of the old world, the old ways. Here the characters are all comfortable in their roles. The landowner. The Guests. The housekeepers and maids. The horseman. The landscaper. The Agricultural engineer who arives every morning to discuss the future of the land. The changes in weather. The yield of the earth and the health of the beasts upon it. Alexis, as he had the evening prior makes it his business to disarm your sense of propriety. For it is his wish, for his own comfort's sake that all the members of the ensemble be comfortable and at ease. Small snacks are brought out and laid on a thick and dark-wooded table just before the bar. Alexis offers a drink and pours glasses of wine for us to enjoy in the living room, sipping as we watch the fire grow in the stone hearth. Alexis' dogs cuddle with us on the couch and I am reminded of my canine compatriots back home and how much I need their affections.


Carolina was freshly bathed and her eyes were puckish, playful and happy to have orchestrated this gathering of souls. We laughed and talked and spoke of life. And here began her thirsty curiosity and the questioning.

Why Argentina? Why so long an absence from my lover, my life? What was I seeking here at the bottom of the world? Didn't I realize just how far I really was? After a few poorly improvised answers to those questions (questions I yet pose myself) I was literally saved by the bell for Alexis keeps a small brass bell to advise the help that the master is ready to be served and we rose and took our places at table.