So we return to the Earth and plant something alive....

In the morning the master of the house, king over all he surveys, invites me to work. Taking me up on my admission of loving the soil, trees, shrubs and flowers and all matter of rooted things that open outward into the eyes and slip into the great space of sky, he invites me to help him plant trees.

Although there were but four, maybe five hours of tossed and troubled sleep and a feeble awakening I was resolved to face it all again. A good stiff coffee and truck full of trees to be planted, what better way to take hold of the day? What better remedy to my troubled imagination than grab a spade and dig out this foreign soil beneath my feet and plant a tree.

I happily acquiesce. It is the least I can do for the kind and generous soul that has housed this stranger under his roof for so many days. This way I can also avoid confronting the other thing and be with the laborers and feel useful and worthy of my meals. I might forget my troubles and hopefully earn some sleep in the bargain.

The day before we had gone to a nursery miles away along a wonderful road toward a town called Azul....Blue. Funny huh? Alexis loves this game, this mercantile bartering and asking and ordering and planning. His bellowed British accent falls into a comfortable French when the woman who runs the nursery explains her holdings in their shared Gallic tongue. There are many trees and plants and roses, a passion we share. In the yard pertaining to the nursery's home, there is a peacock strutting in defense of his female concubines.

We stopped at a roadside beer hall and gas station and sausage maker and antiques dealer. Here Alexis had bought his dinnerware fresh from some barge or shipped crates at the port and driven out here by the man who owns the place; he must have acquired them in a warehouse on the RIver Plata, bidding among lost or abandoned cargo.

Alexis insists these handsome white and heavy plates with the light blue markings we have dined off of in the past few days have a Portugese pedigree and he is proud of them. We have come to see if there are any more of this pedigree to complete the collection but all have been sold. They drink beers and I watch. I have kept myself from drinking in the daytime against any and all forms of peer pressure and I have forsaken the delights and disgusting nature of tobacco consumption since just before I left the United Bedevilled States of America. In this regard at least my dire discipline has born the fruit of better health. However I do crave a good joint to reverie my way through this wide canvas.

But today, the truck and the trees were ready. I donned a pair of big mud boots and went out to where the workers had already dug up the holes for planting and Alexis and I chose which trees to insert into them. My favorite were the beech trees of which we planted a good twenty five or so. I love beech trees, they are among my favorite trees. Thin little adolescent sticks that someday would make a fine view from his window.

We also planted lovely Pampas grasses which grow wild pell mell, but placed correctly will please the eye with their windswept undulations and their graceful feathery stems. They seem ladies at court taking in a great composition on a harpsichord as they feign a delicate immutability fanning themselves.

The day expired after a good five hours of planting. Alexis owns an old Ford truck from the early 60's. A three gear monster thing full of glorious creaks and groans which handles the uneven terrain and varying grades of soil with aplomb. We have brought the dogs with us. Juan who is an old man of a dog, faithful and still putting on his best paws forward to affect a keen and determined hunter's eye and nose. We also have his crafty sister who reminds me of my Sunny Boy and they both leap from the truck and begin to scamper over the grassy hills trying to flush quail and partridges from their hiding. Sure enough in moments the birds take to the air and they bolt into the sky ready for a bullet that will not greet them on this day. For this day is not for hunting but for planting. But still, it is a sight to behold this ancient ritual between a man and his dogs.

After the trees are all in the ground, the Italian cypresses, the eucalyptus, the birches, the willows, a good fifty or sixty trees we have laid into the ground, we return for one last dinner. I promise Alexis I will help him again the next day.

Again the solid table, the fireplace coked and ablaze, the green glasses and the red wine within them, the little brass bell and the 3 acts of feasting, appetizers, entreés and desserts and we are back in the living room talking, laughing and all my nightmares seem to be absent and life seems aglow with a simplicity and a pageantry which are this gentleman's gift to me.

I pretend to be happy. I believe it myself, almost. The other thing, the tension, is unresolved and remains so.

Worse yet, the tension increases as we have chosen to see Brokeback Mountain and within the first twenty minutes Carolina curses it, a cat hissing, finds a hundred reasons to dislike it. Accuses it of manipulation, Hollywoodization, abandons us to it finally refusing to endure the insult and humiliation it is for heterosexual women to watch men, strong men, complete men, fall deeply in love, consumed with desire one another, the need of one another.

For me, it is the fifth viewing, a sad reminder of longing for something and someone that I can never quite be certain of anymore.

Also a reminder that I am finally against all hope, middle aged; that I will never be young on film again as I once was in my limited way. A realization that my lithe and pliant body which was once as slim and athletic as these actors' are, is older.

But I also see that my experiences have been as deep, as wide and broad as the landscape of the film. My life could well sustain a soundtrack as elegiac as Santaolalla's and I could easily fill the screen with endless majestic vistas, oceans I have crossed, mountains I have trekked, horses ridden, roads driven endlessly and places as amazing as where I am just now.

Also it is a reminder - nonetheless - of the last vestiges of sprite and youthful ardor, for now it seems all of life is to be a kind of wise surrendering, acceptance of the dreams that never materialized and joy before the ones that did. I give in to inevitable odds and chances. I accept that my long slought Golden Fleece has eluded me and may very well always be just out of my reach in spite of my incantations and efforts.

Nonetheless, I will. I will write my screenplay, finish with these demons and exorcise the tormenting visions on to the pages. I will give birth to my malformed, ill-equipped children. But born they must be. There is no more denying them. For if I do not deliver myself of these gestating monstrous creations, then I will be fated to succumb to a final and tragic degradation of my self-respect, a sad and pointless deterioration of my soul.

I must yet fight this last ignoble war within myself if I am to live the remaining time of my calendar in the world at peace with myself. This is no more a matter of choice but the very vein and crossroad of my survival; the last great thrust of my endurance. I cannot go back to procrastinated waste. I must endure.

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.