Here at the End of the World

"Very slowly, standing there by that icy window with the condensation forming on it, eyes eagerly scrutinizing the peaceful stretch of road where perhaps danger yet lurked, ears alert for the sound of innumerable fine rain drops falling in unison, while the town beyond pullulated with a thousand sounds and lights, Besson felt a strange sense of intoxication surge up within him. He was alive, then, in his body, contained in his own skin, face to face with the world. Sensations ran together in his various organs, established a curious foothold there, jostled one another for place, struck up music... [...] It mounted straight towards the sky, dominated unknown space, plumbed the abysses of mystery and emptiness. The void, the enormous void, a living, breathing entity, was always there, eternally present behind each individual object. It dug out chambers beneath the earths crust, it forced its way through the stiff metal uprights of the street lamps, light was carried on it in tiny eddying vibrations, the void was present in glass and bronze and concrete. It had its own colour and shape. And what, finally, enabled you to see the void was nothing other than this sense of intoxication, which went growing without anything to support it. Like a bouquet, like some joyous explosion of giant flowers. Gleams of light all fusing together in a single mystical efflorescence, life traced its pattern on the face of the night. No ordinary ray of light could ever, ever make you forget the shadows. There had to be this irresistable feeling of intoxication, this joyful sense of being really there for one to comprehend the full reality of the void: to shiver at its chill contact, to perceieve the transparence of it, to hear the terrible, heavy roaring sound of silence, bare skeletal silence with its multiple voices, its tones that surge and swell and carry you up till you could put out your hand and touch it...to intone with it that agonizing song of the years going by you, the actions you perform, the song of all that is, thats triumphantly alive, that embodies life with an undying ephermeral glory in such immensity that when you have been dead and rotten for centuries it will still not have reached the first moment of its advent."*

                I wonder what else I´ve inherited from my parents other than my dad´s large nose and my mom´s slender wrists. My father´s restlessness and constant agitation? My mom´s tendency when talking to strangers to touch them, lightly, on the elbow? Their great affection for a cold beer at the end of a hot day, all of us, when we were still all of us, sitting on the deck of the sailboat listening to some echoing country song, drifting over a muddy river somewhere, enjoying the fading heat of afternoon and welcoming evening together, quietly. 

                I don´t think my mom believes in god because we never went to church, but we spent a lot of time out in the woods, by the beach or in the mountains of her north carolina home, and she always seemed to be really happy there, saying out in the middle of nowhere is where she felt at peace, and in tune with something else, something larger than herself. I learned that from her, the ability to sit still somewhere and to let myself feel insignifgant, and now I finally understand the word ascetic from a book I read on the plane to Argentina. I knew the word, but now it makes sense, why mom sailed around the world and spent so much time away from people, in the middle of nowhere. A ascetic finds peace in sacred places, not just empty marble churches but deserts, open oceans, small places on tops of mountains. I understand now that I know many people like this, and certaintly have dated a few of them. It ties in my answer for people when they ask me what I´m doing in Buenos Aires, alone, wandering around this melancholy city. 

               Nature is a place I´ve never felt lonely, but there is a loneliness in large cities that is unattainable for me anywhere else. I realized at nineteen walking around Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona...I felt contained in my own body, alone but quiet calm, and enjoying that loneliness when compared to the world there, around me. Buenos Aires feels the same. In any country where I don´t speak the language fluently I´m forced to think what I want to say through, all the way down to each syllable. I have to clear my head and focus on what I really want or need to say. I have to listen with an intensity I am not capable of at home. The parks and giant, impossible bright green trees are beautiful. I enjoyed the sunset in Uruguay, but its the buildings and the rush of traffic and people that are truly what I´m here to see:

               Women on the subway, passing by me on the street. Each with her own perfume, a whole world of perfumes here at the end of the world. Flowers falling out of balconies, windows open leaking songs and shouts, fights and whistles and declarations about the weather. Open doorways spilling air conditioning, the smells of cleaning products, fresh and soft and welcoming. People buying grocieries to cook dinners I won´t eat, kissing people on the street corners, hurrying onto buses. Antique books I can´t read, the smell of dust and leather and fur in every store, in the market, like the smell of my grandmother´s closet in a house I´ll never see again. The ummistakable smells of summer, of diesel fuel and rotting paper and meat, raw and cooking and overcooked. I could never be an ascetic, it´s places like here where I feel alive, where I unpack my thoughts fully and place them, tightly rolled, back inside for the trip home. 

"That was Buenos Aires...a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid style avenues and Catalan cafes next to Neapolitan avaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droit mansions, beyond all of which, however, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end of the earth feeling you get when you look at maps and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way."**

                

*J.M.G Le Clezio, The Flood

**Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Tango Singer