Living the Diaries

I suppose the third world is ideal for nostalgia. The buildings are the same though they have lost their colour, the energy they emit will never fade, I imagine, so long as the people hold their spirits high. Paco was a bastard child to a man he did not know. His mother did not care to mention his name either. But despite all the hate in her heart, the withered rose pressed between the pages of Pablo Neruda never lost its vibrant red, the same red of her naturally radiating lips. She would sit by the window facing the south and stare at the now abandoned road in hopes to once again hear the rumbles of his motorcycle before seeing his blurred silhouette in the sun’s mirage, approach from out of the midday clarity, as he did that day she fell in love for the last time. Paco recalls his mother with her summer dress, light blue and wrinkled all over with the book on her lap, starring hopefully or hopelessly into the horizon through the window. It was only when she passed, he opened that book and learnt who his father was, or at least began learning who he was. The rose was flattened between two stained pages with the signature of his soon to be discovered father. It read; Hasta siempre, mis ojos claros y mis labios rojos, Ernesto. The rest was illegible but the first piece of the puzzle resonated so loudly that it brought his skin to crawl. Paco felt for the first time in his neglect-filled life, warmth, love, though it could never be fist hand from his father who he did not know nor from his mother who only lived by the window. Paco could never recall ever looking into her eyes nor her into his, only through the white rays of sunlight which consumed her by that window. 

When the little they had became the little he had, with his mother’s passing, he searched for things to sell and found a diary with the stories of his father, who he would soon learn to embody. This diary spoke of an epic journey but it was written by his mother, who must have obsessed over his travels and wrote every single detail up until the final page which read; The day will come of his return. The day will be like the first but this time I will be expecting him. I will wait by the window, be it my prison until you return my love.

She had written of an epic journey which his father shared with a friend of his which commenced far from Temuco, Chile on the other side of La Cordillera in a city called Buenos Aires. Paco felt nostalgia from the words of his mother as if he was reliving his life third hand, through her own eyes.  He stopped at the first chapter and decided to walk in his father’s shoes as if he were walking beside, or behind him so that he may feel what his father felt and by some means understand the man which for his entire life had been waiting behind a horizon out by the window.  He sold the little he had and packed a bag. He spent days on a bus which at times seemed to traverse the edges of the world with the sharp mountain turns on the seemingly forsaken roads, rocking left and right with a constant rattling noise.

I’ve never been to Buenos Aires nor has the urge to travel here been this strong. Though I have never seen the tall, arched roof of Retiro station I know I have seen them through my mother’s tellings of my father’s stories. I had reached the other side of the horizon which my mother peered at for the remainder of her tortured life. The city and its chaos were just as she wrote and even 50 years later these streets still roar - An exert from Paco’s own writings. 

In the following chapters of his mother’s book, Paco learnt about more than just his father but about the suffering of his lands, not just of Chile or Argentina but the continent as a whole. With each new town at the turn of every page, he met new people with the same stories, tragedies and conditions. The leppers of Peru were no different from those of the pages. The mines in Chile still belonged to a foreign power and the faces of the poor miners, though belonging to different people, were exactly the same. Tired, hungry faces. Fathers sacrificing their chance to raise children and for their children to have a father present. Mothers suffering the same miscarriages due to having to slave through clouds of dust and burnt coal. As he walked and hitchhiked through the same places, he began to advance through the pages before actually arriving at the destinations. His indignation and tears began to take control of his body and intentions until he finally became his father before truly knowing who he was. The book stayed in Venezuela but he pushed on through the continent, where he saw the tragic remnants of a forgotten revolution under the watchful eyes of his father’s monument. The warm Cuban ocean breeze and the rum could not change the faces of despair. He later found out the full name of his father and read his published diaries as well as that of his travel companion. After learning of his life through the stories of the many people of the lands traversed, Paco flew to Bolivia and pointed an empty revolver at an old police officer and told him to draw, but what he was really saying was, according to a so-called officer Rodriguez; I am here to remind you that I never died and that I will be back to remind you, time and time again. According to the now-retired officer Rodriguez, it was like he had seen a ghost. 

Footnotes: The protagonist of this story was the fictional child of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who had discovered, with the passing of his mother in Chile, that he had an adventurous father who travelled across the continent of South America to discover himself, and subsequently discovered collective suffering all throughout, which all shared a common source. Paco, in walking to recreate his father’s adventures from his readings of a second, unofficial copy of Che’s motorcycle diaries which his mother had written, discovers the same misfortune. In an attempt to meet the needs of his nostalgia after his readings and to understand his mysterious father, he becomes Che and is killed by the police officer who claimed to have been a witness to Che’s final words in the same city in Bolivia before his execution.