A Writer on a Plane

Between Barcelona and the forest, the plane flies over a thick cushion of clouds that only occasionally breaks into a clearing through which a fleeting patch of flat land can be seen in the depths. It is the winter time and the whole plain is covered with caked cumulus clouds, curdled with pulverized moisture. Sometimes a blacker, more isolated cloud drips rain onto a patch of savanna.

The land that can be seen at times is flat, reddish and poor. Few trees, some group of palm trees, many bloody cracks and cracks of red clay, and a few scattered spots of animals. The straight, dark line of the road crosses that loneliness. From above you can feel the mist of the hard, sterile ground. No cultivation green breaks the stained red, black and gray granite that resembles the floor with its regular squares.

It is a land of little water and little softness. To be crossed by the isolated caravans of ranchers and guerrillas. After all, they were the same men, only sometimes they went with the tip of the cattle and sometimes with the montonera. Giving the same harsh screams, singing the same road songs.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, without any change in the aspect of the land to announce it, a large, flat population emerges, with a lot of shiny metal on roofs and tanks. It is an oil camp. The surrounding desert is not disturbed. Through the window of the plane you can see the rows of even houses, the parallel roofs, the movement of the vehicles. Another cloud erases them. Further on, the bare earth reappears, with its straight black path and, next to it, like a vein, the long pipe of the oil pipeline.

Between the hum of the engines, the history and the enigma of the earth pass through the imagination. Is it barren? Have we made it barren? Could we have given it another destination? Has it created the nomadic rancher, the nomadic guerrilla, the nomadic adventurer, or is it they themselves who have made it that way? That scaly and sparse vegetation, that reddish soil, are signs of difficult life. Below is a large, violently shaped flame shaken by the wind and hidden in an oil gas leak. Like a huge votive fire. Some others appear further afield. They are lit day and night as if to implore terrible gods.

We have been flying for about an hour, and the cloud cover has been lightening. I go to the cockpit of the pilots of the aircraft. As from a glass balcony suspended in the sky, I look uncovered at the wide panorama of the savannah cut in the background by a long and wide ocher vein. It is a river. Some pipes wind exhausted like scars. The water is asleep in its meanders. We approach the immense river. From that lonely height the impression of its proximity is more overwhelming and complete. In the background, in a straight line, on either shore you can see the distant spots of the houses of Soledad and Barcelona. The river is alone. The dark earthy color makes it look like petrified lava. In all its extension you cannot see the wake of a ship or the stain of a sail. He goes muddy, lonely and slow. Land of fields and sows, of valleys and hills that from the distant mountain ranges and the toasted plains is torn up and dragged away. They are leagues and leagues and leagues of bleeding land in the great river. That fierce tawny color announces that the river is dirty from the damage of the earth, from the damage of the men of the earth. Faced with loneliness, the city gathers around its hill, which is made of the same shiny black stone that emerges in the middle of the stream. Tall trees, dark ceilings, white walls, wooden railings, lattices, and a voluptuous mist of warm moisture lend a tropical charm to the old river city. The steep streets lead to the gloomy avenue of the riverbank. Under the shade of the immense tamarinds open the arcades of the shops. On the other side the river spreads its puma skin. It is the old city to return or to wait for departures. La Angostura was at the door of the jungles and deserts of gold, balatá and sarrapia. To those arcades of the Alameda the miners were returning laden with the purgüeros with their balatá balls. Others came out of them, with their provisions and their weapons, who would remain in the adventure. Old lands, old solitudes, old mysteries give the city of Barcelona its patina and magic.

This is a city with a lot of history behind it. A brave man many years in the past, with decimated people, with veterans and emigrants, thrown into the river, the jungle and the plains, he dedicated himself to talking about the highest, permanent and fundamental things of our destiny. There is also his house next to another basalt stone ridge with a lot of shade from groves and corridors, you lie, the grass grows in hummocks and the polished tops of the mereyes rise and the profusion of red flowers of the acacias.

That vision and the lesson of its contrast is not erased from my eyes, which scan the extension through the window. The wasteland of those beings so bound, isolated and denied. They are solitudes too vast and harsh for the little flame of human life that struggles to ignite in them.

None seem more timeless and less subject to time. The legendary vastness that surrounds her, with its invisible and overwhelming presence, isolates and binds her. Plants that come out of the waters, stones that look like beasts, animals that seem to come out of the oldest rocks. Alligators, crocodiles, iguanas. But the warmest breeze from the tropical river blows over them, passing through the hammocks, and making the macaws of improbable colors spread their overwhelmed wings.

Being a writer in the middle of a flight not too far to the complex lands makes you understand certain things that a simple glass window can give you as knowledge.