white xmas. view from our backyard. cerro piltri with summer (patagonia) snow
The car is a mid 90s Jeep Cherokee with the sidewalls of the tires all worn away and patches of white showing through. They drive over the curb then drop down into a space you’d normally back into. The driver jumps out. He’s in his mid 30′s maybe. His hair is cut short and is starting to thin. Clipped to his right front pocket is a small tape measure. I look at the guy and wonder what he does. Is he a designer of some kind, a builder? What kind of builder would only have a little 3 meter tape measure? He´s wearing a t shirt and jeans that could maybe or maybe not be what a ‘designer’ would wear. He walks in toward Jauja, the ice cream shop at the center of town. Other people get out of the car. Two men in their 40′s. They look slightly disheveled as if they were or are middle class but now it’s hard times and they’re just surviving. The men go to the front of the car and open the passenger side door just as the guy with the measuring tape gets back. They all reach in and help a man who looks like their brother get up and out of the car, then sit him in a wheelchair. The guy with the tape had been measuring to see if he could get through.
layla y los colque by fence. grass still trying to grow.
Watering the grass along the fence where mint is growing, the mint smell rises up as the water hits the leaves. I could be enjoying this or going insane, the two sometime being hard to tell apart. Adela is on the other side of the fence watering too. Elena, the old lady who lives behind, is out in a bathing suit watering. The snow is almost melted out off Cerro Piltriquitron. I visualize for a moment a time-lapse film of the last 3 weeks. The grass seeds in the yard sprouting and slowly rising. The long arcs of the sun and moon beginning over Piltri and dropping behind the Andes. The first 7 days of continuous rain. How would it sound to speed all that up? Time-lapses are always visual only. Later the heat and the dust. Insects rising from the ground. The cottonwood seeds blowing from the Alamos. Cut to inside the house, no furniture except a single borrowed mattress. Sitting against the wall writing and drinking wine at night. Listening to headphones. Then the bringing in of mattresses, shower curtains, lawn chairs, a tiny love-seat for Layla. The taking of clothes to the laundry. Another period of rain, then sun again. Then the girls coming. The Colque kids gathering by the fence to meet them. Later the stokes and the screaming. The first dinners. The first fights. The waking up at night. The cuss words in Spanish and English. The orgasms. I wish we could watch all of this over again and study it. What are we doing right and/or wrong? Of course you can’t see subtext in a time-lapse film. You can’t see backstory. You can’t see back into our childhoods which is where the shit always starts. But seeing this film is watching Layla’s backstory. If we could watch it over somehow would it all turn out the same? Or is this a form of watching it all again here, just passing the hose over little things in the yard? Fennel. Dandelion. Clover. There’s a little puff of dirt that rises where the stream hits each new patch of dry ground. Can self-consciousness be construed as a virtue? Adela has watched everyone else move here. She’s been out here watering for 40 years. “Everywhere else the seed is growing,” I say across the fence. “But under the roof it doesn’t grow para nada.” She looks down beside the mint where there are patches of raw black soil. The seed just won’t take there. She nods. Then we both turn back to our hoses.
evening sky in Patagonia after thunderstorm.After dinner, walking the land with Brisa. Clearing sky after thunderstorm. Sunset flaring off Piltriquitron and across Andes now. You never lose your bearings here.
We’re on a hunt for palitos. Little sticks. I want to make a couple stakes and pound them through the fence where the dogs crawl under. This morning I couldn’t find one of my flip flops. Then we saw it in the Colques’ yard. Negrito or huevito had gotten it, plus some of Layla’s mini-doll family. Now I’m wearing my sheath knife. There’s sauce (not like ketchup, but “sow-say,” a willow-like tree everywhere.
I stop at the first pile of already-cut branches (this stuff is constantly being thinned away from power lines). I find a good palito and start trimming the branches. Brisa watches. She handles knives every day. She works out in the chacra. This morning she and her brother Noel brought us red-leaf lettuce. Even earlier their grandmother Adela had stood at the gate holding a huge green head. We talked for a minute about her two dogs. All the other dogs–Bito, Huevito, Negrito–live outside but these two–a pair of tiny white and brown rat terriers–sleep at the foot of her bed and follow her everywhere. “La patrulla,” I call them. The patrol.
Brisa starts telling me a little of the story. Her grandmother Adela lived in Buenos Aires but came here 40 years ago. “When there was nothing here,” she points all around. “These are her trees,” she points to a row of apple trees.
I don’t fully understand if she just began homesteading here, but at one point she was given lands. “She didn’t have to buy them, they gave them to her,” Brisa says. “Now this is an expensive neighborhood.” She asks me how much I paid for our piece of land and I tell her. I fight against the instinct implanted in me by my family and culture and upbringing to hold this information back. When you’re out here walking the land it has to be all real. It is what it is. “Quince mil dolares.” I say. Dolares is one of the words where I can’t hide my accent.
“I used to live in this house.” She points to a well maintained two story house with a dormer looking out over Piltriquitron. “But then we sold this place.”
Jorge (my landlord) had mentioned something about the Colques losing a bunch of land for some reason that I didn’t fully understand. (I was sick and barely functioning when I first arrived.)
I’ll ask Adela for more of the story sometime when I feel like the confianza is there.
A few things I know for certain though:
- Nobody knows this street we live on by its new official name, “Perito Moreno,” but if you tell the remiseros [taxi drivers] “Callejon de los Colque” they’ll take you right here.
- All these newer, nicer looking houses keep going up around the Colques, including the one we’re renting right next door, but their ‘new’ house itself is kind of unfinished. It doesn’t look ‘middle class’.
- It’s not like a gated community or something–this place, “Barrio Arrayanes,” is still mostly just farm fields. Where our land is currently being used (happily) as a place for horses to graze (there’s thick shrubs of wild rose and fennel, all which the horses love). But I can’t stop feeling that in a much slower but still persistent way, we might all be somehow economically displacing these folks.
- On the other hand, the Colques themselves just seem stoked to have neighbors. Noel and Brisa are over here every day. They watch me type on the computer.
We get the arroyo. There are fish jumping. The sky colors are unreal. I point across a meadow full of lupines. “You see that big Maiten [native tree]?” “Si.” “That’s our land right there.” She nods. “I know you guys have explored back here, right?” She nods again.
view of our land in Patagonia
I carry Layla over the ‘fence’ of tangled sticks that someone (probably the Gauchos wit the horses) has put up. Brisa seems like she doesn’t want to follow us to far into the fields. We see the horses again. She tells me that her mother got bit by a horse and it tore off part of her breast. She doesn’t go near it, but just stays near where we came in, looking all around.
“Well, now you know where it is,” I say, “where we’ll be moving. It’s all just wild rose and thistle right now.”
“Mucho trabajo,” she says.
We walk back to our houses.
It was about 8 pm and there would still be another 2 hours of light but it was cool now and good for working out in the fields. About 8 of the Colques, all kids between the ages of about 7 and 12 were walking past the house including Brisa and Noel. The one adult with them was one of the aunts (I haven’t learned who they all are yet), in her early to mid twenties. She had had a short-handled shovel and a couple long knives.
Where are you going? I asked.
“A la chacra,” she said, (to the farm). “A trabajar,” (to work).
I watched them duck through the fence wires one by one and then walk out into the fields.
It’s almost impossible to describe the way that she’d said “a la chacra.” But somehow it brings to mind this kid about 15 (or maybe younger) I kept seeing in Florida this summer. His job was to stand at the corner of Hwy 41 and Central Sarasota Pkwy and hold a sign that said DOMINOES CHEESE PIZZA – Large $5.99. It would be 100 degrees out with 100% humidity and he stood there holding the sign, sometimes shifting it so that it would give him shade. He had this facial expression like this whole scenario couldn’t quite exist and so he was imagining being somewhere else (and why the fuck not?)
I think the woman who said she was going out to work had the exact opposite expression, and that’s why I thought of the kid (my mind works like that). She was going to the chacra to work. She wasn’t proud of that fact or unhappy about it. But by her expression it was like she couldn’t imagine there being anywhere else to go.
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