Last Thoughts from Salta
Every journey is a circle if you go back to where you came from. The return is what completes a journey. If you don’t go back to somewhere, you’re still on your way. In Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s Journey, the final step is The Return, when “the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back…where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community...”¹ The return can also be the hardest part, especially if you don’t have any fleece or princess, and even the wisdom can prove fleeting back where you came from. It’s never gone very well in my experience, the coming back from a long journey.
That somewhere for me, the place I usually go back to, is Charlottesville, in Virginia. A little town at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains where I grew up, which for unfortunate reasons has become famous while I’ve been gone. I can feel the gears of the circle closing, from winter here in Argentina to summer in Virginia, the pull of family and finances and friends. I am on the verge of putting an end to my migration, at least for the time being. But I haven’t bought the ticket yet. The Hero’s Journey is more complex than most people think. There are in fact seventeen stages, the twelfth of which is called the Refusal of the Return. Campbell goes on:
Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real… the passing joys and sorrows, banalities, and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting…the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast.
Though it seems inevitable, I haven’t bought the ticket yet, for the airplane that would take me all the way back in a day’s time, all this way I’ve come in almost two years. It seems almost immoral that such a thing is possible, to change worlds in a matter of hours, and I am reluctant to use this strange magic. Nonetheless, I am not going back the way I came. I have neither the money nor the human energy for hundreds of hours of buses.
For the time being, I am still corporeally and existentially here in Salta; I have a job and pay rent on a room in this charming, if slightly shabby, villa. And even if and when I decide to go, with the necessities of giving notice, it would be at the soonest a month out. I am always at least a month away from leaving here. You could call it one foot in. I know it’s time to call an end to my journey, to return, but I’m not quite ready. And so the circle that brought me down to Salta continues to widen, day by day.
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This morning, a Saturday, I went in for a few hours to the school where I teach, El Instituto de Estudios de Inglés, for some extra work. Cecilia, the woman who runs the school, knows I don’t have enough hours and am struggling financially, so she throws me side things here and there. My first month she asked me to proofread and edit an employee manual for a mining company entitled “National Personnel and Freight Transportation Procedure” that she had translated from Spanish. It wasn’t exactly page-turning material, but I can take a certain pleasure in the pursuit of clarity in formal and technical writing.
Today I was giving practice oral exams to advanced English students preparing for a Cambridge English Proficiency test. Spent thirty minutes each with three sets of students, asking questions, giving them prompts to describe and infer and compare, writing down feedback to give them afterward. They are all good English speakers, but most are fairly nervous about this coming exam. I enjoyed it, and the students were grateful for perspective from a native speaker. I genuinely like helping people learn a language, especially when they want to learn.
In early afternoon, leaving the school on Pasaje Zorilla, I decided not to head for home as I do nineteen out of twenty times, and walked four blocks in the opposite direction to the main city plaza, the Plaza 9 de Julio. Somehow I haven’t set foot there in over a month. It’s a lovely place with grand old trees, lush vegetation, a monument to war heroes, arcaded walkways, a dozen open air cafes, street musicians, a colonial cathedral in soft lines painted a kind of lavender pink. In many ways, this plaza is the jewel of the city, but it’s also touristy and expensive. I suppose my prolonged absence is akin to how a person can live in New Orleans and rarely find themselves in the French Quarter.
As I was walking in towards the center of the plaza beneath a verdant canopy, thinking how charming it was and wondering why I don’t go there more often, I saw a very familiar-looking woman sitting on a bench, fiddling with an analog camera. This was an unusual feeling, as I almost never run into people I know in this city. After a second I realized I did indeed know this person. Walking over, she looked up and recognized me too and we both broke out into big smiles. I sat down and gave her a kiss on the cheek, the standard way of greeting people in these parts. It was Nolwenn, the celtic french hippie artist who had been volunteering at Piedra Alta hostel in La Pedrera on the coast of Uruguay. We’d hung out some then, and I’d liked her. She was the person who convinced me I had no choice but to go out to Cabo Polonio, Never Never Land; one night at the hostel she had interviewed me about my journey, to make a painting of it, and here she was!
We exchanged stories of how it was that we both came to be in the north of Argentina. She is on her way up to Perú, and we talked about that for awhile, one of my favorite topics. Nolwenn is in Salta for exactly one night, and what luck(!) that I happened to walk to the plaza on the one day she‘d be sitting there. I’d had a bit of a crush on her the first time, and then, when you run into someone in a different country, entirely unexpectedly, it always feels a touch of the magical, the meant-to-be.
She asked me what was good to do in town, and among other things I recommended going to a certain peña — an old-fashioned club for Argentinian musica folklorica — that I’d been meaning to go to since I visited here in March, La Casona de Molino. Silvina, my housemate, keeps suggesting we go and then backing out. She describes it as mágica, and it’s one of her favorite places in Salta. I’d been to a touristy version of a peña, a kind of song & dance show with overpriced food and drink, but this was supposed to be the real thing. Nolwenn just said, smiling, “we should go together,” which sounded excellent to me.
All evening I’ve been hoping she’d reply to my text message asking if she still wanted to go. Just now, a few minutes ago, I finally heard from her: “¡Si, claro!” So I have something of a date. I need to eat some dinner, make myself reasonably presentable, figure out exactly how one gets to this music club on the far side of the city, then catch a bus and walk fifteen minutes to her hostel. It is nine thirty now. The good thing is that we are on Argentinian time, and the music likely won’t start before midnight.
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A Wednesday, four days later. Still no ticket. Past evening and into night, here on Avenida Reyes Catolicos. The house is quiet but for a faint murmur from Silvina and Killa watching TV in the little room in front. I have a sopa on the stove in the kitchen, a crema de zapallitos, which I think I first encountered in Cuzco. Cream of Zucchini, which may not sound exciting but is surprisingly delectable. While my dinner simmers on into the nine o’clock hour, still a totally normal time for dinner in Argentina, I am working down the hall in the big room on my endless writing project.
In this moment I am taking a break from the work of writing, to write. I say that I’m writing, but what I really do these days is more along the lines of editing. The work is the story of my journeys, for publication on the blog. I take journal entries that I wrote at the time, type them up, add additional memories that arise, flesh out ideas that call for further development, then edit all of it down. About a quarter of it comes out and a different quarter gets written in, with the perspective of a year gone by, though I try to maintain the frame of mind I was in at the time. Tonight I am working on a chapter about Chachapoyas, my first stop in the north of Perú. This process of writing my way to Uruguay, which I physically left some time ago, will go on for years. At least in some conceptual sense it keeps the migration alive for me, even though for over two months I haven’t gone anywhere at all.
As I wrote the words “journey” and “journal” in successive sentences, I noticed the commonality in these words and became intrigued. I’ve always been interested in words, but over the past year working as an English teacher, and the past two trying in earnest to learn the Spanish language, I’ve only become more interested in words and linguistics and etymology. The first thing that occurs to me is the French word jour, or day. This makes sense for journal, a daily writing. But journey is more mysterious.
Through a brief bit of online research, I discover that journey comes from the Old French journée, meaning “a day’s length, work or travel”. This is from the Vulgar Latin diurnum, “daily portion”. Very reasonable, so far, but then it takes a turn towards the mystical. The latin diurnum comes from the the Proto-Indo-European root dyeu — “shine” which gave rise to all sorts of words in all sorts of languages, including, but by no means limited to: dia/day, adieu/adios, dios/dieu, deity, divino/divine; the Norse god Tyr, also known in Old English as Tiw, the namesake of our Tuesday; and the Greek god Zeus and the Roman Jupiter.
That is quite a rabbit-hole, which leads from a notebook you write in daily, all the way to the kings of heaven. Not to mention the side passages of sojourn, journeyman, journalist and adjourn. It’s fascinating to me that “journey”, once a day’s travel in old french, has evolved to mean travel “especially over a long period or a great distance,” (Cambridge). There is an additional meaning: “A long and often difficult process of personal change and development,” (Oxford) which I think in an aspirational way is why I prefer the word to describe what I’ve been doing the past two years, and brings me back to my train of thought.
I have published on the blog some sixty chapters thus far, which has gotten me writing-wise into Perú at last. I estimate there are about twenty chapters remaining to get me to Uruguay and then to leave again, which is where I think I will end the blog and the story. My best estimate is that so far I’ve published nine hundred book pages, and there will be another two hundred and fifty by the time I’m done. So essentially I’ve written a Tolstoy novel worth of travel writing. One of my medium-term goals, and the potential fulfillment of a lifelong dream, is to eventually sift through this enormous pile of writing and make a book out of it. I have begun to contemplate the best angle by which to do this.
There is a book in what I’ve lived and seen between the Rio Grande and the Rio de la Plata, but I don’t want it to be travel writing. For myself as a reader, I almost never seek out that kind of thing. Travel writing has this connotation to me of being frivolous, privileged; almost arbitrary. It may be that my journey down here has no significance or weight; just the travels of a somewhat aimless, forty-year-old man from the United States who goes to Latin America in a manner most people my age would consider themselves too old for. But I know that the people along the way, the culture, the mountains, the cities, the history, the rivers are not insignificant. No one could ever say that the Andes or the constructions of the Incas have no existential weight. This is what has inspired me to write so much about, what makes me feel that there is a book. So there’s a strong inclination to not make this about me. But as a writer and a reader, I know that the way we experience something best is through story, through the perspective of a character.
The only authentic way for me to talk about all those things, as I’m not an expert on any of them, is to express it through my own experience. And I’ve come to think that to make my protagonist a compelling character, I have to trace some sort of transformation or development. This requires me to figure out what all this wandering means and has meant. I wrote to my friend Nick, who has written a book, and asked him how you make one, and he basically confirmed what I was already thinking and afraid of, that it’s all about the protagonist and their development. “That’s really the primary thing people want from stories: they want to see someone change…As much as people might like your writing or be interested in hearing about your experiences, they’re only going to keep reading if there is some sort of transformation happening.”
I think I’m lacking in the proper distance and perspective with which to discern these things. And my fear is that I haven’t really developed or transformed very much. I’m short on the transformation. It’s not such a troubling fear really, as I’ve long been consigned to a fairly existentialist life-view — that I suspect our travails on this planet have little or no meaning on their own. In a more positive sense, I believe it is incumbent upon us to create the meaning in our lives.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that in setting out on this journey I was indeed seeking some type of transformation. While I am comfortable with who I am, I have longed for a sense of actualization, of becoming who I’m meant to be. In going to previously unknown worlds, learning to express myself in a new tongue, taking on a new profession, leaving everyone and everything I’d known behind, I suppose I was hoping that at the other end of the passage I would be, if not different, then certainly a more actualized version of myself.
Here I am, almost at the end of the line, and what growth or development I’ve found would appear incremental at best. I am immeasurably better at speaking Spanish, though nowhere close to fluent. I have learned how to be a teacher, of the English language in particular. I have a better command, understanding and feel for my native language and for writing in it. I can play the guitar again, and have been writing songs for the first time in five years. The songs started coming in Perú, and have continued to emerge the past few months in Uruguay and here in Salta. In terms of writing, I have almost certainly written more, in a focused sense, than I wrote in my first forty years of life put together. I drink mate in the traditional way, without sugar, from a bombilla. I know a tremendous amount more about Latin American history, culture and geography. I know that this planet is larger than I thought, more diverse and beautiful, and it is in danger. Every country seems to have the same problems, though they differ in degree. I value friends and community more than maybe I ever have before. My senses of self-reliance and comfort in my own skin have grown. These are worthwhile things, all, and I am grateful for them, but they don’t strike me as transformation, nothing I think to base a book on.
Why, you might ask, were two years of being a stranger, of foreign wanderings overland, not enough to alter the gravity of my person? I do think it would have been possible, at least theoretically. One answer is that after forty years of life — when I crossed the border with Mexico I was eight days short of this milestone — I was set enough in my ways, and my character has had long enough to settle into its foundations as to perhaps be fundamentally immovable. Another is that this undertaking, purely on a superficial, physical level of nuts and bolts, miles and kilometers, buses and borders from there to here, was so all-consuming and exhausting. Given the opportunity to take on further challenges along the way, for things that seemed risky, questionable, a little scary even, I simply lacked the requisite energy.
Looking back now, I can see various detours, geographical and otherwise, I could have taken. Sometimes to stay where I was; sometimes to stray farther off the beaten path. A few come immediately to mind. I could have stayed on la Isla de Ometepe in Nicaragua and lived under that volcano in the middle of a giant lake and accepted Alvaro’s invitation to volunteer as an English teacher at the elementary school next door to my hostel. I could have taken the job I was offered in Barranquilla — the big city in the steamy north of Colombia where Gabriel Garcia Marquez lived — and taught at a public school for a year and seen Carnival there. I could have sought out a San Pedro ceremony in Vilcabamba when I had the dream about the warrior-priest wearing the orange-yellow feather shirt and knew the sacred cactus was in that valley, the Valle Sagrado of Ecuador. On my very first day in Perú, I could have taken a sudden and extreme left turn and gone along with Didier the hippie guy from Bogota, three weeks on boats on the Amazon River, deep into the jungle, all the way to the Atlantic in Brazil. In fact I never even set foot in the Amazon, the real jungle, because from my experience with far lesser ones, I know what the jungle is like, and know it is the kind of thing that could change a person, or eat them. And it felt like too much for this traveler.
All along I felt this deep commitment and allegiance to the path I was on, the physical journey to Uruguay, which place had taken on entirely unrealistic expectations and a significance in my brain that it couldn’t possibly live up to. Uruguay was in no way prepared for what I was asking of it. Again with the benefit of hindsight, it was very predictable that I’d feel disappointed upon arriving there, and in some ways I treated that country unfairly and different from all the others I passed through. For example, I mostly just accepted and embraced Argentina as it is, not having had much in the way of expectations for this country. I never asked Argentina to be something else, never expected magic or actualization or a life to be provided for me within its borders.
I am in this strange position of trying to figure out the through-line of a book in which I am the protagonist, and when I weigh things out on those scales, this is what it comes to. Though I am really the same person, when I left Virginia in July of 2017, I felt spiritually and creatively dead. I don’t feel that way anymore. There is spirit and life everywhere, inside me and without. And I suppose that is a degree of actualization. I am grateful for what I’ve seen and found and experienced.
Up til now the writing has been a simpler and less soul-searching endeavor. For the purposes of the blog, I’ve been much more grounded. Tell where I went, what happened, what I saw, what I learned, what I felt when I was there. And maybe this is enough. My Mom, who teaches literature and is a writer herself, thinks so. She tells me I should just pick out my favorite stories, and there’s a book. I think with excellent editing work to separate the wheat from the chaff, that version could be decent, possibly even rising to the level of good. But I don’t feel very drawn to make a book out of that: I went here, this happened, then I went there. I think I have to at least aim for something more than a travelogue.
And so I’ve been treasure-hunting, panning for gold, as I seek out that angle with which to sort the best possible book out of the dozens of different ones I could make. I think it’s what pulls people into a book, keeps them reading, touches their existence: the crux of change to a character. In some ways I think I’ve transferred my desires for self-actualization, to find a promised land, from Uruguay to this theoretical book. Perhaps I’m not learning my own lessons. I continue to think there is something external that will make me into the person I want to be.
Today was another strange day in Salta, strange but in no way unusual for my life here. Disturbingly low on sleep, a day feeling like multiple days, strung along from one stimulant beverage to the next. After staying up late Monday night, sleeping in yesterday, then teaching night classes until nine, I was today expected to be in class, sharp of mind, teaching at seven thirty a.m. So last night I needed to get to sleep by midnight more or less, which would have provided the six hours necessary for basic human functioning. Alas, it was not to be. One of those nights where the brain wants to look into every untidy corner and loose end of living. Some things were important, others entirely mundane, but none of it was pressing. I think my mind is on edge because of this background unresolved decision about leaving here. Maybe at one thirty I finally drifted away from my thoughts, and when the alarm came less than five hours later, I was in rough shape.
This was the coldest morning yet. Sitting out on the patio for my cup of tea and a smoke in the darkness of six fifteen, I felt a biting cold and looked at “Salta Weather” on my phone. Negative two degrees Celsius, which comes to twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. I am not prepared physically or emotionally for twenty-eight degrees. But I rallied my forces with all the layers I could muster — three shirts, a sweater, fleece and windbreaker, hat and gloves — and though I felt much larger than normal, I was still very cold at the bus stop.
My first lesson of the day was with Pedro the young accountant and Dad in his mid-thirties, with Maximilian from the same company sitting in. All of my students but one work for a multinational lithium mining company. We covered “Uses of Present Perfect” and I think I made it relatively interesting and comprehensible for them. Present Perfect is our tense to describe experience — “I have taught English,” or to express or declare recently completed actions of importance — “I have finished the project”. They have a very similar tense in Spanish, but here in Argentina, they don’t seem to use it, so my task was to show them the nuances of meaning that differentiate it from the Simple Past: “I taught English” or “I finished the project”.
Of all my students, Maximilian/Maxi, about my age, has the second best English, but he doesn’t really try and is erratic about attendance. I think he knows enough already to get by without much trouble. The company pays for the lessons, so if he cancels at the last minute and still gets charged it doesn’t affect him much. Despite his lack of enthusiasm for his studies, I like him. He works in labor relations; his job is to negotiate with the local, regional and national unions on the various contracts, agreements and issues that arise. It would probably be very challenging, but I think I might like that job. I have always been drawn to finding the middle ground. Pedro, my regular student who always shows up, took a back seat to his older, more senior colleague, but I asked him the majority of the questions to balance things out.
My second lesson was with Sergio, an engineer in his late fifties at the same company, and the most colorful character among my students. He always comes in strongly smelling of coca leaves, which he was likely just chewing on his way to class. Sergio does not know enough English to get by, and he desperately needs it. He is working on the construction of a major new mining base, with French engineers and Chinese contractors. Neither of these groups speak Spanish, and he doesn’t speak their languages, so English is the only chance for communication. He tries and puts in as much effort as any of my students, but struggles with voicing simple sentences. He needs to know the language but can’t seem to learn it. We’ve been working on the Simple Past for weeks and weeks now.
There are so many peculiar things we use in English and never think about at all. In the Simple Past, there is a different form for verbs depending on whether the sentence is positive or negative. “She went to the party,” vs. “She didn’t go to the party.” We have a past form of go — went — but it’s only used in a positive sentence. The negative is “didn’t go”. Sergio wants to put that extra auxiliary verb “did” into the positive sentence, too, as in “she did went…” and when I root that out, it disappears from the negative as well, and he will offer the very understandable “she no went”.
We end up just talking a lot, which is good practice for him anyway. I ask him questions and pretty quickly found we share a love of music. He has always wanted to go to the United States but especially New Orleans. When I talk about Mardi Gras and parades and marching brass bands he gets misty-eyed. He is a singer of traditional folklorico and loves rock and roll. It turns out his brother was a quite famous musician in these parts, but died relatively young some time ago, and this is still very sad to him. He tears up a little about something almost every lesson, and I love him for this. I learned today that they call Janis Joplin La Blanca Diosa de los Blues, which I think is a pretty cool name.
By the time my classes were over it was sunny and up to a balmy fifty, which felt lovely walking home, under that desaturated blue you only get in a winter sky. Stopped in to buy a couple baguettes for the equivalent of seventy-five cents at my preferred panaderia, then at a verdureria to get the vegetables for the crema de zapallitos. I came home a bit before noon and made myself an egg salad sandwich for lunch. Though it was a beautiful winter’s day, I was in no position to enjoy it.
Laid in bed and read about the English Civil War for awhile. Found a book in the library at my school called “A Shortened History of England,” which I’ve been devouring. I was hooked by the oddness of the title, combined with the fact that it is still six hundred and eight pages. I hadn’t looked into this period of history, the aforementioned civil war, much before. In the 1640s, much of the English and Scottish decided that their King, Charles I, was a tyrant. The Parliament of the time stopped giving him money, and forced him to sign all sorts of laws restricting his powers to control the legislature, levy taxes, and impose religion. He signed the bills, but shortly after sent four hundred soldiers to Parliament to arrest the leaders and charge them with treason. They’d been informed and fled, and this proved to be the tipping point. Within a few days the King himself had left castle and city and was raising forces from the north for a war which eventually cost him his head. I found particularly interesting the coalitions that formed in the course of this civil war.
The liberals, those in favor of fairly basic human rights considered radical at the time — that a King or ruler governs by the consent of the people, that the elected Parliament should decide on taxes, legislation, etc; that people shouldn’t be forced to observe a certain religion — or Whigs, were allied with the Puritans, who were basically the evangelical christians of the day, as well as the armed forces. The conservatives, who supported the power of the King, were allied with the more moderate but establishment religious faction, the national Anglican church. As today, city and town dwellers skewed left, and rural folks to the right. This period had lasting effects on what would become the United States: beyond the political thought that deeply influenced the founders of the country, it dictated to some degree the pattern of settlement and culture of the colonies. Many persecuted Puritans and Whigs left England in the lead-up to the war and went to Massachusetts; while large numbers of conservative Royalists, or Cavaliers, decamped for Virginia after the King had been deposed.
Before long I deserted the field of history and succumbed to sleep, and slept almost two hours. Woke up groggy, but no longer feeling like a plant without water. Lacking the energy for a long walk to take my evening yerba mate, I took my guitar a couple blocks up to the Plaza de Chile, one of the worst-maintained public spaces in the city. It may not be coincidental; I have found that Chilenos are not popular with any of their neighbors. But the dying brown grass, litter and crumbling monuments mean that no one else hangs out there, so I can sit and play guitar in peace. I’m working on a few new songs that have recently arisen. I don’t know if they’re among my best, but I’m delighted to be back in the songwriting game, to be considered worthy of songs again by the muses.
An awkward youngish woman came up while I was playing and sat down near me in this little plaza that no one ever sits in. I was almost finished with a song, and when it was over I said hello and we talked. It was clear that she had come to listen to the music, and wanted me to play more. But for some reason I just never started to play again. Maybe I was feeling shy. I was out there just to play for myself, to the empty plaza and the birds, and wasn’t prepared to perform. Sometimes it’s not a show. We talked sporadically and after a while she said goodbye and left. Eventually I started playing music again, when she was long gone and out of sight; drank my mate, watched the winter sun set behind the Andes, and came back home to write.
My trip Saturday night to the peña La Casona de Molino was indeed mágica. The hoped-for romantic interlude with the charming Nolwenn did not transpire, and I knew that before we arrived. She told me she was only going to stay for a short time because she was planning to leave Salta in the morning at 5 am. When she said that it was getting on midnight, and I said she was crazy. But I knew she was on the way out the door, and the romance wasn’t happening. I did enjoy having a friend, but put most of my energy and attention on this brilliant place we were in.
At a real peña, as opposed to the touristy kind, there are no formal “acts” as such, or even a stage. People just bring guitars and flutes and hand drums and other instruments and sit at tables, and take turns passionately singing old canciones of the people. It’s not so much a music venue as it is a music-making party. At La Casona there are four rooms, situated around a central courtyard with a bonfire. Each room has multiple groups of players and friends and hangers-on scattered about. When one group is playing, another is talking about what song they’re going to play, and after the applause is finished, and several people have yelled out compliments and dramatic toasts and the like, the next group will begin.
Some people come wearing traditional gaucho outfits with long scarlet ponchos, and couples who are feeling the moment will get up and dance traditional dances with kerchiefs in hand. Sometimes after a song a man will feel so inspired that he’ll stand and give some kind of a speech. Everyone knows the songs, and the whole room sings along with gusto. This is the closest to the heart of this country I have found myself, some kind of mythical Argentina.
The word that came to mind was noble. Not in an aristocratic sense, but in the sense of elevated humanity. It was soulful and inspiring, a trip to another century that was completely authentic and not touristic at all. Perhaps there were Argentinian travelers there, but Nollwen and I were the only foreigners. The relationship between music and performers and the audience was seamless — it was all one. This is probably the best music venue I have been to in my life. They serve empanadas and chorizo and steak, and beer and wine. I had two empanadas and a liter and a half of beer, the most I’ve drank in this country in one sitting, and it cost me six dollars. We moved slowly from room to room, the music opening our hearts, and usually when I looked over at my friend, she was smiling and I’d realize I was smiling too.
Nolwenn managed to drag herself away at two am, and the place hadn’t slowed down a bit. Looked like the crowd was heading for dawn. Though I wanted to stay, not knowing if I would make it back to this blessed musical realm, I decided to be a gentleman and see her back on the bus and to her hostel. We stood out in the cold cold night and whistled the songs stuck in our heads and did our best impression of traditional gaucho dances and gushed about it all. I said goodbye to her on the bus at the stop nearest her hostel and she said “it was very nice, merci” in a great french accent and chances are I’ll never see her again. By then she’d decided to put off her departure from town until the ten o’clock bus.
I woke up late the next day with my first hangover of Salta. To make matters worse there was a nationwide power outage, along with all of Uruguay, and parts of Paraguay and Brazil. Something to do with the hydroelectric plant at Iguazu Falls. The opposition is blaming it on the President; the President is blaming the previous administration. Either way, on a cold, dark wintry day, there was no electric light, no way to heat food or even boil water for a cup of tea. I knew nothing about the national situation, because I was cut off from all forms of communication or media. More than anything I really just wanted a cup of hot tea, so I went out walking, but all the cafes I came to were without power. I kept walking, but after ten blocks I decided it was the whole city. Walked back home and just went back to sleep. At three I woke up again and made a literally cold sandwich. By nightfall the power mercifully came back on, and I made some tea and the world was better.
This tired hero has so far refused the return, and the circle that brought me so far afield remains open. I know that sometime soon it will close, and I’ll go back to the place where I’m from. For now I’m off to my heavenly rock dwelling, my rented room on the second floor of this villa on Avenida Reyes Catolicos in Salta. I don’t have class until late afternoon, so I can sleep in, blessed sleep of respite and replenishment, of forgetfulness and healing.
- Campbell, Joseph (2008). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (3rd ed.) pp 167, 189. Novato, CA: New World Library. ISBN 9781577315933
