Madison Morrison's Web / Sentence of the Gods / Possibly
Possibly,2

2

We are underway again, this time out of Manaus, on a four-day journey down the Amazon, our destination Belém (Bethlehem). Author is seated at the prow of the ship. We pass granary towers decorated in a checkerboard of red-and-white.

We mount to the top deck, where a veritable party is already in progress: tipsy revelers dancing to popular music issuing from vertical boom-boxes. Before long we have tied up at a pier, where scantily clad girls await their turn to board.

 

The future: Una cuestión previa: It was once said of Fidel Castro. ¿Hispanoamérica? That his “stomach is in Moscow.” ¿Iberoamérica? “But his heart is in Beijing.” ¿O Latinoamérica? Now (November 29, 2008) the opposite seems to be true.

Dmitry Medvedev’s trip to Cuba this week. América pudo haberse llamado Colombia. May have the geopolitical dazzle. Por Colón, su descubridor. But nowadays it is China. Pero este murió creyendo que había llegado a la India. That does more to pay the bills.

 

Along the wharf are small mountains consisting of cartons of beer. Groups of Brazilian males, clustered together on the pier, dance to the pulse of yet more seductive rhythms. The captain above appears on deck, sleepy-eyed, in knee-length Levis.

He steps down onto the pier to oversee our docking. It is mid-afternoon. For two days the erotic madness has continued non-stop. The party, begun before we had departed from Manaus, is seasonal: the revelers are heading home for Christmas.

 

Sin comprender la magnitud, trascendencia y naturaleza de su hallazgo. When Hu Jintao visited the ailing former Cuban leader. América recibirá ese nombre por Américo Vespuccio, navegante italiano. Castro was happy to receive Beijing’s largesse.

But the problem for Cuba has been Castro’s unwillingness to take Chinese lessons. Hu’s trip, 30 years after Deng Xiaoping was a vivid reminder that for all the speculation about Raúl, similar prospects for Cuba are dim as long as Fidel remains.

 

Now a group of eight or ten young males have gathered on the pier, which has its own source of music. Most hold beer cans aloft in their hands. All are dancing. One waves a red jacket over his head. “Los Angeles Lakers” reads his pink tee-shirt.

A covered passageway to the dock is roofed in green. There is much construction activity in this lively, economically viable harbor. Flying at full mast: the green and white flag of a regional beer. Red Christmas lights flash off and on.

 

Juan de la Casa elaboró un mapa de las Indias en que estas aparecen aisladas, como un continente. Las noticias aportadas por Vespuccio indujeron al geógrafo alemán Martín Waldseemüller a llamar América al nuevo continente.

Medvedev will find the elder Castro nursing a Russophile mood. In his new post-presidential incarnation as a columnist-cum-blogger, Fidel’s paeans to the Russian Orthodox Church have been among its most recent – and strangest – manifestations.

 

“Ciclos Amazonas” reads an advertisement for racing bicycles. A 65-year-old clown in a red-yellow-and-blue dress has descended from another ship. To call the port’s mood “festive” would be an understatement.

On the opposite river bank, as though in universal response, serene nature has let down her hair for a gorgeous display of her own sensuous beauty. Overhead cloud cover is underlain by the palest of eye-shadow blue.

 

In July, he gave cryptic endorsement. Nombre que se generalizó a partir de entonces. To suggestions from Russian air force officials (in the newspaper). Excepto en España. That strategic bombers could be deployed to Cuba sometime in the future.

Donde hasta el siglo XVII. China may not take part in the anti-American nose-thumbing that Castro enjoys. Se emplearon preferentemente. It even refused to develop a free-trade zone on the north side of the island for fear of antagonizing the United States.

 

A dilapidated concrete obelisk, visible from our deck, reigns in the town’s square, on one side of which reads a sign for the “Bar Panorama.” The sun declines a notch, undercutting the fleecy clouds and tinting them mauve.

The surface of the Amazon, in a dull café-au-lait, is now enlivened by a million ripples, as a breeze picks up: blue, pale grey, darker grey. The fins of fish appear on the surface as they rise to scavenge near our ship.

 

Los del Nuevo Mundo e Indias. In addition to numbering as one of Cuba’s leading creditors, Beijing is already Cuba’s second largest trading partner (narrowly behind first-place Venezuela) and a more reliable long-term bet than Hugo Chávez’s petro-solidarity.

El conjunto de países americanos hispanohablantes y el Brasil ha recibido diversos nombres: Modern Chinese buses compete for space on Havana’s streets with 1950s Cadillacs. Sudamérica, que excluye a México, Centroamérica y los países del Caribe.

 

It is the third day. The floating disco continues, alive with pulsating beats and gyrating bodies. At its fringe the scene degenerates into mock combat among four brown-skinned youths, bare-chested, drunk and more than slightly obnoxious.

They are half dancing, half threatening one another, swinging their shirts above their heads, kicking like Thai boxers. But it is all in fun. The “Supermercado Pompéia” pulls alongside us. “Hidroviária” reads a sign, as though in summary.

 

But on the question. Indoamérica, que no tiene en cuenta el componente europeo del subcontinente. Of Cuba. Hispanoamérica, que se aplica sólo a los países de habla hispana. Following a “China model.” Iberoamérica, que incluye también a Brasil.

There has been a fraternal split. Y Latinoamérica o América Latina, inventado por los franceses en el siglo XIX. Early on, Fidel. Que no refleja la totalidad de la realidad sociocultural de tan vasto mundo. Had the greater affinity for Beijing of the Castro Brothers.

 

A fourteen-year-old boy, in a tee shirt reading “The Wait is Over,” leaps from the pier to our ship with a box full of already-peeled oranges held above his head. Fireworks punctuate our departure from yet another dingy little town.

On our way out of port we pass an old cinema. A blue truck, two black workers in its bed, labors up a hill. As we skirt the northern riverbank, three small boats lie in wait, now paddle furiously toward us, their passengers supplicating.

 

Sin embargo, este nombre se ha impuesto a todos los demás y es el preferido por los laninoamericanos. Both brothers used to arrive unannounced at the Chinese Embassy to demand food from the chefs and remain in the restaurant, talking long into the night.

The break with China in favor of a more powerful and generous Soviet benefactor appeared to be a pragmatic rather than ideological choice. Curiosamente, el nombre de América se emplea en nuestros días sobre todo para referirse a los Estados Unidos de América.

 

Plastic bags with charitable offerings are thrown overboard. It is the morning of the fourth day. Within a kilometer we come upon two large barges tied together, each accommodating ten cargo containers. We pass the wide mouth of a river.

At its embouchure it is perhaps three hundred meters across. The sun is shining brightly. Before long we are passing a large house with barn and outdoor toilet. We have entered a harbor so small that there is only one berth for a ship our size.

 

Jiang Zemin’s big hope for the Chinese plan of alliance in the hemisphere was Raúl Castro, whose lengthy tours of China at the time featured a string of meetings to discuss “lessons for Cuba from Chinese experience.” Las lenguas y culturas ibéricas.

He invited a key aide to the former Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji. Unifican a indios, negros, mestizos, mulatos y blancos. To lecture Cuban officials. Es decir. On China’s economic reforms. Que Latinoamérica es latina en la medida en que habla español y portugués.

 

It is already occupied by a ship from Belém, which we prepare to tie up next to. From its upper deck fly streamers of crepe paper in pastel green, blue, orange and pink. The captain downshifts his Scottish gear box to bring us into port.

As we are leaving the port, we pass a group of black kids swimming off a pier. On the shore behind them is a white church with a silver steeple. Farther behind, on a hill, rises the town proper, fortified, its cemetery filled with obelisks.

 

So when Fidel stepped down. Y que posee una cultura ibérica. Speculation was rife that a more pragmatic, Chinese-style economic opening beckoned on the horizon. Pues no se suelen incluir bajo tal denominación las Guayanas, Belice.

But reforms have been modest: Y las islas caribeñas. Some loosening of agricultural markets. De hablas inglesa. Some greater freedom to purchase electronic equipment. Francesa. The abolition of restrictions on Cubans entering international hotels. Y holandesa.

 

It is the fourth night, and the skies are clear. Orion is seen lying upon his side. Tomorrow we make landfall at Belém, perhaps by mid-morning. Author’s plane for Brasília leaves at 2:00 pm. When morning finally arrives, it begins to rain.

As we approach our destination, the number of villages along the banks of the river increases. Houses are strung together, connected by walkways. We dock at a little pier that seems too fragile to support our intrusion. A dog barks and barks again.

 

The financial crisis has given Cuba little room for anti-capitalist schadenfreude. Demand has weakened for nickel, Cuba’s key export. Her leading benefactor, Venezuela, is taking a hit with plummeting oil prices. Other anti-American allies that Castro had hoped for.

Such as Iran and Russia. Have emptier pockets too. Credit for Cuba. Is drying up. And debt payments are being rescheduled. All this has come on top of the worst hurricane season in decades, which wiped away over ten per cent off Cuba’s Gross Domestic Product.

 

Behind schedule, we reach Bélem at noon. Author must rush to catch a plane.

 

Quickly his taxi exits the port, where a ship from Hamburg has docked, continues on through Belém’s contemporary high-rise maze, out onto the road for the airport. Heat-exhausted, he scarcely has time to enjoy its air-conditioned comfort.

Having spent four nights in a hammock among 200 passengers on a boat with but two showers serving all, he settles unhygienically into his seat on a plane among businessmen heading for Brasília, the country’s modern, artificial capital.

 

Our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

Intellectuals are people who produce decontextualized ideas. These ideas are meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone concretely putting them into practice. A mathematical formula claims to be true in and of itself, whether or not it is useful.

 

In a heavy rain our plane lifts off at last to spirit us out of the Amazonian Basin. We gaze down upon a corrugated rust-red and olive landscape. After transiting the capital’s airport, we will continue on, this evening, to Salvador.

Ahead of author a rich man sprawls in his seat, which he has reclined, oblivious to the comfort of the passenger behind him. Across the aisle a nine-year-old Brazilian girl is being given cheerful Japanese lessons by her pleasant tutor.

 

At last, when his wits had left him, he conceived the strangest idea that ever occurred to anyone. It now appeared to him fitting, so as to win honor for himself and serve his country, that he become a knight-errant and roam the world on horseback clad in a suit of armor.

A work of literature, or of history, claims the same sort of status, insofar as it is conceived as art or scholarship: part of a realm that is higher, thought to be more valid, less constrained by particular occasions of human action or by ordinary notions and objective things.

 

We have begun our descent. On our gradual approach we overfly a large plantation of controlled forest, the landscape becoming increasingly regular. Tract houses appear. An eight-lane superhighway, circling the city, leads to nowhere.

As we bank in for a landing, Brasília’s famous grid of planned avenues at last becomes visible. Nature, having been razed and reformulated, has returned to repose about, even encroach upon, the city’s borders. A purplish haze lies over all.

 

The first thing he did was to burnish up some old pieces of armor. He polished and adjusted them as best he could and then noticed that he had no helmet. His ingenuity, however, enabled him to remedy this, and he proceeded to fashion out of cardboard a kind of half-helmet.

Philosophy has the peculiarity of periodically shifting its own grounds, but always in the direction of claiming the standpoint of greatest generality. This is especially true when it asserts that everything is transient, historically situated and of local value only.

 

A meandering river persists through a long wooded valley, despite the attempt to regulate Nature. We are almost ready to touch down. As though back in Oklahoma, scrubby trees border the asphalt surface of the desolate runway.

After a couple of hours we are airborne again, at dusk. We must turn 180 degrees. Artificial lights introduce a factitious gaiety into the evening landscape with its grey rectilinear structures. As we gain altitude, the rains recommence.

 

True, when he went to see if it was strong enough to withstand a slashing blow, he was disappointed, for when he drew his sword and gave it a couple of thrusts, he succeeded only in undoing a whole week’s labor. The relativistic statement is asserted as if it were value.

This is an old conundrum of the skeptical tradition, discussed at length in Hellenistic philosophy. Skeptics in attempting to avoid making assertions implicitly stand on a meta-distinction among levels of assertion of various force. He decided to make the helmet over again.

 

On our way out of the modern capital we become immersed in a bank of clouds that extends from heaven to earth. Within 90 minutes we descend into a city bathed in golden light, strewn with glittery green, blue and white electric bulbs.

Setting out on foot from his nearby hotel, author has reached the central city streets. “La Carta de Misericordia da Bahia,” reads a sign, with reference to the region. As we approach the largest square a sign on a church reads “Salvador.”

 

Having found a name for his horse, he turned to the question of a fitting name for himself. Remembering that Amadis was not content to call himself that and nothing more but added the name of his kingdom, he chose for his name “Don Quixote de la Mancha.”

This illustrates the sociological point admirably, for only the intellectual community has the kind of detachment from ordinary concerns in which statements of this sort are meaningful. Intellectual products forming them belong to a realm that is peculiarly elevated.

 

“Booz Festos!” reads another sign, its first word in yellow, its second in red. Angels are outlined in yellow, their trumpets in red. The Virgin Mary appears, her head surrounded with a red halo, likewise the baby Christ’s.

The “Cine Excelsior” is outlined in yellow lights. Black couples stroll with baby carriages. Hispanic families intermingle with well-mannered gaggles of tourists. A second, smaller square includes Salvador’s fashionable shops.

 

Next he turned to finding a “lady.” Nearby lived a very good-looking farm girl with whom he had once been smitten, although it is generally believed that she never suspected it. Her name was Aldonzo Lorenzo. Don Quixote resolved to call her “Dulcinea del Toboso.”

We can recognize them as sacred objects in the strongest sense; they inhabit the same realm, make the same claims to ultimate reality as religion. “Truth” is the reigning sacred object for communities of scholars, as “art” is for communities of artists, musicians and writers.

 

A black man photographs his overweight wife in front of an heroic nativity crèche. The curb is lined with a queue of a dozen taxis striped in red and blue. “Bau Bau,” reads the sign above a shop, “H. Stern,” another.

As author is returning to his hotel, a gorgeous black woman of 25 puts her arm in his and smiles, expressing her willingness to accompany him home. Regal in her bearing, her name, she tells him in Portuguese, is Elisabetje.

 

“Undoubtedly,” said Don Quixote as he rode along on Rocinante, “in the days to come, when the true history of my famous deeds is published, the learned chronicler who records them, when he describes my first sally so early in the morning, will put down something like this: ‘No sooner had the rubicund Apollo spread over the face of the broad and spacious earth the gilded filaments of his beauteous locks, and no sooner had the little singing birds of painted plumage greeted with their sweet and mellifluous harmony the coming of Dawn, who, leaving the soft couch of her jealous spouse, now showed herself to mortals at all the doors and balconies of the horizon that bounds La Mancha – no sooner had this happened than the famous knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, forsaking his own downy bed and mounting his famous steed, fared forth and began riding over the ancient Campo de Montiel.”

 

It is the Chinese language with its dearth of explicit syntax that prevented Chinese philosophers from developing syllogistic logic and pursuing such a route to epistemology. Time is elided, because verbs lack tense. Nouns do not distinguish singular and plural, abstract or concrete. Without the definite article most things appear as mass nouns, with no distinct emphasis given to the particular. Realms of philosophical consideration are excluded. What is constructed in the characteristic Chinese worldview is language-embedded. The Chinese often use the same word as noun, adjective or verb, hence the haunting multiple meanings of their poetry; they avoid the Greco-European style of philosophizing by piecing apart abstract distinctions. To this quality of language is due the centrality of concepts such as Tao, a blending of process and substance. Thus for the Chinese no abstract metaphysics or theory is possible.

 

Don Quixote decided to turn back home and supply himself with whatever he needed and with a squire as well. He had in mind a farmer, one Sancho Panza, a neighbor of his, a poor man and the father of a family but very well suited to fulfill the duties of a squire to a man of arms.

As he was returning, however, he came upon a group of merchants from Toledo. No sooner had he sighted them than he imagined that he was on the brink of some new adventure. When they were near enough to see and hear plainly, Don Quixote raised his voice and addressed them:

 

Elizabetje accepts author’s invitation to accompany him on the morrow to Rio de Janeiro. A ticket for her purchased, our plane is soon circling the city to descend for a US$40 taxi ride into its downtown streets, which have the air of Manhattan.

Given the dangers of promenading the Copacabana, its famous strand, alone, author is happy to have a strong Portuguese-speaking woman on his arm. Together we survey the signs of life and commerce along the beachside avenue.

 

“Let everyone,” he cried, “stand where he is, unless each will confess that there is no more beauteous damsel than the Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso. Nowadays it is fashionable to say that there are no distinctions between internal and external.

Upon hearing these words and beholding the weird figure who uttered them, the merchants stopped short. One raised his voice in turn: “Sir Knight,” he said, “we do not know who this beauteous lady is of whom you speak. Show us to her and let us regard her beauty.

 

Having strolled along the Avenida Atlântica, we settle into one of its cafés for morning coffee. The day is cool and sunny. Up again, we stroll under luxuriant palms, along with other strollers, native joggers and bicyclists, all in bathing suits.

We are passing the facade of the Copacabana Palace, its grey and beige stones illuminated by brilliant light. Atop it flies the flag of Brazil. We pass a Mercedes Benz showroom, across from it the Rio International Hotel, its windows tinted brown.

 

What gives force to such claims is that internal and external, the micro and the macro, the local and the distant, are indeed connected. The macro is built out of chains of micro-encounters in local situations, and in some respects there is analytical primacy to local ritual and detail.

“If she is as beautiful as you say, then we will right willingly confess the truth as you have asked of us. They charge up the symbols with a significance which makes it possible for humans to maintain what continuity they can from one micro-local situation to another.

 

A man on the sidewalk stomps upon soft drink cans, preparing them for recycling. We cross the avenue to take another, arriving at “Erótico Discoteca,” its neon unlit at this early hour. We take note of a café called “Au Crack: Dos Esqueletos.”

We pass the Jockey Club Brasilero to enter a record store, where Elizabetje purchases two CDs. We continue on past freshly roasting chickens, past the Plaza Copacabana Hotel, a lottery stall, the “Shop de Brahma,” named for a beer.

 

“If I were to show her to you,” replied Don Quixote, “what good would it be to confess a truth so self-evident? The important thing is for you, without seeing her, to believe, confess, affirm, swear and defend that truth.” This is not the same as dissolving such concepts.

“Otherwise, monstrous and arrogant creatures that you are, you shall do battle with me. Come on, then, one by one, as the order of knighthood prescribes; or you all together, if you will have it so, as is the sorry custom with those of your breed. Come on; I await your arrival here.”

 

A truck is being unloaded by red-clad Coca-Cola personnel. We pass a Chevrolet salesroom to arrive at “Cervantes Bar,” before it an open book in bronze with Miguel’s bronze pen atop it. The bar’s grey shop doors are not yet open for business.

We enter “De Plá Fotografía,” where Elizabetje examines a Yakisha but buys instead a Máquina de Plá, for 79 reales. We stroll the streets again, among the confident, friendly denizens of Rio, who are going about their morning routines.

 

One may claim that the personal is political, and that there is no right separation between what intellectuals do and the economic and ethical relations of the surrounding historical era. But the level at which such statements are true cannot be fixed in advance of research.

In explaining this to Sancho, whom he mistook for the famous knight Rodrigo, Don Quixote said, “I inform your Grace that I am speaking of the lovely Dulcinea del Toboso, on whose behalf I am doing the greatest deeds of chivalry that the world has ever known.”

 

The sign indicates the direction of Ipanema Beach. A bus stop is painted yellow, in honor of Lipton’s Ice Tea. We cross the street and continue past “Bob’s,” not yet open for business, past an ad for “Torrelli Classic Italian Men’s Clothes.”

We pass “Bazar Bom Jesus Plumbing Supplies,” a sign for “Telefónica Celular.” A confident big-busted woman in halter-top, dark glasses atop her head, smiles at author. Elizabetje decides that she must have her gorgeous long black tresses ratted.

 

To which Sancho, the farmer, replied, “Sinner that I am, cannot your Grace see that I am not Don Rodrigo de Narváez, nor the Marquis of Mantua, but Pedro Alonzo your neighbor? And your Grace is neither Baldwin nor Abindarráez but a gentleman named Quijana?

The personal is political, but the politics of intellectual practice, within the inwardly focused network of specialists, is not the same thing as the politics of gaining power in the state, or the politics of men and women in their private homes or public sexual encounters.

 

We pause at “Oficina Casa Com. Arte Teatro Música Dança.” In the window of a beauty salon Elisabetje examines a display of hair care products along with portraits of Brazilian women in various hair styles. She steps inside to make an appointment.

Her “Permanente Afro” will be undertaken at 3:00 o’clock. Meanwhile a blond haircut is in progress, as a brunette awaits her turn. Sparkling turquoise is being applied to one set of nails, maroon to another set, bright yellow to yet another.

 

Pulling himself up as though he had been affronted, Don Quixote replied, “I know who I am, and who I may be, if I choose: not only those I have mentioned but all the Twelve Peers of France and the Nine Worthies as well; for all their exploits cannot compare with mine.”

With such talk as this they reached their destination just as night was falling; but the squat farmer decided to wait until it was a little darker in order that the tall, badly battered gentleman might not be seen arriving in such a condition, and mounted on an ass.

 

When we return, however, a conference in theory and practicum must first be convened, among the owner, the beautician and her assistant. On the pale yellow wall behind hangs a crucifix, framed certificates, a bas relief of a basket of corn.

At last the operation gets under way: blue and green catches portion out Elisabetje’s locks. There is a pleasant disarray in this wood-floored salon. A fly buzzes and settles on a mirror. Through broad windows traffic passes on the avenue.

“Rio-São Paulo-Curitaba” reads a panel on the side of a bus.

 

Chu Hsi agrees with Aristotle: that Ideas do not exist for themselves, that the Idea as the one does not exist apart from the Idea of the many, that matter exists in the sense of possibility, that matter and form exist together, that there is an eternal principle, which is at once form and moving cause, that matter is the ultimate source of the imperfection in things and that it is the principle of individuation and plurality, that an entity (God or Heaven) exists, which imparts motion but is itself unmoved, and that it is pure energy, eternal, and good per se. However, although Chu Hsi is an Aristotelian in the field of nature, he is a Platonist in the field of moral values, recognizing that there exists an eternal, unchanging truth.

 

In the salon’s display window has been placed a scraggly Christmas tree, hanging from its branches bottles of hair care products. Presents, wrapped in maroon, yellow, orange and red, all tied up with silver ribbon, have been stacked beneath it.

Meanwhile a trinity of hair stylists, older, middle-aged and youthful, continues its ministrations. The first wears a conservative smock, the second, a floral patterned dress and strappy sandals, the third a busty yellow top and tight red short shorts.

During the long process of the Afro, author steps out into the neighborhood.

 

Now it is true that form is the factor of individuation, and so is li. But here the resemblance ceases. The form of the body, for Aristotle, is the soul; Chinese philosophy, however, has no place for a soul. Again, whereas Aristotelian form confers substantiality on things, the ch’i is not brought into being by li, which has only logical priority. Ch’i does not depend upon li in any way. Form is the ‘essence’ and ‘primary substance’ of things, but li is not itself substantial or a form of ch’i. Rather than metaphysical, li is the invisible organizing force to be found at all levels within the natural world. Pure form, for Aristotle, pure actuality, is God. In the world of li and ch’i there is no equivalent of God whatsoever.

 

Facing the beauty salon is a wall covered with graffiti: “Destruidores do Visual”; “Afera Voltou!” read two of the more legible. Author turns to set out around the block. “Mustafá Commída Árabe,” reads the name of a shop, its interior in white.

Two doors down a dress shop’s name, in a horizontally elongated diamond, reads “Bleue,” beneath it “Bleu”; beneath both, at the point of the diamond, “Moda.” The two blues have been off-centered, the “B” of the second beneath the “l” of the first.

 

Next to the shop is the doorway to a large building that rises above. “Miramar,” reads the door, the “M” of “Mira,” the “Ma” of “Mar” in fat silver letters, the others in thin grey. Stylized white waves flow across the abstract grey grid of the door.

Within which stands a woman, on her arm a baby, a nursing ring in its mouth. To the other side of the entrance is a sign for “Modulus,” most of its letters in blue, the grey “M” squared at the top, all within a yellow ground reading like an open book.

 

To either side of the door of “A Roseira do Inhangá,” a florist’s shop, are two displays almost totally discordant: one of bright enameled butterflies, one of a somewhat clumsy, religious statuette of “Dores” in painted plaster.

Dores wears her unseemly red heart on her chest with a knife stabbed through it. Christ, arisen, his arms still spread in the posture of his crucifixion, wears a heart that is yellow above and red below. His white robe has been trimmed in gold.

 

The cases on three levels are crowded with similar figures lined up behind one another, sorted from case to case by height. Author pauses at “Bar” for a Coke and delicious sausage. He has entered a diagonal street, principally residential.

Among its shops are a “Café” and another bar, “Santa Rosa,” its name on the pockets of the staff’s pale blue uniforms. Beer is the beverage of choice, but a shelf is lined with bottles of “Domecq,” “Vinho com Jurubeba” and “Selva Gem.”

 

On the label of the last a man holds a woman in a short skirt. In the glass window of a case containing miscellanea sits a picture of the Pope. “O Papa do Povo, 1997,” reads an inscription. Nailed to a beam above the case is a Mitsubishi calendar.

It is adorned with the photograph of a bright, chaste young Japanese woman in kimono writing with ink brush against a snowy background. November and December are displayed beneath her. A plumber arrives to clear a stopped-up pipe.

 

He is bearing what appears to be a canister of liquid oxygen, which he now vigorously injects into the drain. At the back of the shallow bar, before the kitchen, a cup has been set at an angle, horns atop it, against which a sword has been strapped.

Keys have been added to this composite sculptural grouping. The liquid oxygen injection has forced out of the pipe what look like two turds. Collecting them in his hands, the plumber laughs. A discussion ensues. He tosses them into the street.

 

I was standing one day in the Alcaná, or market place, of Toledo when a lad came up to sell some old notebooks to a silk weaver. As I am extremely fond of reading anything, be it but scraps of paper in the streets, I followed my inclination and took up one of the books.

Whereupon I at once perceived that it was written in characters that I recognized as Arabic. I recognized them, but to read them was another thing. And so I began looking around to see if there was a Spanish-speaking Moor nearby who would be able to read them for me.

 

Rejoined by Elizabetje, with her new windmill braids, author proposes a stroll toward the beach. We pause before a café on whose walls hang sepia photographs of an ancient clientele, seated about its tables, drinking and laughing in the 1950s.

On the next corner is an upmarket men’s fashion store named “Saint Gall.” In its windows are displayed expensive but not especially attractive shirts, large pocketed shorts, vulgarly stitched loafers. The block continues with barred gates.

 

When I found one I besought him to tell me the content of the note, and he, laughing, said, “As I told you, it is something in the margin here: ‘This Dulcinea del Toboso, so often referred to, is said to have been the best hand at salting pigs of any woman in all La Mancha.’”

No sooner had I heard the name Dulcinea del Toboso than I was astonished, for at once the thought occurred to me that those notebooks must contain the history of Don Quixote. With this in mind I urged him to read me the title; he did so, turning the Arabic into Castilian.

 

Behind them rise apartment blocks of modest height, a luxury hotel. We have reached the corner of Rua Republica do Perú and Rua Barata Ribeiro, where stands “Max do Garrios,” the “Max” in dark blue, the “Garrios” in blood red.

We turn the corner and encounter the narrow Casa Vesuvio, in it an electrical and plumbing supply store, an American department store with the latest in CD players and ghetto blasters; potato chips and Gatorade; a Betty Boop notebook.

 

History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Written by Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arabic Historian, the title read. It was all I could do to conceal my satisfaction and snatching them from the silk weaver I bought from the lad all the papers and notebooks that he had for half a real.

But if he had known how very much I wanted them, he might well have fetched six reales for them. The Moor and I then betook ourselves to the cathedral cloister, where I requested him to translate for me into the Castilian tongue all the books that had to do with Don Quixote.

 

Across the street is a Blockbuster Video store, with advertisements for classic American movies. Rush hour approaches, or has already begun. Pale yellow taxis, some with their headlights lit, are streaming by. A Ford, a Chrysler, a Honda.

We are crossing Rua Domingo Ferreira on the way to the beach again. A gymnastic swing has had bungee jumping ropes attached. Kids across the avenue are playing on the beach, lavish blue-grey cloud puffs disintegrating above.

 

Among the goatherds Don Quixote took up a handful of acorns, and gazing at them, fell into soliloquy, “Happy the age to which the ancients gave the name of golden, and not because gold, which is so esteemed in this iron age of ours, was to be had without toil.

“But rather because those who lived in that time did not know the meaning of the words ‘thine’ and ‘mine.’ In that blessed era all things were held in common, and to gain his daily sustenance no labor was required but to take the fruit from the sturdy oak.”

 

We have reached The Luxor Copacabana, its graying doorman blowing his nose. A Volkswagen bus, painted red-orange and silver, has been refashioned into a refrigerator truck. A hotel is using for its logo a yellow circle that represents the sun.

The large neon disk holds steady in a blue sky above exaggeratedly undulant green hills. We are passing the Palacio Champs Elysées, its pillars illuminated from top to bottom by the sparkle of tiny yellow lights, which have just been turned on.

 

“All then was peace, all was concord and friendship; the crooked plowshare had not as yet laid open and pried into the merciful bowels of our first mother, who without any forcing on man’s part yielded her fertile bosom for the satisfaction of her first sons.

“Then it was that lovely and unspoiled young shepherdesses, with locks that were sometimes braided, sometimes flowing, went roaming from valley to valley, from hillock to hillock, with no more garments than were needed to cover decently that which modesty requires.”

 

“Feliz 2000,” reads a sign. Once more we are strolling the Avenida Atlântica. It is “19:47, 20 degrees C.” We have reached the Rua Bolívar and cautiously cross Rua Othan to look at a big Christmas tree made out of little neon Christmas trees.

Atop the second story of the Othan Palace sits a huge Santa Claus, his face lit from below, as he gazes out over the Atlantic with a telescope. Turning into Rua Havier da Silveira, we pause before a window filled with nothing but white clothes.

♥

The bus ride from Rio to São Paulo is a long one. After seven hours we break our journey in Campinas. Though one of the larger cities in the state of São Paulo, it is not listed in author’s 700-page guide to Brazil, nor in his 400-page history thereof.

 

In his day Fidel Castro could not stop talking. He was Cuba’s Talk Show Host, his long speeches broadcast into homes on radio serving as something akin to background music for the lives of ordinary Cubans. (“A Rare Silence Reverberates in Castro’s Long Goodbye”)

 

Author does not have a camera to document the city. After dinner at our hotel we head for the disco, where raucous music does not permit a recorded description. From memory alone he recalls the frenetic scene of 1000 bodies in constant motion.

 

Anything that popped into his head was material, his reflections on Cuban history, his outrage at Washington, a meandering story that left audiences scratching their heads. Now, however, Mr. Castro, Cuba’s ailing leader, is silent, leaving a gap in the state-run broadcasts.

 

A much later Internet search turns up very little about Campinas. Luckily author has a correspondent, an artist, who lives in the city. Graciously Larissa Pires do Prado Baptista obliges his request by sending him five postcard views of Campinas:

 

On the final day of a weeklong belated birthday celebration for the 80-year-old Cubans expected one last discourse. At a military parade, however, Castro proved to be a no-show. This left many Cubans convinced that their leader of half a century had delivered his final speech.

 

#1 Though we did not arrive by train, or perhaps because we did not, Larissa has included a view of “Estação Ferroviaria,” a brick affair with a tower, a steeple and clock faces pointing in four directions. Small European cars are parked out front.

 

In Chapters XI and XII of Part I Cervantes recounts “the story that one of the goatherds told to Don Quixote.” “The old man is as weak as me,” said a man selling copies of the Communist Party newspaper from the wheelchair that he has used since losing a leg to gangrene.

“I must tell you that the famous shepherd known as Grisótomo died this morning, muttering that the cause of his death was the love that he had for that bewitched lass of a Marcela, you know, the one who’s been going around in these parts dressed like a shepherdess.”

 

#2 Her second postcard is a view of the Catedral Metropolitana de Campinas with its white walls, four Corinthian columns and architrave, above which is a clock, above it in turn a white tower and grey steeple, all nested amidst downtown scenery.

 

Mr. Castro last addressed the Cuban citizenry July 26, then slipped out of view for several days. July 31 he announced in a statement that several days earlier he had had abdominal surgery and that his 75-year-old brother, Raúl would take over as president, while he recuperated.

“For love of Marcela, you say?” “Yes, and the best part is that he left directions in his will that he was to be buried in the field as if he were a Moor. Grisótomo’s good friend, the student Ambrosio, who also dresses like a shepherd, insists that everything be done to the letter.”

 

#3 In a corner of the second card has been inset the church’s interior, but the remaining three are all exteriors, the first of the soccer stadium. Before its oval playing field are four municipal swimming pools, two kidney-shaped, two rectangular.

 

Mr. Castro’s illness, details of which are still regarded as a state secret, has awakened Cubans to the notion that without the only leader most of them have ever known, Life, defenders and critics of his rule agree, is likely to continue largely as it has, except for a more taciturn Castro.

Don Quixote asked them what it was that they had heard of Marcela and Grisótomo. Receiving no clear answer, the mad one turned as usual to extolling the life of the knight-errant, adding, “That is why you find me in these wild and lonely places, riding in quest of adventure.”

 

#4 In the next view dusk has fallen, producing a “Vista Parcial Noturna” of Campinas’ downtown, the white tower and grey steeple of the Catedral reading pink off in the distance, beyond buildings reading green and office lights reading orange.

 

“Nothing has changed for us,” said José, a mechanic who opened the refrigerator in his tiny, rundown apartment this week to show three shriveled tomatoes, three pieces of garlic and little else. “Every day is a struggle.” Mr. Castro’s Cuba is very much a work in progress.

“It strikes me, Sir Knight-Errant,” said Vivaldo, giving the Don further opportunity to display his absurdities, “that your Grace has espoused the most austere profession to be found anywhere, even more austere – if I am not mistaken – that that of the Carthusian monks.”

 

#5 The series of cards concludes with a view of the Bi-Centennial Monument set in a darkened square, light flooding upward from within a fountain, which has turned the air to mist, as the moderne structure rises from past to present to future.

 

“Theirs may be as austere as ours,” the Don replied, “but if the truth be told, the soldier who carries out his captain’s order does no less than the captain. The religious pray to Heaven for earth’s good, but we soldiers and knights put their prayers into execution.”

The parade, which featured Soviet-made tanks rumbling by and jets streaking overhead, drew onlookers from around the world, including such notables as Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel-prize-winning author, and the renowned French actor Gérard Depardieu.

 

“We defend with the might of our good right arms and the sword,” Don Quixote continued, “those things for which they pray, and we do this not under cover of a roof but under the open sky, beneath the insufferable rays of the summer sun and the biting cold of winter.

“Thus we become the ministers of God on earth, and our arms the means by which he executes His decrees. And just as war is impossible without toil, so those that have taken upon themselves such a profession must labor harder than do those who in tranquility pray to God.”

 

“Here they come with Grisótomo’s body,” said one of the goatherds. “The thing that killed Grisótomo,” said Marcela, was his impatience and the impetuosity of his desire; so why blame my modest conduct and retiring life, if I choose to preserve my purity among the trees?”

Don Quixote, seeing the opportunity to display his chivalry by succoring a damsel in distress, laid his hand upon his sword and cried, “Let no person of whatever state or condition he may be dare to follow the beauteous Marcela, under pain of incurring my furious wrath.”

 

Expectations were high that Mr. Castro would attend, but when he did not, his supporters made the most of the celebration. “He’s not physically present, but he’s still ‘here with us,’” said Deysi Francis, 42, a journalist with the state-run newspaper Granma, published in Havana.

Antonio Jiménez, 70, a retired teacher, held up a photo of a young, cigar-smoking Mr. Castro and expressed optimism that he would recover. “His doctors are trying to preserve him,” Mr. Jiménez said. When he dies, Castro’s illness has shown, he will not disappear altogether.

♥

At 8:00 pm, December 31, we leave for São Paulo, only four hours remaining in the second millennium A.D. Slowly we make our descent from the mountains into a murky metropolis whose air is rank with industrial pollution and visual confusion.

“He and She Motel,” reads a sign. From the bus station we take the Metro into the center of town, to experience, we hope, the highly anticipated millennial celebration. We must change trains three times as we become involved in “Samba”’s Inferno.

 

In the 16^th century Indians fell victim to diseases, contracted from the Portuguese, such as measles, smallpox and the common cold – against which they had no biological defenses. The death of indigenous people, employed in raising foodstuffs, caused a terrible famine.

It was not by chance that, beginning in the 1570s, the importation of Africans was encouraged. The Crown took measures to pass laws which tried to curtail the wholesale slaughter and enslavement of Indians. These laws, though, had exceptions and were easily flouted.

 

On the third leg of our underground journey we are traveling on the Green Line from Paraíso to Vila Magdalena. We exit the subway into a view of looming towers. Festive balloons are flying overhead. Street music is audible up the avenue.

It has, however, begun to sprinkle on this holiday scene. We progress down the decorated course toward the center of the celebration. It continues to rain, now steadily (if rather lightly). At twenty to twelve we are forced to seek shelter at a bus stop.

 

As they explored the African coast during the 15^th century, the Portuguese had begun their slave trade, which was helped along by their contact with societies familar with the market value of indentured workers. All had discovered how profitable was the slave trade.

Many blacks came from cultures that worked with iron implements and in which cattle were raised. Accordingly their productive capacity was higher than the Indians’. During the peak years of the sugar economy the price of a slave was recovered after thirteen months.

 

Passionate vocal performances from many live, presumably well-known, singers are accompanied by the individual dance performances of many ordinary Paulistanos, who have husbanded their energies to outdo themselves this evening.

As we approach the New Millennium the fireworks begin. An amplified voice offers continuous commentary, coordinating the events with their appropriate emotions. Now music, dancing and more fireworks enter into the symphony.

 

The two great import centers were Salvador and, later, Rio de Janeiro. The traders in Salvador used tobacco as a means of exchange on the African coast. Rio de Janeiro received slaves mainly from Angola. It surpassed Salvador, once gold was discovered and mining begun.

From the gateways of Salvador in Bahia state, and from Rio and São Paulo further South, the pioneers made their way to Jequintin Valley and the Mantiqueira mountain range in today’s state of Minas Gerais (= General Mines) searching for mineral deposits.

 

It is not possible, however, to say that tonight’s public demonstration is especially inspiring. Perhaps the weather has disappointed the organizers and the participants. It has certainly dampened spirits, to say nothing of bodies and clothing.

Still the magic moment beckons. Rhetoric and emotion rise as the countdown of the final seconds begins. Midnight is finally achieved. After fifteen minutes of jubilation, the mood turns romantic, rich ballads overwhelming the airwaves.

 

It would be wrong to think that while Indians opposed slavery, blacks accepted it passively. Individual or mass flight, attacks on masters, and daily resistance were part of the relationship between owners and slaves. Hundreds of communities were formed by runaways.

After Portuguese discovered it in 1500, Brazil’s early history was shaped by gold and precious stones. In 1728 the first diamonds were found by gold panners, and, when news reached Lisbon, prospectors rushed to these transatlantic Pre-Cambrian sites.

 

São Paulo is a city mostly of European immigrants – Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French, along with some Asians – principally Japanese. But the remnants of native Indian and African heritage are also evident in the visages seen this evening.

It is a culture of mature interracial relations, reflected in a predominance of what might be called “mixed couples” now milling about in the streets, as all begin to consider the means by which they will now return home in the 21^st century.

 

Despite resistance, African slaves as well as Afro-Brazilians were not able to overthrow forced labor. For better or worse they adapted to it. Nor did either the church or the state oppose the enslavement of blacks. The Benedictines even became large-scale slave owners.

For a century Brazil was the world’s leading diamond producer, taking over from depleted India. The link between Minas Gerais and Goa proved profitable for the first Brazilian dealers, who traded on the good reputation of Indian stones in Europe.

 

At 5:00 am, having said goodbye to Elisabetje at the municipal bus station, where we have tried unsuccessfully to relax from a strenuous evening, author takes a taxi to the airport for an early morning flight to Montevideo, Uruguay.

♥

Early evening, January 1, 2000 author enters Avenida 18 de Julio to face a monumental building rising above two stories, its classical columns below already in shade. On a cornice above the second read the words “El Día.”

 

In 1859 Richard Henry Dana, Jr., an American lawyer whose “To Cuba and Back” became a classic, sailed into Havana. He later wrote: “What a world of shipping! The masts make a belt of dense forest, all the ships lying head into the city streets like horses at their mangers.

(“Is it Time for Things to Change with Cuba?”) The confining shadow of Fidel Castro’s tropical curtain was captured in the emptiness before me (Roger Cohen, in The New York Times). I noticed over subsequent days that Cubans perched on the seafront wall rarely looked outward.

 

“1887-1927,” the inscription continues, in letters cut from stone and painted red. Four angels smile down upon this relatively provincial urban scene. (Whereas Brazil is larger than the USA, Uruguay is smaller than most European countries.)

At the foot of the building a green newspaper stand has been boarded up for this festive interval. “El País,” reads a sign in blue. The weather is cool, the ambience Iberian. We have moved from “Portugal” to “Spain,” from one New World to another.

 

When I asked Yoani Sánchez, a dissident blogger, about this, she told me, “We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats in Cuba, because, if they did, they would sail them to Florida.

“We are left, as one of our poets put it, with the unhappy circumstance of water at every turn.” It is unnatural to perceive the sea and a distant horizon as limiting. The ailing 82-year-old Fidel still holds Cubans in his thrall, even if he formally handed over the presidency to Raúl in 2006.

 

If the seedy downtown streets of Montevideo are a true indication, Uruguay is a backwater. The avenue, understandably still littered with the millenarian refuse of the previous evening, has about it a pleasantly civilized air, quite unlike Brazil’s.

From high above, on the third story of a turreted building, two girls, dancing on a balcony, recapitulate the New Year’s celebration. On one of the heavily stone-carved railings of their apartment a hand lettered sign in green reads, “Feliz 2000.”

 

“The U.S. wants to punish Cuba with its blockade,” she told me. “It cannot accept us the way we are. It cannot forgive us our independence. It cannot permit us to choose our own model.” Cuba stands at a fulcrum of generational shift, from Fidelistas to those who will hardly know him.

Lealtad (Loyalty) Street runs from the Malecón down through the densely populated district called Centro Habana. Today I stopped at a chicken-egg-fish store with nothing in it. Antonio Rodriguez, 50, the affable, bald Afro-Cuban running it, explained to me Cuban rationing.

 

Beneath them, in the first story of their stonily elegant residence, is a restaurant whose name reads “El Chivito de Oro,” the “Chivito” in question the typical Uruguayan dish, a mélange of beefsteak, omelet, vegetables, pommes frites, etc.

Yellow roofed, black-bodied taxis aimlessly cruise this deserted scene in search of passengers. Above a confusion of store fronts a sign in Gothic letters reads, “Jesucristo es el Señor,” beneath it, “Iglesia Universal del Reino del Dios.”

 

Every month each Cuban is allocated ten eggs (the first five at 0.15 pesos each, the second at 0.90 pesos); a pound of chicken (at 0.70 pesos); of fish with its head (at 0.35 pesos, or eleven ounces without the head); and half a pound of an ersatz mince (at 0.35 pesos a pound).

At the rate of 25 pesos to the dollar, you can get the whole lot for no more than 25 cents. That may sound like a steal, but there are catches. The average monthly salary of a Cuban is about $20. I asked Rodríguez when some chicken or eggs or fish might arrive. “Beats me,” he said.

 

The street scene, in chiaroscuro, leads to a vista of light, as the sun prepares to set. Across the way, in a shoe store’s window, a sign reads “Liquidación fin de Milenio.” As we continue westward the buildings grow even more grandiose.

We approach a square, “Plaza Cagancha.” The avenue bulges to accommodate a bronze figure of “Revolución,” a sword in her hand, a flag raised above her head, she herself mounted atop a tall Greek pillar, at whose base, four lions’ heads.

 

At its opening in 1868 Montevideo’s port was the continent’s finest, but its market now survives on atmosphere. No visitor should miss the old port market building at the foot of Calle Pérez Castellano. Its impressive wrought-iron superstructure shelters a gaggle of parrillas.

About 40 years ago entrepreneurs added more sophisticated restaurants to these grills that fed the people who brought their produce to the market. But economic stagnation has left Montevideo a worn-out city with buildings that would not be out of place in Eastern Europe.

 

Here, as throughout much of the central city, stately sycamores umbrella the scene. “Il Mondo della Pizza” reads the sign of a restaurant in red, inner-lit letters. Above the “Mondo” is a heavy spherical representation of the globe.

It is centered on Africa. Plaques advertising Coca-Cola are lettered in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Russian and a script that author does not recognize. As he is studying these texts, the head waiter steps out the door and pauses.

 

Micro-situations are embedded in macro-patterns, which are just the ways that situations are linked to one another; causality – agency, if you like – flows inward as well as outward. What happens here and now depends on what has happened then and there.

We can understand macro-patterns, without reifying them as if they were self-subsisting objects, by seeing the macro as the dynamics of networks, the meshing of chains of local encounters that I call interaction ritual chains, chains of events in everyday life.

 

The waiter is dressed in a black shirt, black pants, a red apron and a red bow tie. Author asks him if he happens to know which language is represented in the sixth advertisement. “It is all the language of Coke,” he replies, satisfied with his answer.

We cross a street called Río Negro and arrive at another pleasant park beyond the Hotel Presidente, lingering a while among its grassy spaces. At the center of a pansy-bordered pool, nozzles spray the base of another revolutionary scene.

 

“Fortune will procure for me the blade of Amadis,” said Don Quixote, “the one that he bore when he was called the Knight of the Blade of the Flaming Sword.” “It would be just my luck,” said Sancho, “that if your Grace did find it, the sword would only work for knights.”

“Never fear,” said his master, “Heaven will do better by you than that.” As they conversed in this manner, Don Quixote caught sight down the road of a large cloud of dust that was drawing nearer. “Today you will see the boon that Fate has in store for me,” he said.

 

The sculptural group is compounded of three horsemen and four riders enacting part of a great political struggle for freedom. Here the avenue descends more quickly, as the temperature too begins to decline more quickly.

Next to the elegant Palacio Brazil, adorned with art nouveau bas reliefs of naked flautists and pipers, stands the Hotel Los Angeles. Up the block the “Auditoria Sobre” occupies a magnificent building dating perhaps to the 1930s.

 

“This, I repeat, is the day when, as well as on any other, shall be displayed the valor of my good right arm. On this day I shall perform deeds that will be written down in the book of fame for all centuries to come. Do you now see that dust cloud racing toward us, Sancho?

“It is the dust stirred up by a vast army marching in this direction and composed of many nations.” “At any rate,” said Sancho, “there must be two of them, for there is another one just like it on the other side.” Don Quixote turned to look and saw that this was so.

 

An Attic frieze high above represents all the arts. A severe, bellied grid supports the masks of Tragedy and Comedy, which top immense pilasters enclosed within bas-relief trompe-l’oeuil, semi-circular columns, tubular and stylelessly abstract.

Across from the theater is a clothing store. Author takes seat in the Manchester, an indoor-outdoor café, where he orders a croque-monsieur and a Coke. A Pepsi arrives instead. Seated in chairs on the sidewalk, four German tourists are relaxing.

 

He was overjoyed by the thought that these were indeed two armies about to meet and clash in the middle of the broad plain; for at every hour and every moment his imagination was filled with battles, enchantments, nonsensical adventures, tales of love and amorous challenges.

He had read of these in the books of chivalry, and every word that he uttered, every thought that crossed his mind, every act that he performed, had to do with things such as these. The dust clouds that he had sighted, however, were being raised by two large droves of sheep.

 

A locksmith arrives in his green van, of a make never seen before, to pause at the intersection. Two nuns in beige cowls cross in front of him, shepherding a group of young children. Large overhead fans circulate the air within the café.

Its interior is arranged with small marble-topped tables in circular borders of wood, chairs, in the same wood with vinyl, floral-patterned seats, pulled up around them. The exterior is serviced by a portly waiter, his girth extended before him.

 

Because the clouds of dust that had been raised were so thick, the sheep themselves were not visible until they were close at hand, but Don Quixote insisted so earnestly on them being armies that Sancho came to believe it. “Sir,” he said, “What are we to do?”

“What are we to do?” echoed his master. “Favor and aid the weak and needy. The one coming toward us is commanded by the great emperor Alifanfarón, the other one at the back is that of his enemy, the king of the Garamantas, Pentapolín of the Rolled-up Sleeve.

 

In a grey vest above a white apron that extends to the tops of his shoes, the waiter wipes all the tables with the same well-used rag. Above a carefully considered moustache dark yellow aviator glasses, secured by a cord, perch on his pug nose.

The behind-counter staff of this bar-restaurant is relaxed but active, the cases in front of them, beneath the bar, filled with delicacies displayed on white platters: olímpicos (club sandwiches) and húngaros (spicy sausages on rolls).

 

“But why are they such enemies?” Sancho asked. “Because,” said Don Quixote, “this Alifanfarón is a terrible pagan and in love with Pentapolín’s daughter, who is a very beautiful and gracious lady and a Christian. Her father does not wish to give her to the pagan king.”

“Why not?” asked Sancho.” “Her father,” Don Quixote explained patiently, “must first abjure the law of the false prophet, Mohammed, and adopt the faith that is Pentapolín’s own.” “Then by my beard,” said Sancho, “I am going to do my duty and come to Pentapolín’s aid.”

 

Various salads in bowls are also available, plates of cheese, quiches, pastries, wines and beers. A plastic menu, hung from wires above the bar, sways in the breeze as it advertises the house’s specialties: “Ravioles,” “Polos /c. frites.”

The pièce de résistance, however, seems to be “Chivito superdelicioso.” The prices in red have been inserted into the plaque by means of plastic chips, then scotch-taped to keep them in place against the constant breeze of the fans.

 

Sancho and his master stationed themselves upon a slight elevation from which they would certainly have been able to see very well the two droves of sheep that Don Quixote took to be armies, if it had not been for the blinding clouds of dust that enveloped them.

In spite of this, however, the worthy gentleman contrived to behold in his imagination what did not exist in reality. “That knight in the gilded armor that you see there, bearing upon his shield a crowned lion couched at the feet of a damsel, is the valiant Laurcalco.”

 

Author pays his bill by depositing a 200-pesos note bearing the portrait of Pedro Figari, respectable, bearded. In return he receives a 100-pesos note with the portrait of Eduardo Fabini and a 50 note bearing the portrait of José Pedro Varela.

He tips with a 20 bearing a portrait of Brigadier General Juan Antonio Lavalleja. On its back is a lively scene of celebration occasioned by the formalization of the first Constitution. He resumes his stroll toward its point of natural conclusion.

 

“The other,” Don Quixote continued, “with the golden flowers on his armor and shield, three crowns argent upon an azure field, is the dread Micocolembo, duke of Quirocia. Here on his right, with the limbs of a giant, is Brandabarbarán, lord of the three Arabias.”

“But behold the head of the other army, the ever victorious, never vanquished Timonel de Carcajoa, prince of New Biscay, who comes with quartered arms – azure, vert, argent and or – and who has upon his shield a cat with the inscription Miau.”

 

It is a monumental statue of the heroic Artigas, from behind which one turns about to review the avenue, framed in palm trees, above which arises an extraordinary concrescence of bold turrets. The plaza is ringed in buildings old and new.

A curtain wall construction houses the Palace of Justice, a much more ancient structure, the Teatro Solís, named for the first Spaniard to set foot in Uruguay. On a temporary corrugated wall a graffito reads, “No más mentiras y corrupción.”

 

Vivimos en un Mundo globalizado lleno de misterios y de secretos militares y políticos en el cual los ciudadanos de a pie no sabemos ni la mitad do lo que ocurre ciertamente, porque los gobiernos nos cuentan los que les parece bien y lo que nosotros queremos oír, y son los Servicios de Inteligencia. Without pausing he went on: “This squadron in front of us is composed of many various nations. There are those who drink the sweet waters of the famous Xanthus; woodsmen who tread the Massilian plain; those who sift the fine gold nuggets of Arabia Felix.”

 

losque, de los diferentes Estados mundiales, guardan esa información codificada y ultrasecreta para que nadie fisgonee en sus archivos, aunque existen algunos “hackers” avispados que logran penetrar en esa “matrix,” con lo cual se demuestra no hay una seguridad total.

And those who are fortunate to dwell on the banks of the clear-running Thermodon, famed for their coolness; those who in diverse ways drain the golden Pactolus; Numidians, whose word is never to be trusted; Persians with their famous bows and arrows.

 

Artists who have performed at Montevideo’s leading theatre, whose construction was begun in 1842 but delayed by Rosas’ siege of Montevideo, only to open in 1856, include Caruso, Toscanini, Pavlova, Nijinski, Sarah Bernhart, Rostropovich and Twyla Tharpe.

Los humanos vivimos en la ignorancia total en las eternas dudas y preguntas del ¿de dónde venimos? y el ¿adónde vamos? y es que si nos ponemos a filosofar y a profundizar en el origen de la vida y como en una coctelera, lo mezclamos todo con el Cosmos.

 

Don Quixote put spurs to Rocinante and, with his lance at rest, darted down the hillside like a flash of lightning. Sancho called after him, “Come back, your Grace, I vow to God those are sheep that you are charging. Come back! O wretched father that bore me.”

Nos hallamos impotentes en contestar esas preguntas, quizás en el futuro se descubra si venimos del polvo cósmico, o si un Ser Superior nos creó, como especulan algunas religiones o si la teoría de Darwin es fiable, todo son dudas y misterios que encierran hipótesis por dilucidar.

 

“What madness is this? Look you, there are no giants, nor knights, nor cats, nor shields either quartered or whole, nor vairs azure or bedeviled. What is this that you are doing, O sinner that I am in God’s sight.” But this did not in any way cause Don Quixote to turn back.

Que las generaciones venideras quizás vean algo de luz sobre el tema, o si el ADN humano, una vez descifrado, nos da alguna pista sobre el tema. Hay misterios sin resolver desde hace siglos, aunque el siglo XX en ese aspecto ha sido un siglo revolucionario en el terreno científico.

 

In Plaza Independencia, at Buenos Aires 678, the Solis has superb acoustics and offers concerts, ballet, opera and plays throughout the year. It is also home to the Comedia Nacional, the municipal theater company. Tickets are available a few days before events.

 

 

We are riding about behind a tractor and being given a tour of his cattle ranch (estancia) by a Montevideo merchant, father of Nein Wang, who sent his son abroad to learn how to write Chinese only to find that the son majored in English instead.

Nein Wang did, however, graduate from the Chinese university, whereupon author recommended him for an M.A. program in history at Leeds. He is now enrolled in a Ph.D. program in international relations at the national university of Argentina.

 

A colleague once remarked, half in jest, that prevailing impressions of Spanish culture in the English-speaking world are dominated by two images: of Don Quixote and of the Spanish Inquisition. The image of the Inquisition has been reinforced from many angles.

Not least of these is the Monty Python comedy routine wherein absurdly garbed Inquisitorial figures issue strings of mock-harsh injunctions but manage only to stumble over their own commands. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is, to say the least, more challenging stuff.

 

The tractor is pulling a cart in which have been set two plastic chairs for the comfort of author (D.Q.) and his student (S.P.). The skies above are completely blue, only tufted with small white clouds at the horizon, where they hover above low mountains.

The farm is used by the family for weekend relaxation and is not under cultivation. Only a small herd of cattle is raised here, by the permanent ranch hand. The pasture bristles with sage plants, which periodically, we learn, must be ploughed under.

 

Cervantes’ work is a wonderfully complex and beguiling text that has become reduced in the popular mind to the pencil-thin profile of its principal character, an errant knight of La Mancha seen tilting at windmills or towering precariously over his paunchy squire.

As for its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “The Man Maimed at Lepanto,” we are faced with a Renaissance man who has also been reduced, either to this single text or, less frequently, to a sole physical mark – the hand that was maimed by gunfire in a famous battle.

 

Slash pines have been planted at intervals along the pasture’s fence. Near the house, a pleasant airy affair, a lily pond has been instituted. We will arrive before long, we are told, at a bamboo forest. The farm hand is driving the tractor.

Mr. Wang (Cervantes) sits on the fender of one of its rear wheels. The weather is cool and crisp. Along the borders of the farm stand high eucalyptus trees, characteristically pungent. Two dogs have accompanied us, one blazing the trail.

 

Whether in spite of or because of these reductive encapsulations, images of Don Quixote the character, Cervantes the author, and his novel, the text have spawned a range of successors that are nearly impossible to characterize, such as Flaubert’s “female Quixote,” Madame Bovary.

They include hundreds of other novels, some by his greatest successors, and also visual and musical representations of the theme, such as the richly orchestrated tone-poem by Richard Strauss and the popular musical comedy, still alive on the stage, called “The Man of La Mancha.”

 

The other dog brings up the rear. With them we have entered the bamboo forest, having descended from the tractor. Bamboo stalks, cut to make the forest grow faster, lie on its floor. Beyond its edge we glimpse the river to our right.

The young bamboo plants sway gracefully as we proceed amongst them. Soon we have exited the Chinese forest to step down toward the river bank. Asked what the river is called, Nein Wang replies, “Río Solís, the River of the Sun.”

 

Don Quixote itself has reached mass audiences, but it is unjustly treated when reduced to a few scenes from Part I – the tilting at windmills, the mistaking of an inn for a castle, and so on. Cervantes describes himself as but the “stepfather” of the great novel.

(He attributes fatherhood to a fictional Arabic historian.) Cervantes was substantially more than this. His wished early on that he might succeed as poet and dramatist; in old age he still regarded The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, another novel, as his best work.

 

Its banks are bordered with the slender trunks of young trees bearing deciduous foliage, light green, dark green, greens in the middle ranges. The leaves flutter, showing us both sides. The dogs have decided to take a swim.

When they have finished, we pass through the forest again to emerge once more in the sunny pasture, glimpsing some of the two dozen cattle shading themselves under a tree. By tractor we take another route to the river.

 

This early novel, however, remained unpublished at the time of his death. Don Quixote, on the other hand, was something of a succès de scandale, and Cervantes was justly gratified by its popularity. But his literary career amounts to considerably more than this.

The overwhelming importance of Don Quixote has secured for him an unquestioned place in the history of literature, yet it presents challenges for readers who may know Cervantes by this one book alone. Moreover, Don Quixote is itself an uncommonly difficult text.

 

We must hold our hands in front of our faces to avoid being struck by branches. The air has suddenly become rank, the floor of a new little forest damp as we approach the river again, which we glimpse off to our left this time.

The farm hand backs the tractor out of the idyllic light-dappled space, pushing its trailer into position for our return. The maneuver complete, we re-ascend the wagon but soon re-descend again to investigate a silvery gold plant.

 

Modern readers may feel at something of a loss when faced with its range of historical and cultural references, to say nothing of its complex Renaissance forms of literary expression and of Cervantes’ internal web of deliberate narrative cross-referencing.

Its combination of earthy humor with sublime lyricism, of simplified characters and sometimes tedious narrative with philosophical speculation may seem oddly disconcerting to those who come to the work from having read homogenous modern fictions.

 

This plant, we are told, may be brewed to make tea. It covers the whole ranch. We return to the farmhouse and its complement of outlying buildings: the farm hand’s house; a tool shed; what appears to be an outdoor kitchen; a barn for other animals.

We partake of a full meal together, prepared by a servant. Author is invited to join the family in this repast. A friend of Nein Wang’s has arrived. On the morrow we will make a trip to the town of Maldonado and beyond to Punta Del Este.

 

Many famous critics have disagreed about Cervantes’ masterpiece. Sainte-Beuve saw it as “The Bible of Humanity,” Byron as “a frivolous iconoclasm,” Nabokov as “a work of cruelty.” A modern scholar calls it “the last and greatest of all epics, the first and greatest of all novels.”

Another says, of Cervantes, that “as an artist he is merely a man of his age; as a thinker, he belongs to posterity.” Ortega y Gasset asked for criticism “that would demonstrate that every novel embeds the Quijote, just as every epic poem encases the Iliad, like the pit of a peach.”

 

We have arrived in the principal square of the town of Maldonado, about a third of the way from Montevideo to Brazil on the Uruguayan Riviera. This almost grotesquely spacious plaza is bordered with houses in pink and grey, yellow and ocher.

One has been painted grey on grey. At the end of the town’s center, barely visible through conifers, rises its stolid cathedral in beige and pink, it too trimmed in grey. Christ stands beside his cross atop an otherwise unornamented gable and architrave.

 

When seen from the perspective of Don Quixote, the origins of the novel can appear unfathomable. Looking backwards from where we stand, it can seem to us as if this book always existed, or as if it had to exist, such has been its forceful impact upon literary history.

Before Don Quixote we can identify various fictional genres, not without interest in themselves, but of minor importance compared with what El Quijote spawned. These include the chivalric romances to which Cervantes refers, and the fictional autobiographies of rogues.

 

Avenue Gorlero, Punta del Este. We are passing Cine Libertador, across from it, Casinos del Uruguay, the Banco Exterior de Ameríca. Two tourists are pushing their suitcases ahead of them on rollers. A man in pink shorts sits on a green bench.

A maroon Pathfinder is parked at the curb, an advertisement left under its windshield wiper looking like a parking ticket. We are passing The Republic National Bank of New York, its interior full of wicker chairs with yellow cushions.

 

Cervantes’ favorite literary romance, or at least his hero’s, was Amadís de Gaula; their favorite picaresque tale, Lazarillo de Tormes, one of the greatest books of European literature in a minor genre, an important work in the development of the Bildungsroman.

Equally important, however, were pastoral tales such as Diana by Jorge de Montemayor and L’Arcadia by the Italian, Jacopo Sannazaro. Likewise all manner of Italian experience, as reflected in references to Bologna, Florence, Naples and Rome, and Italian epic romances.

 

“Libros Libros,” says a bookstore. Beneath the two occurrences of the word is yet another “Libros” in red neon. The smell of perfume pervades the sidewalk, issuing from San Roque. A twelve-year old girl cavorts in scrubbed jeans and red tee shirt.

A fashion emporium’s window displays models in grey skin, grey eyes, grey lips, their heads cut off above the eyebrows. Above their skinny grey legs they are wearing skimpy bikinis, their crotches in blue and silver. Skinny arms dangle down.

 

Among the latter none was more renowned, nor studied more assiduously by Cervantes during his sojourn in Italy, than Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, itself a continuation of Boiardo’s massive Orlando innamorato, which he doubtless also knew.

The Italian influence extends to such writers as Caporali and Castiglione, Dante and Folengo, Petrarch and Tasso, to the artists Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. Cervantes’ desire for Renaissance Italy carried with it the impetus for necromantic imitation of the ancients.

 

We reach a Family Fun Center, a shop called “New York Look,” which has a plastic Statue of Liberty within it, posed on an emerald stand. We have come to the end of the touristic street and the commencement of high rise condominiums.

We are strolling the Rambla General Artigas, finishing our tour. Author turns to companion: “Now that I have seen Montevideo the Beautiful, so typical of the life of Uruguay, tell me what I may expect when I arrive in Buenos Aires.”

 

For, like the Man of La Mancha, his creator engaged in a life-long rivalry with the classics, a revival of, conversation with and competition against Aristotle, Cicero, Lucan, Plato and especially Vergil, who served as the conduit through which he sought to overgo Homer.

Don Quixote, no less than Aeneas, is Odysseus redivivus. Reading Cervantes can be a sobering experience, for conducting it one discovers that literary criticism only now gives us a systematic formulation of things that he knew intuitively represented the wisdom of the ages.

 

Nein Wang replies: “In Buenos Aires there is the old part of the city and the new part of the city. The old part of the capital of Argentina is the part, as in the old part of Montevideo, where the streets are narrow and you can see the colonial structures.

“As you leave Buenos Aires in a northward direction you can experience the newer structures of the city. It is where the most expensive buildings are to be found. The richest citizens of Buenos Aires are nowadays all living in this part of the city.”

 

In the still more distant literary past stand the archaic adventure romances, such as Heliodorus’ Ethiopian History and the anonymous Apollonius of Tyre, and, before them, the towering tradition of ancient epics written in verse. These of course are all pre-novelistic genres.

They were strong enough, however, to exert a pressure on literature as practiced by the greatest writers, in spite of the novel’s rise to a position of near, if not complete, dominance. For some misguided souls, the novel became their unforeseeable and incongruous continuation.

 

MM: “What are the principal differences, in terms of feeling, between the way that you feel when you are in Montevideo and the way that you feel when you are in Buenos Aires, where you have spent the last few years of your life?”

Nein Wang: “In Buenos Aires one is able to see that it is a very sophisticated, even hyperactive city. In Montevideo people have their simpler way of life. In Buenos Aires one can see the difference in their dresses and in their manners.”

 

But no matter which way the picture is turned the Quixote remains a watershed work of literature. Before it, things seem remote; after it, we are in a familiar universe. Cervantes of course could not have known that he was inventing the modern novel.

Since the publication of the book, however, we can retrospectively say that, among novels, Don Quixote was the first. How did this happen? What sort of literary transformation did Cervantes bring about? And which forms of literature did his masterpiece replace?

 

MM: “This book that I am currently writing is called Possibly. Considering the Spanish-speaking world, from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, on to Santiago and Lima, back to Barcelona, Madrid, Córdoba and Sevilla, what does the title mean?”

Nein Wang: “Maybe Possibly means the possibility that we have, as we travel about the world, of experiencing reality, of understanding it in terms of history but also in terms of the actuality that we encounter in the present.”

 

One has only to recall Henry James’s description of the novel as a “loose, baggy monster” to realize that what Cervantes invented has no fixed form. James was suggesting that the novel can incorporate a limitless number of components and assume unpredictable shapes.

Think of the difference between Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, to say nothing of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Clearly these all count as novels, but if one looks for a “family resemblance,” one may be disappointed.

 

MM: “Might we say perhaps that, whereas history has to do with the past, possibility has to do with the future?” Nein Wang: “I would say that history is an interpretation that the historian creates for what has happened in the past.

“Possibility, on the other hand, is what we believe is happening in the present.” MM: “But in a sense, what is happening in the present is simply another perspective upon history, is it not?” Nein Wang: “Well, it depends how you look at the reality.”

 

In the rest of this chapter I shall speak of the preexisting genres that the Quixote incorporated, eclipsed and transformed, and shall likewise say more about some competing views of the novel’s invention, for example, its continuation of epic literature in a post-heroic age.

It begins with the realistic rendering of “ordinary life,” and it grows out of an interest in legitimizing the “fictions” of romance in the face of the truth-claims of history. Some important questions of detail, such as the differences between Parts I and II, will be addressed.

 

MM: “How does the future figure in your idea of this Spanish-speaking world?” Nein Wang: “I think that if you want to see the possible future from present-day reality, then you can also deduce the future from the present, the new city from the old.”

MM: “Yesterday I walked through a city of the past, and today we have seen something of a city of the present. What do you think Montevideo will be in the future?” Nein Wang: “What Montevideo will be in the future is hard for me to say.”

 

Without naming Cervantes, Bakhtin helps explain how Don Quixote was shaped, for example, how he brought the peasant speech of Sancho Panza into contact with the language of educated people, such as the Canon of Toledo and the Knight of the Green Greatcoat.

The narrator of Don Quixote often speaks in the “plain” style that we have come to associate with literary prose, for example, “In a town of La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall,” it begins. But even his so-called “plain” speech is resonant with literary associations.

 

“What is happening in Montevideo is also happening in Buenos Aires. But to speak only about Montevideo: I think that the older parts will decay, whereas in the newer sections the structures will be better; the poor will stay; the rich will move out.”

 

The immense influence of the work is also remarkable for being twofold: even as Cervantes’ method offered a flexible model for realism in the novel, his runaway hero, the self-created Don Quixote, became the model of rare heroism in the face of mundane reality.

 

What is it about the social interactions of intellectuals that create those abstractly decon-textualized symbols under the guiding banner of “truth,” the defining moments of intellectual exchange when intellectuals come together for the sake of serious talk.

♥

The nineteenth-century contradanza habanera, or simply habanera, evolved from the Spanish contradanza, which was danced in formations directed by a caller. Cuban music, however, was greatly influenced by refugees from Haiti after the Haitian Revolution of 1804.

They brought with them the traditions of French and Franco-Caribbean music and dance. Following the French contredanse, the Cuban habanera developed couples, acquired an Afro-Cuban syncopated rhythm and became very popular in 19^th century Europe.

 

Buenos Aires, 10:04 of a sunny summer morning, author seated at café, Avenida Coronel Díaz, in view of its crossing with Avenida Las Heras, yellow topped, black taxis turning to mount the hill or continue down José Andrés Pacheco de Melo.

The fashionable female Porteñas (as residents of Buenos Aires call themselves) descend the slight incline, their high heels clicking on the sidewalk’s pavement: young blondes, henna-streaked 30-year-olds, elderly women in large sunglasses.

 

The Porteños are in a foul mood these days. Nearly one in five is out of work, crime is on the rise and the only thing to joke about is the bumbling of the government. There is a lot for them to grumble about these days. (“In Argentina, Difficult Times Make for Earlier Hours”)

The three-year-old recession has gotten so bad that even this cosmopolitan city’s most entrenched institution – the café – is in distress. The free flow of Malbec wine over a game of chess has become a thing of the past. There is not enough money around anymore.

 

The last-mentioned wearing artificially silvered coifs, fluffed up but not quite bouffant. In the Avenida Las Heras the buses stream by, in red-white-and-blue, in black-red-and-beige, in green-cream-black-orange-and-yellow. Across the way is a little park.

As younger women sun themselves in bathing suits a muscular male jogger descending the hill glances at them. A full-breasted 40-year-old in crotch-tight, off-white slacks, blond array, sways up the hill past author, looking down on his tabletop.

 

The habanera was followed by the danzón, even more strongly Afro-Caribbean in its rhythmic form. Along with the bolero, another European-derived genre from Cuba, danzón soon became popular throughout Latin America. By the mid ’30s the bolero was quintessentially Mexican.

It is a romantic song of traitorous women. One of the best-known composers and performers of bolero was Agustín Lara (1900-70), known for his Noche de Ronda, a classic of the genre. The bolero’s greatest years were from 1930 to 1960, but its appeal is timeless.

 

A huge moving truck, with an ancient green cab and maroon cargo compartment, enters the Avenida José Andrés Pacheco de Melo, while an ambulance careens by in the opposite direction, its green and red lights aflash, its siren wailing.

A policeman in combat boots mounts the sidewalk, leading behind him on a leash a large recalcitrant dog. At the corner of Avenida Las Heras a workman in grey tee shirt, plaster-spattered pants, leans over to reach into a bucket with a trowel.

 

Everyone has become so grumpy that customers argue over the smallest infractions at Scrabble. Assessments of the crisis have become almost apocalyptic, with café managers like Ricardo Pasquali casting back a hundred years for the right disaster to compare it to.

“The yellow fever epidemic really hit this bar” – the venerable Plaza Dorrego – “hard,” he says, referring to the plague that struck the San Telmo neighborhood in the mid 19^th century, just after his café was founded. “But this crisis is turning out to be pretty tough too.”

 

The mason is repairing a crack between the sidewalk and the side of a bank. Farther down the Avenida Coronel Díaz, past the sun-dazzled tops of a blue Audi and a yellow Lamborghini Gallardo, one can make out traffic crossing the intersection.

An Indian woman pushes her baby up the hill in a violet, pink, purple and carmine stroller. Two men, both mustachioed, both in pale green uniforms, mount the incline. A middle-aged woman in a black dress steps up onto an ocher curb and into the park.

 

In South America tango too is a hybrid of neo-African and European elements. It evolved in the poor suburbs of Montevideo and Buenos Aires and by the beginning of the twentieth century was already associated with cafés and brothels frequented by poor immigrants.

The social habilitation of tango and its adoption by the middle class is a product of its acceptance in France, where Argentinians took it with them about 1905, and where it spawned a European tangomania that endured until 1914 and the outbreak of World War I.

 

The woman in the black dress now takes from her oversized black handbag a white towel and spreads it on the grass. She pulls her black dress off over her head to reveal beneath it the black bra and black panties of her bikini’s ensemble.

In artificially red-dyed hair and black-framed sun glasses she blows her nose. Then she proceeds to slather sun tan lotion, squeezed from a yellow tube, all over her body. Having done her arms and feet, she covers her cheeks and chest.

 

While a neighborhood café is still the preferred place to hide out with a mistress, the 54-year-old bar manager said, more and more Argentine men are staying home, to save money. So his bar, which used to remain open till 4:00 am, now shuts at 2:30.

It is a sign that the city, which used to drink all night, is no longer carefree. Cafés in Buenos Aires take the form of bistros, taverns and tango clubs and reflect their neighborhoods, but cheese cubes, garlickly lima beans and spicy sausages are universal.

 

A bus in turquoise-yellow-and-beige turns to climb the Avenida Coronel Díaz. A younger dark-skinned woman, in a tee shirt reading “A Simple Life,” supports an older, light-skinned woman, apparently her ward, as together they mount the incline.

A white Ford pickup truck, its bed painted in alternate strips of yellow and red, ascends the hill. A 30-year-old in stiletto heels and black peg leg jeans descends the hill, magenta Gothic letters on her black tee shirt reading “Carolyn Manson.”

 

In Argentina the popularity of the tango continued to grow, peaking in the early thirties, enhanced by the sale of sheet music, recordings, radio and film. Like the bolero in Mexico, it is a song of nostalgia, disillusion. Its popularity declined in the late forties.

One of its greatest stars was Carlos Gardel, whose death in a plane crash over Medellín, Colombia, in 1935, while he was still at the height of his fame, only added to his legendary stature. The tango has further mutated by incorporating elements of jazz and blues.

 

On the twelfth floor of a pink high-rise block across the way a woman opens her balcony’s sliding door and steps out in pink panties and a black bra. She rearranges a plant and returns into the apartment, sliding its black glass door shut behind her.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the café in social life. It is a place to read about the latest financial crisis in the morning paper, dance the tango in mid-afternoon and watch a soccer match after work. The tango in fact often celebrates the life of the café.

 

Late afternoon summery situation, broad sidewalk before Buenos Aires ice cream parlor, Avenida Del Libertador. A helicopter overflies the broad boulevard, as author views from ground level the luxuriant fern-like foliage of its deciduous trees.

Pale green lamp posts extend in wide arcs above the trees. This avenue is many lanes wide, the white stripes of its lanes, from this perspective, reading as stepping stones across a black river. A white-haired man strolls by in a yellow polo shirt.

 

Cuba is also the home of rumba, a secular Afro-Caribbean musical genre, as opposed to religious Afro-Cuban music, associated with the widespread practice of sanitaria and palo monte, two of the many syncretic neo-African religions in Latin America generally.

Rumba emerged at the end of the 19^th century as an urban dance, orchestrated with conga drums, tapped sticks, a lead singer and a chorus. Its most popular form today is the guaguancó. It usually includes a clave beat, a thematic canto and the montuno, or refrain.

 

Author finishes his banana con crema ice cream cone, arises and departs.

 

By the forties and fifties, Cuban music had traveled to New York, where musicians like Arsenio Rodríguez, Dámazo Pérez Prado, Machito (Frank Grillo), Mario Bauzá, Benny Moré, Israel López (Cachao) and the Puerto Ricans Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez created mambo.

The big-band Latin sound (achieved through the fusion of swing jazz with Cuban son and the guaracha) evolved in New York City (in contact with Puerto Rican plena along with North American blues, jazz and rock) as the basis for the salsa explosion of the 1960s.

♥

6:00 pm, Lolita Café and Restaurant, a pleasantly darkened, cavernous space painted grey, atop its door an ancient clock, no longer working, which lists the hours of the day, 12-12 in black, 13-24 in red. Behind the bar: a single yellow neon light.

Through the window, across the street, a white wall sparsely covered with graffiti: “Kaput” above, “Aguante soledad” beneath it; “Soda stereo,” beside it, “Say no More.” A businessman mounts the sidewalk, his coat held over his shoulder with two fingers.

 

Inside a once-secret detention center where political dissidents were tortured and killed 25 years ago, during Argentina’s dictatorship, forensic anthropologists have discovered a pit containing 10,000 bone fragments. It is the first discovery of the human remains of victims.

“The new evidence confirms the testimonies of hundreds of survivors who said that authorities had killed and burned the bodies of political opponents,” said Luis Fondebrider, who helped uncover the remains inside the former detention center in La Plata known as Arana.

 

A girl of 22 in a magenta strap top strides down the hill with her mother, the mother also in a magenta top. A family of four dressed in grey and black, the mother and father in their forties, ascend with their teenage daughters, thirteen and fourteen.

John, the restaurant’s owner, and Virginia, its manager, are engaged in a serious conversation with a patron. A man in his thirties and a woman in white tank top on his arm, having walked up the incline a block or so, now return past the restaurant.

 

Purists would argue that salsa is a Caribbean phenomenon, forgetting its genesis in New York recording studios. Celia Cruz, one of the few women to make it to stardom as a salsa performer, has said that salsa is nothing more than Cuban son. “Salsa is son, and son is Cuban.”

While salsa’s gene pool is murky, incorporating big-band mambo at a time when Cuban music, cut off from Cuba by the embargo, was giving way to rock ’n’ roll, musicologists, given mambo’s debt to Afro-Caribbean music, are never reluctant to claim it as Latin American.

 

One of the magazines in the restaurant rack is called Noticias. In its table of contents, under Science (“Ciencia”) is an article titled “Promesas Del Futuro.” Among the promises are sex without propagation, intelligent robots and global climate control.

Transplants of the future (superimposed upon a gorgeous naked woman) include “Oído,” “Córnea,” “Lengua,” “Laringe,” “Tráquea,” “Corazón,” “Pulmón,” “Hígado,” “Riñón,” “Intestino,” “Piel,” “Músculo,” “Rodilla,” “Sangre,” “Nervio” and “Tendón.”

 

The 10,000 bone fragments were unearthed between February and September, and on Tuesday Mr. Fondebrider and his team announced that the remains were human. Now months of laboratory work is needed to determine how many bodies were destroyed in the pit.

But the evidence already shows that they were first covered in fuel and burned along with tires, to mask the smell of burning flesh. More than 200 bullet marks were found along the wall of the mass grave. The bones, however, were not completely reduced to ash.

 

Outside, in the crepuscular street, three Porteños have taken one of the café’s sidewalk tables: a portly, balding man in a striped shirt open two buttons; his young wife, in red-dyed short hair and white bustier; plus another, even younger, woman.

John joins the group, in the role of conversationalist rather than the café’s owner. Between them and author older couples enter, taking adjacent tables. Above the bar, behind us all, reads its name, “Lolita,” the first five letters in black, the last in gold.

 

Rock has followed an interesting trajectory in Latin America. In Chile and Argentina, it came to signify resistance to dictatorship and social control. In Argentina, middle-class youth were the first to make it their own and often suffered political oppression as a consequence.

Branded “subversives,” musicians and their fans were confronted with systematic censorship, harassment and imprisonment from 1965, when Argentine rock first came into existence, until 1982, when the military junta collapsed, after the Falklands War.

 

The group of patrons having parted, John has now joined yet another friend in a knowing conversation at the vacated table. He places his two hands above his head; he gestures toward this younger male friend with all four fingers of his right hand.

He returns all four fingers to gesture toward himself. Meanwhile, a striking blonde mounts the sidewalk, her flaxen hair tied in a pony tail with a red ribbon. Her well-tanned arms clasped to her breast, against a sleeveless top, a grey portfolio.

 

Enrique Santos Discepolo, the tango composer of the 1940s, once wrote an ode to the café in a ballad called, ‘Cafetin de Buenos Aires.” In it a lonely man reminisces about how, as a child, he once looked dreamily through the windows of a café seeking to recover lost wonder.

“You are the only one who reminds me of my mother,” the song goes, “who reminds me of my youth.” It is the café, he writes, that gave him his “first cigarette, the faith in dreams, and a hope of love.” All can still be found in Buenos Aires cafés, just in small doses now.

♥

Having completed his few days in Buenos Aires, author boards flight for Santiago. If the route be true to the map, we should be flying over the States of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba, San Luis and Mendoza on our way to the capital of Chile.

In his literary account author will be troping at a distance Chapters XXIII-XXVI, including Cervantes’ account of the “Imitation of Beltenebros’ Penance.” For this literary view of the Sierra Morena he will substitute his own view of the Andes.

 

PASO LOS LIBERTADORES, on the Argentina-Chile border. It is the dead of winter in the Southern Hemisphere and everyone knows what that means. Along with snowstorms, ice and glacial winds, there are sure to be thousands stranded for days high in the mountains.

This is the choke point of commerce, 12,671 feet atop the Andes. The majestic, snow-capped range runs the full length of the border, but we are on the road from Mendoza to Santiago, where the Christ the Redeemer Tunnel cuts through the cordillera.

 

Notwithstanding the predominant importance of the natural endowments of the Pampas, Argentina boasts a wide range of mineral resources too. It has developed the capacity to satisfy domestic energy needs and to become an exporter as well of a wide range of energy products including gas and electricity. The Cordilleras contain deposits of exploitable minerals: even today the full extent of these resources remains imperfectly understood. Although there are regions of agricultural specialization, such as Neuquén for hard fruit production, Mesopotamia for citrus and stone fruit production, and the central pampas for cereals and pasture, much of the Republic’s temperate agricultural land also has the innate capacity to produce other commodities.

 

“This is the largest cargo point on the continent, but we are subject to the vagaries of the weather,” said Juan Abarca Cordero, director of the complex. “When the condors fly down to seek shelter and the fog closes in on the peaks, you can be certain of a bad storm.

“Confusion and privation are likely to occur. Portillo, one of South America’s fancier ski resorts, where rooms run $500, is below the crossing. As the highway zigzags toward the summit, it passes under chairlifts transporting skiers from the slopes to their hotel rooms.

 

The earlier entry of the USA into the war in December 1941 produced intense pressure on every Latin American country to break with the Axis. At the inter-American defense conference in Rio, January 1942, Argentina defended the cause of neutrality, but to little effect. Virtually all Latin American countries broke with the Axis powers. Some declared war, and Brazil would later send troops to fight in the European theater. In Argentina, pro-Allied and pro-Axis groups operated freely, despite demands – notably from Washington – to blacklist the export of strategic commodities to Germany and Italy and to block financial and material assistance to the Axis. Inevitably the Argentine position was interpreted as pro-Axis. This is to misinterpret or misrepresent reality.

 

Truckers, though, pride themselves on their toughness, and cannot afford to stay at the resort. Every year a few die of heart attacks attributed to below-freezing temperatures, the stress of driving the route or being stuck for days at “patios” on either side of the border.

The terrain is anything but hospitable. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas, has precipitous drop-offs. When the crossing is closed for snowstorms, as many as 5,000 truckers can back up, fretting about the cold and the money that they are losing.

 

“My name is Cardenio, my birthplace one of the finest cities in Andalusia, my lineage noble, my parents rich, my misfortune so great that my kin must have wept over it, without alleviating it with their wealth, for the gifts of fortune can be of little avail.

“In that country there lived one who was Heaven to me. She held all the glory that I could desire. Such was the beauty of Luscinda, a damsel noble and rich as I, but more fortunate and with less constancy than was due to my passion. I adored her.”

 

As during World War I, the flow of strategic exports to the Allies continued. Through the allied commission even U.S. troops engaged in Europe were provisioned from the River Plate. By supplying exports on credit, Argentina made a substantial contribution to the allied war effort and victory. Nevertheless, many, especially in the U.S. State Department, viewed Argentina as pro-Nazi. Argentina was even identified as a center for German espionage and intervention in neighboring countries. U.S. anger was manifested in diplomatic action to isolate Argentina in the Americas and by the denial of access to strategic imports. Only in January 1944, as German defeat became inevitable, did Buenos Aires break with the Axis, but she delayed a declaration of war till March 1945.

 

While they wait, the truckers sleep in their trucks, which are equipped with cooking gear. They go forever without a bath and must use the side of the road for their physical necessities. To keep warm during the day, they sip yerba mate; during the night they resort to bonfires.

“Every time you cross the cordillera, it’s a new adventure,” said Vilmar Rocha, 40, a Brazilian veteran of the route. “But this time of year, you’re cold, you’re tired, you’re hungry; you smell of diesel smoke; you’d give anything for a bar of soap, a shower and a bed.

 

“As I heard Don Fernando bestowing such praise upon Luscinda, I must confess that I was disturbed and began to distrust him, for not a moment went by without his wishing to speak of her. And he would drag her name into every conversation that he had.

“This awakened in me a spark of jealously, not because I doubted Luscinda’s loyalty, but I dreaded what fortune might have in store for me. At last it came about that Luscinda one day asked me for a book of chivalry to read, the Amadis of Gaul.”

 

The new Perón regime adopted an anti-imperialist stance in world affairs and antagonized the USA, not least by strengthening relations with Cuba and, during the mid 1970s, “up-grading” its commercial and financial relations with Castro. There was a domestic political (as well as economic) dimension to the improvement of these bilateral relations, notably the radicalization of Argentine youth. Criticizing the USA in the OAS was a flawed method for defending the Argentine position against Brazil, then embarking on a massive program of hydro-electricity generation (in association with Paraguay) in the River Plate Basin or, indeed, of securing anti-British votes in the UN general assembly or elsewhere (given Britain’s ability to obtain the support of Caribbean countries).

 

No sooner did Don Quixote hear of the book than he said: “Had your Grace told me at the beginning that Luscinda was fond of books of chivalry, it would not have been necessary for you to add anything more to give me an idea of her superior qualities of mind.

“But pardon me, Sire, if I have broken my promise not to interrupt your story, for in hearing of knights-errant and deeds of chivalry I can no more refrain from speaking of such things than the rays of the sun can help giving heat or those of the moon moisture.”

 

Bilateral regional relations deteriorated further with the 1973 coup in Chile, compounded by the flight of high-profile refugees to Argentina and general disgust at the violence of the Pinochet golpe. The proceso de reorganización nacional epitomized the inconsistencies – if not perversities – that clouded Argentine efforts to define the world order and the position of the country in what would soon be described as the new “global age.” Declaring a policy of alignment with the “Western, Christian, free world,” while murdering its own citizens and strengthening commercial links with Eastern Europe, military regimes of the 1976-1982 period subscribed to the doctrine of “national security” then popular in U.S.-Latin American anti-Communist policy-making circles.

 

Truck traffic has increased here by an average of ten per cent a year over the past decade, Mr. Abarca said, with Brazil, the region’s largest economy, accounting for nearly 50 per cent of it. On a busy day, as many as 1,200 trucks, some more than 60 feet long, pass through.

For years both Argentina and Chile have sought alternatives to the treacherous roadway. There has been talk of building a longer tunnel to accommodate the increased traffic, of revamping a railway closed in 1979, and installing heating coils in the roadbed, as in the Alps.

 

Even if the Peronist victory in 1989 was more an anti-UCR vote than a vote of confidence in the PJ – given that the Menem campaign consisted of vague promises rather than programs and policies, it was nonetheless a comprehensive electoral victory. In addition to taking the presidency, the Peronists increased their representation in the Chamber of Deputies to 127 seats, thereby gaining a comfortable working majority in alliance with minority parties. Though Menem took only 47 per cent of the popular vote, the overall electoral arithmetic was much more favorable. This, coupled with Menem’s skills as a coalition builder, gave him freedom of action. He took advantage of this to construct a broad alliance within and outside the traditional ranks of the Peronist party.

 

Bad weather forces this border crossing to close for 40 days in the winter months between May and September. Last year, though, that figure rose to 46 days, due to snowfall and an avalanche that buried a dozen trucks, sweeping some over a cliff.

Remarkably, no one was killed, though all drivers recognize the threat of death. “Never lose your fear, that’s what I’ve learned,” said Adriano Plácido, a 24-year-old Brazilian, who has crossed 20 times. “The fear keeps you focused, your adrenaline flowing.”

 

Consequently, in a reversal of IMF strategy articulated since the Asian emerging market currency crisis, there would be no bail-out for Argentina. The Fund miscalculated both in terms of the domestic political response and of the regional economic impact, but its action was belatedly consistent with the unforgiving nature of a Convertibility Plan Currency Board arrangement. The golden rule is that, in the long run, fiscal deficits cannot be tolerated. Plan Cero was the final attempt to demonstrate this lesson to the political class, but it was already too late. Spiraling indebtedness, itself a reflection of the failure to impose fiscal discipline and the corollary of corruption, only postponed and intensified the problem. By late 2001 the dollar debt to GDP ratio was one-to-one.

 

July is the worst, because the weather is bad, schools are closed for winter vacation, and families are on the move. With the strong Chilean peso and a booming Argentine economy, tourism is thriving, which means plenty of inexperienced drivers on the road.

“When they stop to take a picture,” complained José Luis Carrizo, a truck driver from Buenos Aires. “They forget there are three trucks right in back, riding their brakes and dragging 50 tons of cargo behind them. One false move and everyone could go over the side.”

 

Chapter Nine: “A Possible Republic and the Real Republic.” A vigorous economy and a modern state emerged between the 1850s and the 1880s. The connection between these two processes is still less than clear, but capitalist development and factors underlying state formation ensured a complex relationship between the “governed” and those in power, which entailed interactions among diverse expressions of popular action and the consolidation of the nation-state. The result was the emergence of a civil society enmeshed with the building of a new economy, which gradually assumed capitalistic features. These forces coalesced in the 1880s: a critical decade that witnessed the parallel construction of state institutions and the burgeoning of a radically transformed society.

 

A few truckers also bring along their families during the winter school break. Marina Marques, 35, said that because she and her sons, 11 and 8, had never seen snow, they decided to accompany her husband, Dirceu, 37, on a run across the Andes from Southern Brazil.

Mrs. Marques said that she had new respect for her husband’s work that she couldn’t imaging returning. “I don’t ever want to see snow or ice again,” she said. “When I get home, I’m even going to sell my refrigerator.” (Larry Rohter, in The New York Times, August 8, 2006)

 

With the emergence of civil society, which appeared at the time of the formation of the state, political participation and engagement in political life was possible for those who were not enfranchised. The political activism of immigrants around 1900 was prefigured, at least in the city of Buenos Aires, as “mass actions” by those who could not, or did not, vote. A narrow focus on electoral history and voting statistics neglects other forms of expression that may have been equally or more important manifestations of the “clamor of politics.” Paralleling an involvement in the market economy, and subject to its vicissitudes, groups with the vote employed a variety of means to make their views heard. (From Colin M. Lewis, Argentina: A Short History, Oxford U. P., 2002)

♥

Chileans awoke Monday to a role reversal from the days of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship as Richard Lagos, a 61-year-old economist, a prominent dissident during the military regime, won the presidency and was poised to take over the nation in March.

Mr. Lagos, who once faced down General Pinochet on national television, became the first Socialist to win Chile’s highest office since a coup deposed President Salvador Allende in 1973. (“Chile’s Next Leader Calls for Unity,” The New York Times)

 

The Most Important People of the Millennium. Author, standing at a heavily trafficked corner, as residents of Santiago wait for the light to change before stepping onto the crosswalk, is observed by a grey-haired man in grey shorts.

William the Conqueror: A man crosses the street with his wife, he bearing two pieces of baggage. The Norman took what he believed was his (England). A brown paper bag and a briefcase. Pioneering state bureaucracy in Europe.

 

Le ministre britannique de l’intérieur, Jack Straw, s’est déclaré «enclin» à relâcher l’ancien dictateur chilien pour raison de santé, mardi dans la soirée. «Ce dernier n’est actuellement pas en état d’être jugé et aucun changement ne peut être attendu à cet égard.»

(Affirme le communiqué officiel, après un examen médical.) M. Straw estime qu’ «il ne sert rien de poursuivre les procédures d’extradition.» Cette annonce a fait l’effet d’une bombe dans le capital chilien, à cinq jours du second tour de l’élection présidentielle.

 

The eleventh-century dictator Mahmud of Gazna. A woman with enormous breasts in a white tank top takes a position next to author. The propagandist Pope Urban the Second. A white car with a black-shirted driver pauses at the light.

The twelfth-century Saladin. He looks at author, looks at the woman’s breasts and guns his engine. This Kurdish adventurer proved to the Crusaders that God had no trouble favoring an Infidel. Oncoming headlights glance off his car door.

 

Mr. Lagos’s victory over Joaquin Lavin, a rightist and former Pinochet ally, came as British authorities were set to hear arguments Tuesday about a possible humanitarian release of the general, under house arrest in London and fighting an extradition request by Spain.

If allowed to return home, General Pinochet will find a nation far different from the one that he left. Mr. Lagos has called for the judicial system here to take General Pinochet to account. In an extraordinary move, Mr. Lavin visited Mr. Lagos and conceded defeat.

 

Insider of the century: Eleanor of Aquitaine. A woman drags a beagle by his leash. Generalissimo of the century: Yuritomo. He is brown with black and white spots. Ghengis Khan, who swept through Asia like the Apocalypse.

A red-and-blue bus lumbers by. This thirteenth-century phenomenon set in motion forces more powerful than his sword. Coughing fumes. Saint of the century: Francis of Assisi. A 4’8” Indian woman. Mystic of the century: Jalal Ad-din Rumi.

 

Partisans et adversaires de l’ancien dictateur, qui dirigea le Chili de 1973 à 1990, ont accueilli le communiqué britannique par des cris de joie ou d’indignation, tandis que le gouvernement chilien exprimait sa satisfaction.

Ils ont tous deux déclaré que le général devait soi être jugé, soi se soumettre aux procédures judiciaires engagées contre lui à son retour. A Madrid, on se dit prêt à respecter la décision. A Paris, La France se dit «pas favorable à une remise en liberté».

 

The Indian woman glances up at author, as though waiting for him to speak to her in Spanish. The fourteenth-century Giotto, with whose brush the severity of religious icons melted into warm humanity, and the face of God became the face of Man.

Her violet blouse has sleeves in three different colors, above, pale purple (covering the lacertus); in the middle, mauve (covering the elbow); below, pink (covering the forearm). Best worldly epic: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

 

Supporters of both candidates descended on Constitution Plaza here, tying up kilometers of traffic in a sea of red-white-and-blue Chilean flags. Among them were torture victims and relatives of the more than 3,000 people who disappeared or were murdered by Pinochet.

They cried tears of joy as they sang, “Feel it, feel it, Lagos is president!” “Justice has finally returned to Chile,” said Isabel Allende, of the Socialist Party and the daughter of the former president. Ms. Allende, a moderate Socialist, bears little resemblance to her father.

 

She wears little black sandals, through whose toe openings project white socks. Terror of the century: Tamerlane. A woman with a low-slung bosom in a red shift, circular designs, slouches past, her lighted cigarette barely missing author.

Johan Guttenberg: this fifteenth-century printer’s innovation kindled reformations in a yet-unfinished information revolution. A mestizo, his cap over his forehead and blazoned with a star, skips across the curb and waddles by.

 

Les photographies prises du départ d’Augusto Pinochet de sa résidence de Wentworth Estates, dans le Surrey, aux côtés de son médecin personnel, Henri Olivi, avaient montré un vieillard frêle, hagard, accroché à sa canne, s’engouffrant avec difficulté dans un 4 x 4 blanc.

De manière «unanime et sans équivoque», les quatre médecins ont estimé que l’ancien président chilien âgé de 84 ans «n’était pas en situation d’être jugé et qu’aucun changement de cet état ne pouvait être attendu», précise le communiqué du Home Office.

 

Best blessing in disguise: Constantinople and the remnant of the Byzantine Empire fell to the Sultan Mehmet in 1453. A beautiful dark-skinned girl in miniskirt and white strappy top, white arm bag, long black hair, smiles at author.

Explorer of the century: Christopher Columbus. Another gorgeous Hispanic girl in tight black jeans approaches from the opposite direction. Soldier of the century: Joan of Arc. Black purse slung over shoulder; a broad gold headband.

 

“A new spirit of unity must run through this nation,” Mr. Lagos said. “We must overcome inequality and provide the same opportunities to every child in Chile.” The past century, he said, left Chileans with “unresolved pains.” (“‘New’ Socialist Vows Economic Equality”)

In a country where people just a few years ago were afraid to say General Pinochet’s name aloud, Mr. Lagos’s speech was interrupted by a crowd chanting: “Try Pinochet! Try Pinochet!” Said Mr. Lagos, “We must protect everyone’s rights and dignities for our community.”

 

The English Queen Elizabeth I: this goddess of the 16^th century Reformation, defeated Europe’s greatest power, Spain, and set Britain on its journey to empire. Long gold earrings dangle nervously as she crosses the street.

The most enlightened despot: Akbar, third emperor of the Mughal Dynasty. Two guys who have met at the intersection now peel off in two directions, one taking a left to continue along the sidewalk, the other crossing the avenue quickly.

 

Jeremy Corbyn, exprime la colère des députés travaillistes qui avait vingt ans lors du coup d’Etat militaire de la mort du président Allende: «Je pense que l’âge ne devrait pas être pris en compte. Les nazis ont été traduits en justice quel que soit leur âge».

«Alors pourquoi le général Pinochet?» L’éditorialiste du Daily Mirror s’interroge: «Comment le jeune Jack Straw jugerait-il le politicien d’aujourd’hui? Comme un opportuniste vieillissant torturé par sa décision ou comme un homme d’Etat d’âge mur?»

 

Akbar ruled an immense empire in India that included millions more Hindus than Muslims; not only did the warrior king marry Hindu princesses, he also lifted religious taxes on their fathers. A businessman walks by twirling a tennis racquet.

Best near face-off: Michelangelo had finished his David and Leonardo was working on his Mona Lisa, when both were commissioned to do frescos for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Suddenly Julius II ordered Michelangelo to Rome.

 

In part Mr. Lagos may have the former dictator, who is still widely disliked or feared in Chile, to thank for his victory. The decision last week by British doctors that General Pinochet was too ill to stand trial in Spain may have given Mr. Lagos a last-minute boost.

Mr. Lavin, who, before the news broke Tuesday, had gone out of his way to distance himself from General Pinochet’s legacy and to portray himself as a centrist. But the possible release of the general may have reminded voters of the link between them.

 

Michelangelo, who looked forward to showing up his rival, had done a 288 square foot sketch for his contribution, but the face-off never took place. An overweight Indian woman in a red shawl makes her way across the intersection.

Ideologue of the century: Martin Luther. She is laboring, with aluminum crutches, to drag her girth along. Astronomer of the century: Copernicus. An 80-year-old woman in a flowery pink dress crosses, arm in arm with a younger woman.

 

Parmi les ennemis du général Pinochet beaucoup ne cachaient pas leur crainte de voir survenir ce qui à leurs yeux eut été le pire des scénarios: la mort du Pinochet en exil, en détention à l’étranger. («Une affaire exemplaire privée de son épilogue»)

On peut imaginer en effet ce qui aurait suivi, au Chile surtout, mais aussi ailleurs: l’ancien dictateur promu au rang de victime des petits juges espagnols, des militants de droits de l’homme, des donneurs de leçons et de l’arrogance des démocraties européennes.

 

Seventeenth-century Isaac Newton’s scientific search for a grand design in the universe overturned ancient assumptions. As a woman, eating from a plastic bag, leaves the curb to cross the avenue, another, in a maroon sweater, approaches.

Best makeovers ever: Russian Czar Peter I, later known as “The Great,” toured England, Prussia and France incognito; as part of his program to westernize Russia, back in Petersburg he cut off the beards of his noblemen, the boyars.

 

The election was viewed as a bellwether vote in Latin America, where two major political forces, the “new left” and the “new right,” battled it out through Mr. Lagos and Mr. Lavin as their surrogates. The former represents a left that has embraced a centrist model.

The approach has made inroads in countries such as Venezuela, Uruguay and Argentina, where leaders have called for a greater state role, especially to cut the income gap that has exploded in the region during a decade of rapid economic growth.

♥

“POR UNA VIVENDA DIGNA,” reads a banner, as the raucous voices of protestors and the roll of a drum fill the Plaza de la Constitución. Flags of Chile are being waved amidst shouts for change as demonstrators arrive from several directions.

Avenida Bernardo O’Higgins is the principal conduit for this scruffy, earnest crowd, one of whose members ventures to explain the agenda, in response to author’s question, “What is going on?” It is primarily a public housing issue, he tells him.

 

In Chile, considered a model free-market economy for much of the 1990s, the election of a Socialist underlined discontent over free-market reforms. Lavin promoted himself as a changed rightist who could bring back a more aggressive management style.

A member of the conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei campaigned on a platform that stressed government efficiency and zero tolerance of crime. He put less emphasis on “political issues,” such as human rights, and focused, like Lagos, on inequality.

 

“Now is a protest for the house,” says author’s interlocutor, who appears to be a student, “for when we ask the government for the house, there is nothing.” Many among the protestors, however, seem much older. “It is very difficult,” he adds.

The demonstrators have begun clapping as they shout slogans. Author follows the protestors cutting through a park, their numbers swollen by ordinary citizens joining them. A circle of grass is being mown at 10:30 am. The breeze is cool.

 

Somos fuerza en movimiento colectivo Campamento Peñalolén. Nos encontramos, en esta situación obligados por la soberbia del Gobierno abuscar soluciones a nuestra tomade terrenos. No nos escucharon, no quisimos llegar a estos legítimos actos de protesta.

Somos el Campamento Peñalolén, nos tomamos los terrenos de Nasur, cansados de tramitaciones y promesas. Nunca hemos recibido ni un solo gesto que indicara voluntad de dialogar. En esto se parecen más a la dictadura que lo que dicen ser distintos.

 

Behind the park, as author distances himself from the monotonous protest, rises a new high building, architecturally undistinguished but clearly a sign of post-dictatorial prosperity. In the sun he takes a seat on a bench to read the protest handout.

The protestors have paused in their march before the Biblioteca Nacional, where two dogs are engaging in a ferocious battle beneath a tree. Yellow and white buses continue to pass along the avenue, despite the intensity of the demonstration.

 

¿De qué democracia hablamos entonces? Lo único que estamos pidiendo es:

1. Que el Ministro nos escuche

2. Que nos permitan quedarnos en Peñalolén

3. Que formemos una comisión de diálogo

4. Que formemos un Comité en el que participen Ministerio, Municipalidad y nosotros

Pidiendo su comprensión y apoyo saludamos a Ud.

 

The Library is anticipating its bi-centennial a decade hence. “Independencia,” reads the destination of a passing yellow bus. “South Pole,” read black letters on a protestor’s white tee shirt. He wears a black and white New York Yankees cap.

The drummer, his shirt in narrow vertical red-and-white stripes, having stopped beating his drum for a moment, begins again in a desultory fashion. The protestors, now standing or milling about, are neither lively nor jaded, nor altogether attractive.

 

C’est un local sans prétention dans le centre de Santiago. Les murs sont couverts d’affiches et de banderoles aux couleurs vives, réclamant «Vérité et justice» pour les familles des personnes portées, disparues à l’époque de la dictature d’Augusto Pinochet. «Où sont-ils?»

Ces mots sont écrits sous les dizaines de portraits affichés derrière une estrade. L’endroit sert de point de ralliement aux adhérents de l’association, en majorité femmes. Mardi soir, les réactions d’indignation sont toutefois restées limitées aux familles des victimes.

 

Another bus goes by, this one heading to “Recoleta.” There is a strong Indian element among the crowd. Many men are black-shirted, swarthy, many less than five feet tall. One, in moustache and goatee, has a marijuana tattoo on his neck.

He discourses with a group of unprepossessing woman. Across the way the police have grouped themselves, in olive military hats, olive pants and beige shirts, their bronze colored badges catching a little light. Organized shouts of protest recommence.

 

Two days had gone by since they had gathered at the inn, and they thought it was high time to be on their way. They all agreed, however, that Dorotea and Don Fernando should not be put to the trouble of accompanying Don Quixote back to his native village.

Instead, the Curate and the barber would take the knight with them and once they had him safely home would see what could be done about curing his madness. With this object in view they arranged that an ox-cart driver bear their friend off in the following manner:

 

The chanting of slogans grows more and more rhythmic. Driving through the scene is a yellow armored truck, “Prosegur” the name of its company, its red letters at the center of a pale blue circle. The chanting grows more and more insistent.

Seated on the curb about a fountain an overweight boy, in black shorts, is breakfasting with his mother on candy bars and Cokes. Many of the protestors are smoking cigarettes. Unsuccessfully the leaders try to raise their colleagues' energy level.

 

First, they constructed a cage with wooden bars, to hold him comfortably; after which, Don Fernando and his companions, along with Don Luis’ servants, the troopers and the landlord, all acting under the Curate’s direction, covered their faces and disguised themselves.

They made sure that Don Quixote would not recognize them as his acquaintances at the inn. Having completed their disguise, they very quietly entered the room, where he lay resting from his recent frays, wholly unsuspecting. Seizing him firmly, they bound him hand and foot.

 

Six Chilean flags fly over the heads of the protestors, the leading cadre lit by bright sunlight. An older student turns his back on the protest; “V” for “Varsity” reads his shirt; a butterfly is tattooed on his arm. A twenty-year-old in braces takes a seat.

Her twin sister joins her on the fountain’s curb. “Université de Paris,” reads her sweatshirt. For these students physical presence is the principal means of protest. Several kids, even a young adult, have taken to bathing naked in the fountain, undeterred.

 

Les larmes aux yeux, elles exprimaient toutes un sentiment d’injustice. «Nous n’attendions pas cette décision, c’est une surprise absolue», a expliqué au Monde la président de l’association. «Nous avions placé beaucoup d’espoir dans une extradition vers l’Espagne.

«Passé ce moment de déception, nous allons réagir et lutter pour la tenue d’un procès au Chile». Toujours à l’initiative de cette association, une manifestation devait avoir lieu sur la place de la Constitution. («Pour les familles des disparus, un sentiment de trahison»)

 

Above a seated figure in bronze, a long sword extending from over her shoulder, between his legs, and to his feet, rises a statesmanlike figure labeled “Vicuña MacKenna.” In one bronze hand he holds an open manuscript, in the other, a pen.

Two grey pigeons have taken positions, one atop the bronze pen, one atop the bronze manuscript, as a white dove flutters down to settle on MacKenna’s balding pate. Author mounts the steps of an overpass to observe Santiago’s traffic.

 

When Don Quixote awoke with a start, he was unable to do anything except marvel at finding himself surrounded by so many strange faces. As a result, his disordered mind at once began to fancy that all these figures were phantom courtiers serving in some enchanted castle.

He himself, he opined, was without a doubt under a magic spell, seeing that he could neither move nor defend himself. Which was as the Curate, originator of this scheme, had planned it. Sancho alone among those present was at once in his right mind and in character.

 

Author has arrived at the “Centro de Exposición de Arte Indígena,” whose cavernous dark interior displays the textile, beadwork and beaten copper of Aymara, Rapa-Nui, Mapuche, all attractive work. We continue on to Cerro Santa Lucía.

Here several fountains, along with a large grotto, have been constructed in niches. Elaborate preparations are under way for the filming of a documentary. At last we reach the spiral staircases of the mountain’s formal “entrance” and take the left-hand path.

 

L’avocate des victimes françaises disparue au Chile et en Argentine a demandé mercredi au gouvernement français de «s’opposer» à la libération du général Pinochet. «Nous demandons au gouvernement français de s’opposer à cette libération», disait-elle.

«Et de faire valoir que le jugement d’Augusto Pinochet constitue une exigence de justice qu’il serait inadmissible de voir paralysée pour des raisons de politique chilienne», souligne-t-elle dans un communiqué, rappelant que la France avait, elle aussi, réclamé l’extradition.

 

Meanwhile, across the way in the Plaza the demonstration has heated up to the point of confrontation. We ourselves arrive at a second plateau, Terraza Neptuno, where another fountain cascades down from a thinly sculptured statue of the sea god.

Behind him rises a Romanized neo-classical structure, its columns and pilasters surmounted by a dome. Two bland, smiling angels in insufficient volume gaze out at us. On this level is more equipment for sound, behind it a display of photographs.

 

Sancho did not fail to recognize these disguised figures for what they were, but he did not dare open his mouth until he saw what the outcome of this capture would be. As for Don Quixote, he said not a word, for he too was waiting to see what further was going to befall him.

They took him to the cage and shut him in it, nailing the bars firmly. As they lifted the Don on their shoulders and bore him from the room, an awe-inspiring voice, the barber’s, attempted to reconcile the Man of La Mancha, and his squire, Sancho, to his imprisonment.

 

At length we reach a castle and look down through its crenellated ramparts.

 

Don Quixote sadly responded: “Thou, whoever thou art, I implore thee on my behalf to ask the wise enchanter who hath these things in his charge not to allow me to perish in this captivity before I have seen fulfilled the joyful promises that have been made me.

“Let this request be granted and I shall glory in my prison house, my chains will be light, and this bed will prove not a hard-fought battlefield but a soft and happy nuptial couch.” At this Sancho bowed respectfully and kissed both of his master’s bound hands.

 

Among the photographs is one of a superhighway, seen from ground level, another of a toll station. “Solo,” read the large white letters on a sign above the left lane; “Autos,” above the middle lane; “Camionetas,” above the third and fourth lanes.

Before the display of photos, officials of the Municipalidad de Santiago, presumably here to organize the show, stand about deliberating, one of them, bearded, in an expensive beige-green-and-black jacket and beige loafers, smoking a pipe.

 

Achieving a free-trade pact with the U.S. was supposed to be the magic moment that certified Chile’s entry into the elite club of stable, democratic, prosperous nations. Instead, the new accord has reignited an anguished debate here about what it means to be Latin American.

Some feel that Chile has lost this sense. Recently, her neighbors have suffered political and economic convulsions that have forced changes of government. In sharp contrast to Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, according to a Wall Street report, Chile looks “dull but virtuous.”

 

Author mounts above the level of Neptune, passing a single sign for three auto companies: “Mitsubishi” (in red and white) changes to “Daewoo” (in white and blue) to “Fiat” (“Nos Mueve la Pasión”). We reach a walkway encircling the castle.

Signs direct us to “Castillo Hidalgo,” “Jardín Circular,” “Terraza Caupolicán.” The way is almost totally shaded by copper beaches interspersed with elegant pines. From here we mount two more flights of stairs to reach a clearer vantage point.

 

When Don Quixote found himself caged and placed upon the cart he said, “Many grave histories have I read of knights-errant, but never have I read of enchanted knights borne away in this fashion, nor at the slow pace that these lazy animals provide us with.

For it is the custom instead to spirit the knights-errant through the air, with marvelous speed, wrapped in a cloud or upon a chariot of fire, or a hippogriff. But that I should now be conveyed in an ox-cart, Heaven help me, this is something that I cannot well understand.

 

A large advertisement shows a group of clowns, three of them wearing gas masks. “Zirkozita,” a band, is practicing for this evening’s performance. Younger members of “El Físico del Mundo,” another band, are practicing, in a very amateurish way.

From these heights we look down on the roof of the Biblioteca Nacional, in front of which the protest has completely dissipated. A smoggy, indistinct Santiago stretches out before us. A huge blond girl in “Intime” underwear sprawls atop a building.

 

This is a country where most people pay their taxes, laws are enforced and the police rarely seek bribes. That is unusual for Latin America and probably should be cause for celebration. Yet, it has the rest of the region looking at Chile as if there were something wrong.

“Chile for many years has been ‘different’ and ‘solitary,’” Peruvian political commentator Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote in a recent essay, which generated much comment here. “She is ‘isolated’ in a space that is psychological more than political or economic.”

 

To the North and Northeast rises the high outline of the Andes, dwarfing merely human high-rise buildings. As we turn to continue toward the Southeast and South along the ramparts, the curtain wall constructions of downtown Santiago emerge.

Between them stands a foothill of the Andes, a Christian cross atop it. On the red brick ramparts read graffiti: “Adriana y Ulises,” “Luis y Tita,” “Priscy y Coke.” We mount another steep set of stairs past an Inca Indian in bronze atop a rock.

 

“However, it may be that chivalric magic in this our time must follow a new path. And it may also be that, inasmuch as I am a knight but recently arrived to revive the forgotten calling, other means must be invented to convey the enchanted.

“What do you think, Sancho, my son?” “I don’t know what I think,” he replied, “but I swear that those apparitions are not altogether Catholic!” “Catholic?” said Don Quixote. “How can they be Catholic, if they have assumed such fantastic shapes?”

 

Lovers kiss by the grated door of Sepulcro de Benjamín Vicuña MacKenna, as an uprising breeze flutters the awnings on a six-story condo below. We have reached Jardín Darwin. A graffito in daisy shape has been inscribed on one of its stone benches.

We continue up uneven granite steps, another graffito reading, “Vinimos y no encontramos nada.” We have nearly reached the summit of El Cerro Santa Lucía. At 12:00 noon the church bells of the city below have all begun ringing.

 

The entire party fell in: first came the cart, driven by its owners, at whose sides were the two officers of the Holy Brotherhood with their muskets. Then followed Sancho Panza on his donkey, leading Rocinante. Bringing up the rear were the Curate and the barber.

Their faces were covered, as they solemnly rode along at the pace of the oxen. Don Quixote, hands bound and feet stretched out, leaned back against the bars, preserving a silence so complete that it seemed he was not flesh-and-blood but rather a stone statue.

♥

Eleven stops from Estación Baquedano (whose route shows twelve “Estaciónes del Metro”) and we have arrived at Estación Bellavista de La Florida and the “Plaza Vespucio Shopping Center.” As we cross the street the Latin music begins.

“Lagos for President,” reads a sign. We come upon a life-size nativity scene, now being dismantled. The Angel, in a five-pointed star, a circle at its center, is still suspended in a tree above the Christ child. Author takes a seat at an outdoor restaurant.

 

“Today, Chile is a hypercaptalist state, while Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil and Uruguay are all questioning free trade and open markets. Chile may also be suffering from what might be called ‘teacher’s pet syndrome.’ Others have had to endure lectures.

“‘For some socio-cultural reason, we are the serious kid in the neighborhood,’ said a business consultant, ‘the nerd student who does his homework and is loathsome to his classmates. However, it is better to be dull and virtuous than bloody and Pinochetista.’”

 

Author orders an Ensalada a la Chilena. The waitresses are dressed in blue tank tops and tight grey pants. Through a clutter of red, yellow, blue and white presidential election posters, electric lines and small trees we can just barely glimpse the Andes.

In competition with the juke box next door, ours starts up. From them issue, entwined, lively but melancholy vocals. A salad arrives of salted chopped tomatoes and onions, to which olive oil has been applied, unleavened bread on the side.

 

“‘Chile has been a very grey country for many years,’ he added. ‘Modernization runs the risk of even more soullessness.’” “The Free-Trade Agreement with the U.S. has aggravated all these contradictory sentiments.” “Everyone is fighting tooth and nail for the same status.

“‘It pains them that Chile was first. My concern is lest Chileans be seen as the new Phoenicians, good at trade alone,’ said Maria de los Angeles Fernandez of Diego Portales University. ‘It is not enough to have good relations. You must have other means of communication too.’”

♥

The Nasca markings are spectacular, these multi-kilometer-long lines, geometrical figures, zigzag motifs, spirals and animal figures the size of a football field, all laid out on the warm, hazy desert between the Ingenio and Nasca river valleys on the southern coast of Peru.

Imagine a large number of people spread out on an open plain, a landscape by Salvador Dalí or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one of them is shouting, “Listen to me!” This is what we call the attention space. Why would anyone listen to anyone else?

 

After lifting off from Santiago’s international airport, our flight veers out to sea and continues at a distance from the Chilean coast. About two thirds of the way to Lima, however, it rejoins the coastal plain, now Peruvian, at the foot of the Andes.

We approach Cuzco, the site of an ancient Incan capital. The famous Nasca lines become visible on the desert floor, even from our height: guidelines like runways for interstellar landings; trapezoids of 100,000 square meters. An “owl man” beckons.

 

The other way these intellectual attention seekers can get someone to listen is by finding someone else’s thesis and agreeing with it, adding something that extends the argument. Not “No, you’re wrong because . . . but rather “Yes, and furthermore . . .”

The mammoth size of the figures and their sheer number attract our attention. We are surprised by their widespread distribution over an area that looks so inhospitable, a lifeless place where it almost never rains. The Nasca lines raise questions that beg for rational answers:

 

The blasé Chileans and Peruvians aboard our flight evince little interest in the phenomena, doubtless having viewed them many times. Author, however, joins other passengers – French, Italian, German, Japanese – in a collective awe.

From our vantage point the blue waters of the Pacific appear unruffled and serene, the mountain mass majestic, the coast a narrow band. All the more remarkable, then, that the features of spider, monkey and hummingbird are detectable below.

 

Why move tons of dirt around on a desert to create such drawings for no apparent reason? Why invest the vast amount of time that must have been required to construct such enormous figures, especially if no one could appreciate them by observation at ground level?

This transforms the relationship into teacher and student, but with no patronizing hierarchy. The plain is clumped another way, into lineages of master-pupil chains. It makes no difference whether or not these strategies are conscious.

 

On this ancient alluvial plain appear to the naked eye the celebrated geoglyphs, also called, variously, “drawings,” “markings,” or simply “the Nasca lines.” From an airplane they resemble a tangled mass, overlapping and intersecting one another.

My first impression, as a teacher, was that of an un-erased blackboard at the end of a busy day of classroom activity. As an astronomer, I also thought of the surface of the moon, an area that is totally unfit for life in any form that we yet know.

 

How could the construction on such a grand scale of such perfectly proportioned earth pictures have been accomplished? Was there a master plan? What technology was required to construct them? Were these marvels conceived by a single monomaniacal individual?

The pampas are strewn with shards of broken stone – flat fragments ranging from thumb size to chunks as large as 30 cm in diameter. Most of these rocks got there when ancient flooding tumbled them down from the Andes. Few famous wonders are less well understood.

 

Ever since our informant laid eyes on them more than 25 years ago, she has felt that the Nasca figures should be thought of as etchings. They were, she says, constructed by a subtractive or removal process, by taking away dark rock fragments.

How did the ancient inhabitants of Nasca create the lines? Clues to their method of execution have come from several sets of lines that for unknown reasons seem to have been abandoned in an unfinished state more than a thousand years ago.

 

One might reject the image as offensive to intellectual values, the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Very well. Let us adopt this as our starting point. Dispersed across an open plain are a number of persons pursuing truth. Why should anyone listen?

Most forms are straight lines or simple geometrical figures, but the eye-catchers are the figural flora and fauna. All cluster along a 26-square-kilometer strip hugging the southern bank of the Ingenio, which has always made me think they were a local phenomenon.

 

Obligingly the pilot has lowered our altitude to afford us a closer glimpse of these extraordinary, cartoonish but abstract, mesmerizing figures. Among the eighteen birds that we are told had been represented, we now see a few, including a frigate bird.

Once past Ingenio we will be heading on into Lima, to land at the capital of a very different civilization, one less given to the celebration of condor, pelican and cormorant, lizard, fox, fish and insect, much less to the half-bug/half bird or half-cat/half fish.

 

Some are so weird as to defy all reason. Take the second largest figure on the pampa. At 165 meters in length, it has the pincer jaws of an insect framed in a goggle-eyed bird’s head attached to rectangular wings by a concave neck. An appendage resembles an elephant’s trunk.

Then there’s the geoglyph whose head starts out like a monkey’s and ends with a coiled tail. It has protruding ears but afterward degenerates into a curve on one side and a rectangular shape on the other. Stick figure limbs complete this engaging, if unsettling, mutant.

 

The problem of forming a truth-recognizing community is exactly the same as the problem of dealing with attention seekers, and the remaining process is similar. The two strategies and their social processes – forming arguments and lineages – occur simultaneously.

Persons in lineages, learning something from one another, have something interesting to argue about; and what cultural capital they thereby possess influences who is attracted to joining the crowd for discussion on one side of an argument or another.

 

“The Inca Connection”: The Incas were the most famous of South America’s ancient civilizations. Where did they come from? The narratives and ceramic designs that they bequeathed make it clear that they descended from the Huari and Tiahuanaco empires.

By the twelfth century, these once mighty states had been reduced by drought to less tightly controlled communities. Legend has it that out of them emerged a skilled military leader named Pachacuti (his name means cataclysm), a century before the Spanish arrived.

 

Our plane descends. We glide in for our landing at Lima International Airport.

 

The Inca placed their garrison at Inkawasi. It lay at a strategic inter-coastal spot so as to control the single most important commodity shared by inhabitants then and now – water. The creation myth in the Huarochirí manuscript links water with native cosmologies.

The earth was a living creature risen out of the ocean. A document describes the combination of low and high land in terms of complementary dual poles: Peru is imagined as “a single world mountain rising out of female valleys to male snowcapped heights.”

♥

Author, arriving from the suburbs at 9:45 am, begins his approach on foot into the center of Lima, map in hand, along Paseo de la República, a narrow way unmarked by street signs, past its grimy if colorful buildings. He enters the Plaza San Martín.

Two symmetrical, beige, baroque monstrosities confront one another across an open space of 200 meters. Olive-clad police in bulletproof vests have gathered sociably about one of their motorbikes. We continue up a street that must be Jirón Carabaya.

 

The Inca king sat upon a throne ensconced in the east-facing wall of the Coricancha, literally golden (qori) enclosure (cancha), which they called the Temple of Ancestors. It was pierced by holes inlaid with precious stones. Others tell of tubs of gold, silver and emeralds.

Today, like many pre-Columbian buildings, the Coricancha is topped by a Spanish church, Santo Domingo. With its golden adornments (the Spanish called it the Temple of the Sun) it must have been a truly important edifice, like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

 

Only on the map can author identify the names of Lima’s streets so far. Though the inner city is being swept, all is nonetheless gritty and malodorous with garbage. Soot covers sidewalks, paving stones and even the facades of five-story buildings.

Window sill, door sill, advertisement and traffic sign alike are too filthy to touch. A security guard or police officer stands at nearly every corner. Rust red, olive, lemon, green and grey dominate the scene. Brass on a bank’s door is being polished.

 

For the Incas water is active. It rises out of the ocean up into the sky as the Milky Way, carried there by the dark-cloud llama constellation, who drinks from the sea every night before he ascends, then crashes down from the mountains to fecundate the welcoming earth.

The Huarochirí myth’s upland-lowland relationship is loaded with what Salomon calls “hydraulic sex”: “earth women offer their parched bodies to the water-huacas who rush down from the heights.” The lake Collquiri gushes over his sweatheart, Capayama.

 

Across the street from the Ministry of Justice a crowd of people is waiting for something to happen, their visages reflected in its blackened windows and door panes. Lotto salesmen confront us on the sidewalk in every block of the city.

We are passing a long line of idle yellow taxis. Crossing against red lights, according to the custom of Lima’s pedestrians, we arrive on foot at the Plaza Mayor’s Cathedral, Archiepiscopal Palace, City Hall and Governmental Palace.

 

Uncontrollably he releases himself over her body, so furiously that Capayama’s elders shouted, “Son-in-law, everybody’s mad at us!” “Don’t send so much water!” “Hey, Collquiri! Hold back on the water!” Collquiri plugged the hole in his dam with a blanket and other stuff.

But the more he plugged it, the more the barrier crumbled, and the dam failed to hold back the torrent, which kept bursting through. Meanwhile the people down below kept yelling at him nonstop: “PLUG IT UP!” They too, however, knew that the waters were sacred.

 

In front of author, between him and the vista of official buildings, an old man, a virtual invalid, stands and totters a step or two. At Plaza’s end, above a stone edifice, flies the red-white-and-red flag of Peru. Indigenous people are seated on benches.

Apparently unemployed, they have congregated about a fountain. Uniformly attired in black baseball caps, blue shirts and black pants, some have lined up across the way at the grating that protects the entrance to a blackened governmental office.

 

“Is Peru Next?” When Peruvians vote, they will choose between Ollanta Humala Tasso, a nationalist former army commander who proposes radical economic and social change, and Lourdes Flores Nano, a woman who would maintain the current neo-liberal policies.

Whoever wins, the results will echo across Latin America. A victory for Humala would confirm the waning appeal of the policies dominant on the continent since the 1980s and bolster the axis of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner.

 

We have arrived at this central square just in time, as a band, whose members are dressed in red coats with blue epaulettes, exits from one of the official buildings. Already playing a military march, it moves out flat-footedly toward the Government Palace.

There it deposits its four standard bearers, also dressed in red and blue, before continuing on. A 4’6” priest in white collar and black skirts passes in front of author. The band has now returned and is passing the grate within inches of the spectators’ faces.

 

Flores has lost support from frustration over the distribution of wealth and her links with powerful domestic and foreign business interests. Her running mate has had no qualms about asking favors of Vladimiro Montesinos, the loathed advisor to President Fujimori.

But Humala too is hardly a saint. In 1988 he attended a course at the infamous School of the Americas, the counterinsurgency training institute where many of the region’s most brutal military officers learned their craft. He also favors legalizing the profitable coca industry.

 

The military march finished, the band has turned to face us. Its members are mostly dark skinned Peruvians. Their amateurish concert now resumes. Author departs the Plaza, turning into Jirónde la Unión to skirt the Government Palace and continue.

At the end of this street emerges a vista of mountains and hills, atop which are situated lower-class dwellings. As we approach the bridge we stroll past a rank of military vehicles, including two small tanks in green-brown-and-cream camouflage.

 

Humala wants to make “a Latin American family” of like-minded peoples and governments. This has triggered fears in Washington that Peru could soon join Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Evo Morales’ Bolivia and Fidel Castro’s Cuba in a united anti-U.S. movement.

Humala’s father, Isaac, founded the ultra-nationalist Etnocacerismo, which stressed the racial superiority of “copper-colored” Indians and mestizos over lighter skinned Peruvians of Spanish descent. His mother suggested that gay men should be shot to end immorality.

 

As we cross the river the name of the street changes to Jirón Trujillo. Author looks deeply into the sad eyes, at the weary faces of the Peruvian citizens streaming toward him in the opposite direction, above the Rio Rimac’s (here turbulent) waters.

Their expressions are ones of anxiety, depression and despair. We are moving from a modern to a much more ancient part of this city, which was founded in 1535. A red-white-and-blue bus turns in front of us. A red-and-yellow bus approaches.

 

“We must impose discipline on the country,” Humala told a rally in Lima. He has pledged to rewrite the Constitution, cancel a free-trade pact with the U.S. and increase state control of the mines. “Our motherland is not for sale,” says Humala, who had a privileged upbringing.

He can be expected to draw support from those dissatisfied with the political system and those who have received little benefit from economic growth. “Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship,” says novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, “that is what this is all about.”

 

On this side of the river the fronts of buildings, some with elegant upper stories, are plastered with posters, many of the ads themselves also antiquated. One offers “Pollos y Parrillas.” The air is filled with noxious fumes from the traffic. Another, a “Hostal.”

It is hard to imagine eating or sleeping in this miasma, but the local guide gives the addresses of many hotels and much advice about “Peruvian Cuisine.” As author is glancing at its “Suggested Walking Tour,” we arrive at a Zapatería (a shoe store).

 

If you like sea food, you’re in for a treat. Try the “escabeche,” an appetizer of fish with onions and peppers. Scallops, “conchitas,” and mussels, “choros,” are also delicious. Any dish served “a lo macho” comes with a shellfish sauce. “Corvina,” sea bass, is an excellent choice.

Likewise shrimp, “camarones.” Good trout can be found in Lima and in the mountains. For chicken, order “aji de gallina,” served in a cream sauce. “Lomo Saltado” consists of morsels of beef sautéed with onions and peppers, served with potatoes and rice.

 

Up a side street is a group of neo-classical buildings that have had their simple, symmetrical stonework painted in rose and dark blue, beige and lighter blue, white and carmine, green and pink. A huge truck, two stories high, bears cases of Inca Cola.

A man on a scaffolding with a large brush is painting a grimy dark beige building a lighter beige, but no one has removed the garbage from its doorway, whose odor reminds one of a large North Indian city. Avenue Trujillo leads to Avenue F. Pizarro.

 

The Canon, accompanied by his servants, listened to all that was told him regarding Don Quixote’s life, his madness and his habits, along with a brief account of the beginning of his derangement and the events that had led up to his being put in the cage.

The churchman voiced his view of the matter: “Truly Señor Curate,” he said, “it is my opinion that those books of chivalry are harmful to the state. And while out of idle curiosity I have read the beginning of nearly all, I have never been able to finish one.”

 

We pause at the window of a shop selling old books, large editions in its window dating from long ago. Behind a modern sign rises a light blue and yellow cathedral. Some of the books have been rebound, but many are falling apart from age and neglect.

The pilasters of the cathedral have been painted white, its belfry left a grimy grey. The coatings of dust in this older section of town have grown multiple. Even an Inca Cola sign has become so obscured that one is not sure if the “Inca” might not be “Coca.”

 

“As I see it, this species of writing is in the same class with what are called Milesian Fables, which are nonsensical tales designed solely to amuse and not to instruct, and in which respect they are unlike those apologues which afford entertainment and proper instruction.

“Granting, even, that the chief purpose of such works is to amuse, how can it be achieved when they are so full of nonsense? For that beauty which the soul conceives must come from the harmony that it beholds, or contemplates, in those things presented to it by sight.”

 

Noise pollution in the street prevents author from recording his own observations. Accordingly, he must retrace his steps, so as to recreate and comment on his experience. Across the street stands the “Teatro Perricho,” now dilapidated and abandoned.

Author enters a small emporium of slot machines: “Red Rose,” reads the first; “Arana Idoro,” the second; “Horseshoes 77 / Banner Jackpots,” a third. Only half the patrons in the store are actively playing. “A Magic Dream”; “Royal Diamonds.”

 

“As for their probability, what shall we say of the readiness with which an hereditary queen throws herself into the arms of an unknown knight? Or the likelihood of a skinny lad slashing a giant tall as a tower and cutting him in half as if he were a sugar-pastry?

“In works of fiction there should be a mating between the plot and the reader’s intelligence. The possible should be made truly possible, things hard to believe smoothed over, and the mind held in suspense to create surprise and delight, that they may entertain.”

 

Mario Vargas Llosa published a long study of his friend García Márquez in 1971. Vargas Llosa’s own prolific fiction appeals to an urbane reader’s attention while still maintaining the denunciatory function seen as appropriate to the Latin American writer.

His first novel, set in a military academy near Lima, is about “macho” values instilled in the boys through bullying, betrayal, rape and murder. The boys represent a cross-section of Peruvian society. One can follow the action on a map.”

 

We re-cross the bridge, looking down into the rampant, muddy flood that rushes out of the mountains. We re-pass the official governmental buildings and continue on, turning right into Conde de Superunda, past the Convento de Santo Domingo.

Across from it, at benches filled with patrons, shoe shine boys are at work. We walk on farther, past the wall of the convent on which graffiti have been scribbled: “No a la dictadura,” says one, “Blue,” another, the crossbar of its “e” styled as an arrow.

 

Such was the power of Vargas Llosa’s denunciation that a thousand copies of the book were publicly burned. He was accused of having a degenerate mind and of being in the pay of Peru’s traditional enemy, Ecuador. His next book he set in a brothel.

But he baffled his reader’s realistic expectations with dual, fragmentary views of his characters over forty years’ time. (His reader could be a U.S. graduate student aware of the nouveau roman, or a Limeñan ignorant of the Amazonian hinterland.)

 

The Curate had listened to all this very closely, for the Canon impressed him as being a man of sound understanding. He told them that having a grudge against such works, he had burned all those that Don Quixote possessed, of which there had been a great many.

The Canon added, however, that he had found one good thing about them, the chance they afforded for a good mind to display its true worth, “for they offer a broad and spacious field over which the pen might run without impediment describing many things, such as:”

 

Realismo y Naturalismo llegaron a Hispanoamérica a finales de la centuria. Eran el eco literario del nuevo orden de valores laico y científico-positivista. Los realistas trataban de reflejar e interpretar la realidad, los naturalistas trataron de reproducirla objetivamente.

A finales de la centuria entra en crisis el orden de valores positivista y universalista y se produce una reacción general en defensa, de nuevo, de las señas de identidad hispanoamericanas y a favor del idealismo, a la vez que los literatos ensayaban nuevos lenguajes literarios.

 

“Shipwrecks, tempests, and battles; a captain with all the requisite qualities showing him as prudent, capable of anticipating the stratagems of the enemy, an eloquent orator in persuading or dissuading his soldiers, and exhibiting a ripened wisdom in council;

“Quick in making decisions, when it comes to biding his time; now a lamentable and tragic event and now some joyful and unexpected occurrence; he can picture here a lovely lady, modest, discreet and reserved, and there a Christian knight, gentle and brave.”

 

His third novel exhibited a greater narrative complexity, demanding of its readers (the U.S. graduate student and the woman from Lima) such attention to “seamlessly crafted layers of meaning” in a “political” novel set under the Odría military government.

In doing so it became an anatomy of an ignorant society which exactly evaded such interlocked complexities. “Magical realism” could never be applied to Vargas Llosa, only “realism,” a functional use of language, a mirror critically reflecting life.

 

A four-foot Indian woman, baby on her back, her head hidden in the hassock that surrounds her, skirts a graffito in black reading “Jap.” Before long we arrive at a palace whose dark blue stucco has faded but whose archway rises in fresh white.

Author stops for a haircut at a barbershop whose sign reads “Caesar-Augusto.” On the table top beneath the mirror in front of him sit: a pair of clippers, a bottle of medicinal alcohol and a large book concerned with The History of Salvation.

 

“The author might further show himself an astrologer, a cosmographer, a student of statecraft, or even upon occasion a necromancer. He might take as his theme the astuteness of Ulysses, the filial piety of Aeneas, the bravery of Achilles or the woes of Hector;

“The liberality of Alexander, the valor of Caesar, the clemency of Trajan, the prudence of Cato – in short, all those attributes that go to make an illustrious man perfect, as are shown in a single individual and shared among many individuals.

 

We have returned to the Catedral and the other buildings of the principal square, where, in anticipation of demonstrations, the Policía Nacional have now parked a black bus with wire-grated windows, within it, a squadron of men in riot-gear.

As author pauses the bus starts up to leave for another location. Outside Banco de Comercio has been parked a tank. We turn left, in search of a demonstration, passing in the process a man in a double-breasted navy blue suit, its front unbuttoned.

 

“These books,” the Canon concluded, “by their nature, provide the author with an unlimited field in which to try his hand at the epic, lyric, tragic and comic genres and to depict all the moods that are represented by these most pleasing branches of poetry.

Here Cervantes interrupts the Canon’s thoughts (as we are presently interrupted by an eruption of chants from the demonstrators in the Plaza), but not before the Canon adds with a flourish: “For the epic may be written in prose, as well as in verse.”

 

Author approaches the vicinity of the loud demonstration taking place before the Defensoría del Pueblo. Ranks of officials in what appear to be military uniforms rush to close off the Plaza. Behind them a statue raises its hand on high to Heaven.

We are in the Calle San Pedro, safe from harm, as the protest, along with its natural enemies, continue unabated. A motorbike marked “Prensa–TV” has been parked on the zebra stripes of the intersection leading into this very baroque Plaza.

 

El arte del barroco, que sirve de refugio a las sensualidades prohibidas, en México salva un abismo aún mayor. El barroco mexicano colma el vacío entre la promesa utópica del Nuevo Mundo imaginado por Europa y la realidad terrible de la colonización impuesta por Europa

– la política de Nicolás Maquiavelo. Moro y Maquiavelo, Erasmo de Rotterdam abre el campo del humanismo, la serena locura donde todo es relativo, tanto la fe como la razón. No hay influencia intelectual moderna más grande en el mundo hispánico que la del sabio de Rotterdam.

 

So, then, are the Nasca lines the eighth wonder of the World? Given that they are one of a kind and the persistence of the belief that a staggering effort was involved in making them, my answer is an emphatic “Yes.” Their very existence has stretched our imaginations.

To comprehend them, we’ve raised every imaginable explanation, from runways for spaceships to runways for Olympians, from op art to pop art to astronomical observatories. I have always marveled at the imagination of the people who created these “lines.”

 

A heavy-set woman in black trudges upward, a small gold cross at her neck. We have arrived at a park next to the principal university. Three municipal policemen with large black mastiffs on leashes guard its otherwise open entranceway.

“Liz y Víctor” (within a heart) reads a graffito, deeply incised in the bark of a tree growing in the University’s precinct. Searching for a more popular scene, author heads down an avenue filled with buses, where police car lights are flashing.

 

El barroco, asimismo, abre un espacio donde el pueblo conquistador puede enmascarar su Antigua fe y manifestarla en la forma y el color, ambos abundantes, de un altar de ángeles morenos y diablos blancos. (En Los cinco soles de México, de Carlos Fuentes)

We all have the capacity for seeking reflections of ourselves in the bright pink sand. Where the astronomer sees the Pampa as a celestial textbook, the artist views it as a canvas for creativity, the anthropologist as a sacred place for coordinating activity among people.

 

“Corazón,” reads a graffito. Along the avenue are many barber shops, their walls covered with glamour photos of beautiful girls and handsome young men. Street vendors are selling dark glasses for both sexes, in a variety of fashionable colors.

In the neighborhood of the University it is not surprising to find that the restaurants, many open air and spilling out on the sidewalk, are cheap. “Sopa d/casa, seco d/pollo, c/garbanzo” reads a typical menu in black, “refresco” in red, “3.50.”

 

Although a number of scholars had earlier catalogued Cervantes’ references to America – to parrots and alligators, cannibals and tobacco, etc. – the American connection has been seriously underestimated and, until recently, under-theorized in academic Cervantine studies.

The availability of Spanish colonial traditions of historiography, however, has been shedding new light on what had seemed but a shadowy partnership between early modern Europe and America. J. H. Elliott has argued against any “historiographical divorce.”

 

On the street author is shown a small bookcase, miniaturized, its volumes likewise but half an inch high, each filled with hundreds of pages of printing. One shelf reads “Luz,” others, “Amor” and “Felicidad.” We are passing the Maison de Santé.

Out of curiosity he enters a shop that is offering secretarial service on word processors, photocopying, books for sale, they all wrapped in cellophane to keep them clean. Two compositors stand before two cases of type, setting texts by hand.

 

“I myself was once tempted to write a book of chivalry,” said the Canon, “observing all the points that I have mentioned; if I am to confess the truth, I have more than a hundred sheets already written. I have even shown them to several people fond of this sort of reading.

In convening the leaders of 31 countries Brazil flashed its credentials as leader of Latin America. But the host country’s popular president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, an ally of the United States, could not prevent the leaders from celebrating the inclusion of the Cuban president.

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We have just crossed the equator on our way from Perú to Colombia.

 

“Some were learned; others ignorant, being concerned solely with the pleasure that they derive from listening to nonsense; but all appreciated my effort. I did not, however, continue, since I did not wish to subject myself to the confused judgment of the public.”

Nor from using the occasion to attack the United States and Europe for their role in causing the global economic crisis that is roiling this region as well. “Cuba is returning to where it always should have been,” said Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president. “We ourselves are complete.”

 

We are traveling at 1000 kilometers per hour, 37,000 feet above the earth.

 

“All these pieces, whether purely fictitious or historical in character, are obviously nonsensical, without head or tail, yet the public takes pleasure in witnessing them and regards them as worthy productions, though they are far from being very good.”

The United States became a punching bag at the three-day conference, which ended Wednesday in this tourist haven of Bahia State, not far from Salvador. Castro was hardly alone in assailing the U.S. and what he called its “neo-liberalist” model for the credit crisis.

 

Arrived in Bogotá, author is frisked for weapons and enters the transit lounge.

 

Meanwhile, Sancho took the opportunity of speaking to his master without the constant presence of the Curate and the barber, whom he looked upon with suspicion. “Master,” he said, going up to the cage, “I want to get a load off my conscience, if you will.”

President Alan García of Peru and President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia were the only heads of state who did not attend. Vice President Francisco Santos of Colombia said that Uribe, a staunch U.S. ally, had had to stay home to cope with deadly floods in his country.

 

Along with German passengers he awaits his Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.

 

“It concerns your ‘enchantment,’” said Sancho. “The truth is that those two with their faces covered are the Curate of our village and the barber, and it is my belief that they have plotted, out of pure spite, to carry you off, because you are so far ahead of them in famous deeds.”

With the recent rise of China, a principal export destination, and the visit by President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia to court Latin America, there have been more frequent reminders that the United States is becoming an ever more distant player in the affairs of the region.

 

“Kein Prozess gegen Pinochet in Europa,” sagt Die Frankfurter Algemeine.

 

“Ask me whatever you like, Sancho my son,” replied Don Quixote, “and I will give you an answer that will satisfy you. As for those who accompanied us being the Curate and the barber, our fellow townsmen, that is who they may appear to you to be.”

“There is no question that this is about excluding the United States,” said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research group in Washington. “Brazil is demonstrating its convening power in matters that concern Latin America.”

 

“Brittische Innenminister ‘neigt’ zur frei lassen,” reads the sub-head.

 

“But you are not to believe that this is what they really are. What you are rather to understand is that if they have this appearance in your eyes, it must be for the reason that those who have put a spell upon me have seen fit to assume that form and likeness.

“The United States is no longer the major interlocutor in the region,” Hakim said. The presidents all saluted the inclusion of Cuba in the meeting, an expression that indicated frustration with U.S. efforts to exclude Cuba from hemispheric deliberations.

 

Before reaching Colombia author discovered that he had been relieved in the Lima airport of his Spanish pesetas, which he bought and set on his briefcase preparatory to putting them in his wallet. One had been warned about thievery in such a venue.

 

“For it is easy enough that the enchanters took whatever form and so assumed the appearance of our friends expressly for the purpose of leading you to think what you do, thus involving you in a labyrinth of fancies that even Theseus could not extricate himself from.

 

In the Frankfurt Flughafen, as he is awaiting his flight for Barcelona, author purchases a copy of The International Herald Tribune. A letter to the editor expresses the view that England should “extradite Lady Thatcher instead of Pinochet.”

 

“I find myself,” Don Quixote continued, “shut up in a cage, knowing that only a superhuman power could have put me behind these bars. This, my enchantment, is like none that I have ever read about in all the histories of knights-errant laid under a spell.”

 

Arrived at last in Barcelona, he fetches his backpack and heads down a long hallway looking for customs and passport control. Finding none, he spots an open door and exits directly into the capital of Cataluña, to resume his quixotic adventures.

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