June 16, 1998 Jefferson City

We have followed him there over the years, through the connecting airports in Bogotá and Santiago, through changes in government and family fortunes we were barely aware of, following him on faith, depending on him for everything, for he didn't bother to teach us the language. At first, of course, everything comes through him, from ham sandwiches to passports. And, of course, this mattered less the first time we went, for while connecting in Miami, I was still busy learning my own language, murmuring possible words to myself.

Boarding, broading, monkey, monkley, spearmint, splearmint.

I picked up on something then, while listening to him translate his step-mother's compliments to her, while playing with cousins who bore for me (an bear) a relentless affection, while listening to whatever the solider said to my grandmother as she pulled me through a checkpoint to ice cream on the other side of her street in Buenos Aires.

The early word of mine, the one I could pick out, was meeda as lettered by my ear. It only became mira (familiar command form, mirar) sometime in middle school Spanish class. Tortuga was also early to my Spanish world, for my uncle Ormand kept a turtle that swam in the pool and I had been well cautioned against it and stayed clear of any corner of the year in which it had lately been seen lurking.

If it seems that I mix the city and the country together quite freely in my remembrances, it is likely because our trips are also taken according to his plan, the youngest of three brothers must be acutely aware of family obligations and this often means waking in the city only to board a plane the next morning bound for the interior. The fact of heat in December is not interesting, but that the parrot I remembered from my first trip still lived was. He hung in the same spot as twenty years ago, though he had long since ceased to speak the names of my cousins. Uncle Ormand himself had died trying to pass a truck.

He would see not always family but schoolmates as well, the same as uncles to us, who had grown into the expected positions and some even helped run the country. It must have been some relief, these reunions, and we kids felt ourselves to be the magic charms without which conversation might soon exhaust itself and everyone would again notice the maid arranging high tea in the other room. We would often spend a day or two in the city before arranging our way upcountry by train or to meet relatives made cross for having driven down hours to see the North Americans.

Nor does this account go where I want it to, or in the way I want it to go to dwell on the parallel nature of the countries, to give how, in the country, one might easily mistake himself for a Texan riding in the usual Chevy truck, talking Spanish--true, but that isn't rare of course, in Texas--past fencepost probably manufactured in some city in common, but when one looks closely every fifth or so stake is home to a swallow's nest, and that the trees send down tendrils and have roots so high that they are technically plants (we are in the parque zoológioco now--back in the city) and that that flock of sparrows on the horizon resolves itself into of all things, parrots. An irrigation ditch in Texas looks the same as one here, but that shouldn't be the truth.

All my foreign places should be as small and close and lush as the books that produce them. India should not have evergreen trees, though I have seen photos to the contrary. Oh, these people, these cousins and the bond we all so quickly assume. Based on what? After a while no one even exchanged baby pictures. But I could still ride out with my cousin in his Chevy, be shown the windbreaks where, from time to time, the parrot nests must be pulled down with robes and shot. But they never come down to the city, the cousins, not that I remember. It is no wonder he has fixed on a young of his own, someone whom he can keep in touch with and feel no hint of abuse or advantage taken. We have interest there. One side of that ditch, and the land for several hundred hectares hence, is ours. And it supports something like eight head of cattle per hectare the turf is so lush (the same, to my eye, as the swards one sees while driving through the King Ranch in South Texas) and, in this place, loans and debts are burdened and paid in land, as inflation has been so fierce in the decades since I was born that it made sense to move barterward when one uncle or the other was in mind of some scheme that must needs backing.

So we are going back there, to look at that land yet again and I am writing early, still stateside because he will be joining us from Santiago a day or two after we arrive. I will have to translate everything then and it will leave me tired and with less time to write. Back to that twice-taxed land, she and I, from Jefferson City, my sister from Positano Italy and only after we are assembled at his cousin's will he fly in from Santiago.

Yesterday the control tower at Ezeiza went black due to sabotage. Such an act, if it didn't kill us outright could seriously throw our schedule off. But we would have still seen those hectares that contribute in a tiny way to the infrastructure of the United States, if only from the window of a plane going down into darkness.