Broken Walks

When still a child, I had a friend in New Zealand whom I never met. My father got to know him during a train journey in Uruguay before I was born. He was called Stuart Marshall, lived in 8 Ranfurly Road in Auckland and had a farm where he raised sheep. He was making a trip of studies through South America and did not speak any Spanish whatsoever. My father, as many others of his generation, was an autodidact in several areas. Besides Galician, his father’s language, he had studied the very difficult Basque (his mother’s family language), French, Italian and even Russian, to be able to read some classics in the original, as he used to say. Even though he read English, often and fluidly, he slaughtered the speech because of his complete lack of training. By the end of the thirties, it was difficult to find opportunities to speak anything other than Spanish or Portuguese in the wide regions of South America. My father alleviated the problem by going down to the harbour to practice English with the sailors. He and Stuart Marshall became friends and exchanged letters for almost forty years.

I knew that I had been born in the southernmost capital in the world. This consciousness of the South was maintained in Montevideo by the presence of the Southern Cross and by the hurt penguins arriving to the winter beach. We used to take them home where they regained strength with fish and poultices. When we took them back to the coast, they crossed the beach with comical urgency and swam straight towards the horizon, never looking back. I also knew that Cape Town and Santiago de Chile, which I envisaged as equally distant and imaginary places, shared a parallel with my neighborhood. Lying on my bed, I tried to imagine Cape Town and Table Mountain, Santiago and the Mapocho, and imagined the children of these places looking at my stars at confused hours.

Each Christmas, and until I reached eleven or twelve, Stuart Marshall used to send me books of Rupert the Bear which I listened to with devotion in strange paternal translations. And each Christmas my father translated my greetings into a letter of exotic and incomprehensible combinations which I copied letter by letter.

I know that in Stuart Marshall’s farm there was a tree that was a curiosity in the region as it belonged to an unknown species. With my father’s help the conclusion was reached that it was a South American variety (I cannot remember which). Probably, they agreed, it had grown from a seed carried in the wool of a sheep that had made the trip from the pampas to New Zealand.

I can ever since evoke in New Zealand’s landscape, hills and a lonely tree’s profile I have never seen but which I would recognize if I happened upon it.

I have spent a good part of my childhood perched on a tree that grew in front of a house my parents had on the coast of the River Plate. There, I have read books, taken my afternoon meals, listened and told stories with my friends, I have learned something about bird and insect life. There, among the branches and leaves of that casuarina, I have felt at home. I have always known that the sound of the wind among the foliage’s threads was the sound of the South.

The horizons of the southern Atlantic regions of South America are level reaches, sometimes undulating. High skies and flat light, sparse vegetation, lonely prairies, processions of posts, lines of barbed wire and cattle. Sheep or cows graze with muzzles to the ground. Sometimes they look at us and then go back to their methodical and quiet routines. We know (and how could we not!) that those cows, those sheep, those horses between horizons stroll their shadows among rocks and lichens that had aboriginal names. Mixed with the cattle, the fences, the brush and the silent trails the landscape is spotted by small tree groves. They are planted there so that the relentless and energetic summer’s sun would not burn the cattle’s heads. To reach one of these groves one must walk through brush and pastures as if shipwrecked. Actually, they are called “islands” and are populated by bird nests and echoes. Most of the birds are small parrots, green and boisterous, roused by just about anything and whose ongoing riot contrasts with the silence of the fields. Inside these islands, grass is particularly high and one walks brushing aside dead branches and dry cow pats. The islands are, mostly, eucalyptus woodlets that have substituted the indigenous flora.

We may or may not know it. We may be tired of being from places usurped for ever. We may be used to the presence of Other among Us. Maybe not. We may have accepted incoherence as much as we accept logic’s nervous gesture. Maybe daily life always has, embodied in ourselves, breaks and failures, suspended tales. It may be we do not care much about that. Maybe we do not care about anything.

Eucalyptuses are found all over the American landscape, from Patagonia to the northern coast of California. Annika, my wife, born in southern Sweden, cannot avoid associating the aroma of eucalyptuses with the woods she got to know in her first visit to Uruguay. Even in Spain, in the vast sea of eucalyptuses that replaces in Galicia the old oaks, chestnuts, walnuts, birches, pines and firs, she perceives the smell of South America.

Rodnay Rosas Walker, with whom we shared a study in Montevideo barely after adolescence, took me once on a trip to the Blue Mountains. From the Three Sisters we saw the air coloured by these infinite woods. Numb with cold, we had to abandon this landscape and its disorder of feathers and screeches from the variegated parrots in the middle of a sleet storm.

In order to keep warm, I had bought a red handmade pullover in a mountain village. Sheltering from the storm, we had a coffee in a small place served by a Uruguayan woman who had lived in Mozambique. She got animated by the presence of two fellow countrymen and gave away pieces of her life story in a brief conversation. She told us she loved Mozambique; that she had shared a house with a Swiss woman and two Spaniards until she separated her husband, a Chilean engineer; that life in Australia was hard for the immigrants because of the racism; but that, in contrast to Montevideo, here there were really a democracy, civic culture and respect for the individual. I do not know what Rodnay was thinking then, but I know I thought that in that “here” of the woman there were many and unnamable Blue Mountains.

We left at last the skyscrapers and suburbs of Johannesburg. We had just seen, in Northern Transvaal, the huge African geological fault generated in the times of old Gondwana, together with Alfredo Pernin, who bored on with studies and curiosity for Geology. From the advantage of majestic, red bluffs, we had admired the huge gorges, the deep rifts and the plain extending all the way to the Indian Ocean. A baboon and I managed to scare each other when we suddenly met among the brushes. We ran away from each other, each howling in his own way, invoking the calm of each one’s species.

That night, we rested in a hotel of small cabins with African names and paintings of wild animals on the walls. I recall that my bathroom had a painted hippo with its mouth open that ineffably parodied the WC with its open lid by its side. Alfredo and I registered, and the Boer owner of the place openly expressed his suspicion of two bearers of Swedish passports who were not blond with blue eyes. We melancholically stared at him and avoided his rancorous hospitality by changing subject and paying attention to the English songs with which his sister, sitting at a badly tuned piano, contaminated our dinner.

In Johannesburg we had met Pepe, son of Black and Hindu Africans. He had been born in Durban and was tired of being looked at with racial distrust by Blacks, Whites and Hindus. He told us, in a moment of sincerity and anger, that he sometimes passed for Italian, which is why he called himself Pepe, that his innermost wish was to make it to Italy and disappear there, adapted for ever more (“another one among many”, he said), and that he wanted to leave that land of others: Africa. He was lean, well proportioned, with fine features, easy smile and gestures between urgent and indifferent. According to him, his racial type and learned manners corresponded to a symmetry likely to be found in Rome. His second choice was Mexico.

There are easy cheats when travelling that sometimes it is amusing to allow oneself. We had just had a speedy lunch in the outskirts of Sydney, while looking at a surfing school for children and small waves coated with white quick foam. We had a photo taken in front of the horizon and I knew, physically, that I was seeing again that line of water and sky that I had so many times seen from Chile’s coasts. Seen from the other side, the horizon looked the same but it was not. Until that moment, there had always been something else beyond the horizon, but that morning in Sydney, it was me, beyond the horizon, looking towards this side.

Carlos Capelán

Bergen, Norway; Malmö, Sweden 2004

Text from an academic performance presented at the ¨Empires, Ruins and Networks: Art in Real Time¨ seminar at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia during the year 2004