The arrival
The plane landed at two in the morning. At the escalator, a night populated by large insects welcomed the passengers by wrapping them in a cloud of steam, dense and sizzling like the dragon's breath1.
While I waited for the luggage I noticed that Cuiabá's2 airport was full of parrots. As if they were inside a monumental birdcage of glass and concrete, these parrots were portrayed on everything from paintings, postcards, posters and advertising signs to clothes, tapestries, hammocks, towels, plates, and souvenirs. Their endless kaleidoscopic display of pure colors expanded throughout the entire building. It seemed almost logical, yet uncanny that an airport in the tropics would resemble a modernist/shamanistic temple devoted to birds.
I took a taxi to the Veneza Hotel in the center of the city. The driver chain-smoked and never stopped talking. He offered me a tour of Mato Grosso for the daily low fee of fifty dollars without gas. His name was Francisco Terraza and was born in the Bolivian town of Barchelón, originally named Barcelona yet because the natives never learned the correct pronunciation Barcelona became known as Barchelón. We drove around looking for the hotel and Francisco told me about a bad experience he once had when working in a shoe factory in the district of Lanus in Buenos Aires. The factory went suddenly bankrupt owing the personnel several months of late salary. He also shared the tale of when his grandfather had sold one small pig and three chickens to the guerrilleros who were wandering around Barchelón in 1967. With certain pride, Francisco added that in those days he was just six years old and assisted the bearded foreigners at pulling out the feathers from the dead chickens.
We finally found the hotel in one of the avenues we had previously passed. Since the concierge was half asleep, Francisco helped me carry the luggage upstairs. Before leaving he asked me if I remembered the turmoil surrounding Che Guevara s death. I said no while searching for a bill in my wallet. He did not accept my tip and instead gave me a card of the car service, on which he wrote his home number. After he left I went straight to the shower. The water from the cold tap felt warm and the soap was a miniature. I don't know why I lied to him, maybe because I feared he had yet another anecdote to tell. I will never forget the photo of Che's corpse with open eyes covering the front page of the newspaper, since it impressed me in a kind of superstitious way. My father doubted the veracity of the news and said it was a simulation. But as a child, I knew it wasn't. In the weeks that followed the assassination I developed the habit of peeking inside the church to make sure the crucified Christ had not opened his eyes.3
After the shower I sat on the balcony to drink a beer. Giant moths were circling the mercury lights and on the ground fat toads waylaid eager to eat them. The toads bouncing against the grid of the tile floor resembled a bizarre checker game.
1 Sp. Ardiente como el suspiro del
dragón, implies that the dragon exhales it's sizzling
breath out of love for the princess. Slogan of the radio program
Jardín Prohibido (Forbidden Garden), aired by Radio Colonia
to Buenos Aires in the seventies. In between playing romantic songs,
the radio show host read letters allegedly sent in by the audience
narrating tragic love stories. The author's reference to the slogan
portrays as impendingly kitsch the romantic notion of a South
American Paradise.
2 Cuiabá, capital of the state of North Mato Grosso in Brazil
3 The paragraph exemplifies how icons often lead to deceitful
conclusions: religious attributes are ascribed to a revolutionary
leader through visual resemblance. The last sentence insinuates that
the discomforts and desires affiliated to mimetic representations
(statues of saints) resides in the threat, posed by their presence,
of them coming "back to life". In the author's view mimetism and iconic
resemblance are deceitful yet unavoidable, thus welcomed in their
ambiguity. Misinterpretation of visual data or the misvisualization of
text were at play for the new world to become constructed as a mythical
paradise. Columbus believed the entrance to Eden was at the gulf of
Paria in the mouth of the Orinoco river. He based his assertion on the
descriptions and assumptions recorded by Marco Polo during his trip
through Asia.
