As time went on, the unease as yet unaware of its name became more concrete, its nature clearer to me, until it attained a lucidity no less painfuclass="underline" I began to feel that the earth was neither solid nor durable under my feet. And it was not long before the shifting sands of reality, the constant changes I saw in the men, animals, and things of the prairie, induced in me an extraordinary degree of anxiety for such a young child. The strange and disquieting way things had of coming into being, then decaying, manifesting in days and nights, springtimes and falls, births and deaths, joys and misfortunes, whose mysterious ups and downs I shared with my prairie tribe, inclined me toward two movements of the spirit that I still haven’t abandoned: a tendency to doubt, which made me wary of anything that bears too visible a sign of transition, the colour of finitude; and a deep yearning for what is permanent, a desire cherished to the point of tears for a world in whose stability Time slept and Space foundered.
The devastation of Time was what first struck my childish eyes. So deeply did I come to feel the corrosive passage of the hours that I came to imagine Time as an invisible river whose mordant waters, tumbling over things, gnawed at everything, dwellings and their inhabitants, the prairie and its beasts. That materialization of time made such an impression on me that during my sleepless nights I could feel it moving the tiny wheels in clocks, or opening up rooftops to make them leak and drip, or biting the walls like a stealthy rodent. Ah, I remember a wedding party in the big house at Maipú! The night of cheer had the body of a god who danced among a hundred living mirrors and a hundred iridescent lamps, to the music of wild strings and impassioned brass. The children’s wonderment, the men’s high spirits, the flashy swirls of the women — ah, it all had me completely enraptured in the moment! And just when Grandfather Sebastián, drink in hand and tottering like Silenus, ventured to dance a mazurka amid laughter and shouts of encouragement; in a rare moment when the lined foreheads of regretful aunts were smoothed beneath their big black shawls; at that very instant, I heard an admonitory voice resonate in my being, and felt a glacial wind suddenly whisk me away from the party and its rhythm, devouring lights and sweeping away sounds. And before my eyes an incredible transmutation took place: I seemed to see time racing ahead in those women and men entwined in dance; I saw time working on them, making faces wrinkle, eyes grow sunken, gums deteriorate; I saw all of them twitching and curling like leaves in a burning tree; and I saw as well how the walls cracked, how the rooftops blackened, how the house in Maipú crumbled to dust. Then I wanted to cry out, but the cry of alarm died on my lips. And I fled headlong into the night, far from the house that was crashing down on all those heads. And indelibly etched in my memory is the image of that little boy, clinging to his watchful horse and sobbing in the middle of a wedding night, in front of the house full of music.
In parallel, the notion of Space, too, took on the aspect of a sorrow, a perception enhanced by the prairie, whose expanse is measured in the lather of horses, and where east and west, north and south were roads sliding away to absence, points where eyes searched longingly for someone’s return. But on new-moon nights my sense of Space acquired the dimensions of terror: lying in the grass, my eyes gazed into the sky, where the constellations of the South seemed to hang over me like the thickly clustered grapes of a heavenly vine. And I tell myself now that Don Bruno, the rural schoolmaster, should not perhaps have suggested in class the notion of appalling distances mediating between those worlds and ourselves; nor should he have calculated the thousands of years it would take for a railway train to get to the star Betelgeuse. Because I remember that, as I gazed at those stellar dust clouds, my soul collapsed in abysmal vertigo, entirely overcome by the brutality bearing down from above, crushing it to dust as if in a mortar. And I sobbed quietly, like a child lost in a wood, not yet knowing that the whole swarm of those worlds could fit into the tiny space of human understanding, since the intellect is essentially non-spatial, free of the three dimensions of Space. Recalling those childish tears, it occurs to me now that many children must still weep on the prairie, beneath the oppressive weight of southern nights, in order that joyous ascending pathways might be opened up in the pure sky of the Argentine fatherland.
Little by little the winds of anguish holding sway over my spirit began to grant me expansive hours of respite. And, little by little, prevailing over its continual devastation, the world of forms and colours started to reveal its secrets when I was in a happily contemplative state, a state whose virtue I did not then understand, but which freed me from myself and my terrors, lifting me up into sweet spiritual climes never before enjoyed. The splendour of those forms (spikes of wheat, horses, flowers) did not die on the prairie, for even though they defected at each material sunset, they were reincarnated, their beauty undiminished, according to the rhythm of the seasons; their splendour thus not only offered me a simulacrum of the stability I dreamed of but also awoke in my being deep resonances I didn’t understand, as though my mind and worldly objects had struck up an intimate dialogue in which the objects spoke and my mind vaguely responded. Only later did I understand the rapturous language of beauty. And I knew that my destiny was to pursue beauty according to the movement of love. Meanwhile, I clung to the security and delight graciously confirmed by the forms of creatures: in the springtime I witnessed their birth, and my heart rejoiced; I watched them die, and my heart became wintry. So it was that for some years my soul, the soul of a child, seemed to revolve around the very poles of the earth. Thanks to a floral aunt (if not a garden angel), I tended a miniature paradise behind the house, where carefully groomed trees perfected the miracle of fruit, a garden in whose shade flourished legions of flowers not normally found in the sunburnt and windswept prairie. Adam in my garden or Robinson on my island, I roamed there at all hours: amid its beauty my mind drifted about, buzzing, probing into the intelligible nectary of things, like a bumblebee seeking some suspected honey. I presided over the birth of forms: I watched them grow until they achieved a splendour that overcame the limits of matter, a splendour painful by virtue of its very intensity. And those colours, odours, and flavours would accumulate until I would sob softly, as if in nostalgia for the taste of some lost Eden, retrieved perhaps by my savouring those forms, bursting at the seams in their desire to tell me something. Then would come the autumn and twilight of the same cherished forms I’d seen arise in the garden, their decline now casting the sweet pall of death over my spirit. And just as the earth disrobed and put her treasures away, all of her seeming to curl up on the threshold of sleep, so my heart folded inward, entered its winter, growing outwardly drowsy but inwardly alert to the process of its deliberations. Winter days and nights went filing by: on the horizon a storm growled like a dog, approached, withdrew, and suddenly charged over the prairie with its squadron of clouds and lashing wind; rain fell, tapped against roof tiles and windowpanes, laid seige to the residence at Maipú with floodwaters, made windows blind. It was pleasant to wander through the darkened bedrooms, or seek out homey smells in clothing, or read forgotten sheets of old paper, or remember the delight of a flower or butterfly I’d embalmed between the pages of a book. And later a vague restlessness would lead to a premature, delightful espionage on spring’s arrivaclass="underline" keeping close watch over the trees in the garden, I measured the depth of their slumber, pored over their naked branches for an emergent sprout or bud. My yearning disappointed, I would root around in the soil and exhume hyacinth bulbs to see if they were still asleep or if their first tender shoots were out yet. In vain! The great revelation would come suddenly, one morning, after a night of warm rain. It only remained to go out to the garden and linger there, enchanted by a wild display of wisterias coming back to life.