The light shouts, the air dances. Each person is a walking color. The black bodies cast green and blue shadows, and the glorious breeze contains so many shades that the rainbow hides its head for fear of looking foolish.
Above the sea, splashed across the slopes of the flayed mountains, Port-au-Prince presents itself to the eyes as a shrill palette of color, where life gets distracted and forgets how little it lasts and how much it hurts.
Could it be that the city imitates the artists who paint the city? Or is it without help of any kind that she transforms her garbage into beauty?
A Dictionary of Colors
According to the surviving Indians on the banks of the Paraguay River, plumage provides color and power.
Green parrot feathers confer style on whoever wears them, and they revive dying plants.
If it weren’t for the pink feathers of the spoonbill bird, the cactus would bear no pears.
Black duck feathers are good for softening bad moods.
White swan feathers chase away pests.
The macaw’s red feathers call down the rain, and his yellow ones summon good news.
And the sad gray feathers of the rhea give verve to the human song.
The Sevencolors
Dante D’Ottone was walking through Rodo Park, wandering among the trees, when he spied a woman kneeling before an enormous telescope pointed at the lake.
“Excuse me. . may I?”
The woman pulled away from the lens. “Take a look.”
And Dante discovered the sevencolors, a little bird you never see in Montevideo, fluttering over the lake.
She told him she’d wanted a pair of binoculars because she liked bird-watching so much, but she couldn’t afford them. One Sunday at the Tristan Narvaja flea market she found this telescope amid a lot of other old junk, and for a few pesos it was hers.
The sevencolors flitted about unawares, while the telescope pursued that jubilance of the air.
The King
In a park in Gijón, someone calls from the treetops.
When all but the whispering breeze in the leaves has receded, a cry that sounds human breaks the silence.
It is the night call of the peacock.
During the day, he flaunts his splendors. Dragging his long feathered tail, always dressed for a party, the cock struts and preens. When he spins around and fans his leafy blue-green crown of a tail, his luminous beauty thrills passersby and humbles every other bird in the park.
Ducks, drakes, swans, geese, pigeons, and sparrows all move as a flock flying or swimming on the lake. Together they chat, eat, sleep. But the peacock lives alone, far from other peacocks, and he seeks out no one.
He who was born to be looked at looks at no one.
When night falls and the people have gone, he flies to the highest branch of an empty tree, and he sleeps. Alone.
Then he calls out.
Art History
“Look, Papa! Oxen!”
Marcelino Sautuola craned his neck. In the light from his lantern, he made them out. Oxen they weren’t. On the roof of the cave, painted by deft hands, were bison, elk, horses, and wild boars.
Not long after, Sautuola published a pamphlet on the paintings he’d discovered, thanks to his daughter, in a cave at Altamira. They were, he claimed, prehistoric art.
From all corners came speleologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists; no one believed him. They said the paintings were done by an artist friend of Sautuola’s or some other practical joker from the European art scene.
Later on, it all became clear. The Paleolithic hunters of long ago pursued more than their prey. As a spell to ward off hunger and fear, or just because, they also pursued beauty in flight.
Memory in Stone
In the depths of a cave by the Pinturas River, a hunter pressed his bloodstained hand to the stone wall. The handprint marked a moment of truce between the urgency of killing and the terror of dying. Sometime later, next to that print, another hunter laid his soot-blackened hand. And other hunters followed, leaving the stone wall dotted with prints the color of blood, ashes, earth, or plants.
Thirteen thousand years later, near the Pinturas River in the town of Perito Moreno, someone writes on a wall, “I was here.”
The Painter
Güscardo Amendola, a fellow from the neighborhood, was going to paint a mural in a bar on the waterfront. He invited me to come along.
He didn’t bring a box of paints or brushes or a ladder or anything. This wasn’t how I imagined Michelangelo on his way to the Sistine Chapel, but my youth gave me no right to ask questions.
A large black wall awaited us.
Amendola climbed up on a chair and from his pocket pulled out a coin with a serrated edge. Coin in hand, he went on the attack. The sharp edge scored the wall with long white lines that crisscrossed without rhyme or reason. Clueless, I watched him thrust and parry. After a few more lunges, I saw a lighthouse appear out of the blackness, a powerful lighthouse rising above the rocks to illuminate the waves.
That lighthouse, born from a coin, would go on to save many a sailor from shipwreck, be they on deck or leaning drunkenly against the bar.
The Photographer
He was a soccer player for Cuba’s national team when a ball to the head knocked him flat.
He looked to be dead. Sometime later he woke up in the hospital. Alive. Blind.
Now Hiladio Sanchez is a photographer. Camera in hand, he turns his magical touch to visual imagery. He chooses the subject that sounds best, paces off the distance, and adjusts the shutter according to the heat of the sun. And when everything is ready, he shoots.
Hiladio photographs the sunlight that governs hours and people as they pass.
He does not photograph moonlight. Every night, those freezing fingers touch his face. And the blind man plays deaf.
The Sculptors
Piltriquitrón Hill has its head in the clouds. Until recently charred ruins, that head is now a forest of carvings.
After one of the blazing fires that are now so common in Patagonia, sculptors came from all around, climbed the peak, and set to work on the fallen, dismembered trunks.
Were the trees dead, or just playing dead? For a week, day in day out, the sculptors kept at their task, until the grace and magic of their hands turned the cemetery into theater.
The show begins with a welcome from a gigantic trunk that’s now a jester sprawled flat, wearing a single hat on its two heads. Visitors roam from tree to tree, past the wooden bodies that from the ruins rise, and in the ruins play.
Kites
The rainy season is ending, the weather cooling off, the corn ripe and ready in the fields. And the kite artists of the town of Santiago Sacatepequez are giving their creations a final touch.
The largest, prettiest kites in the world are the work of many hands, and each is unique.
When the Day of the Dead dawns, these immense birds of paper plumage take flight and soar, until they break free of the strings that hold them and vanish into the heavens.
On the ground, at every graveside, people tell their dead relatives the latest gossip. The dead don’t answer. They’re busy enjoying the spectacle on high, where kites in the sky have the good fortune of becoming wind.