In search of Homer’s blue

by Lorene Santos (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Argentina

I always believed that we exist in the world because of language. I believed that we got here thanks of the stories that we learned to tell, we create them so the unnamed can live inside us. Still, sometimes the stories only come out in silence and this is when we need to learn the epic of the unknown. It is where we find the art of talking, without speaking, about what it is or what it could be. Last year, I traveled to Buenos Aires looking for the unknown that lived just on the neighborhood. My main objective was clear: I wanted to start knowing everything that I did not know yet. I spent seven days there and my most vivid memories are of myself, walking for six hours a day, usually without a clue if I as on the right direction. I did not have a 4G connection or spoke enough Spanish to ask for directions. It was me with my best and worst guesses. Buenos Aires is a city of parallels and it made possible for me to find some guidance on those straight and long streets that crossed entire neighborhoods. Sometimes I walked for hours on the wrong direction, but sometimes I went straight to where I intended to and felt very proud of my courage to try. When I went to the traditional Mercado de San Telmo, I stopped at one of its little stores to eat and met a young woman who made all kinds of empanadas. She spoke a little of Portuguese and while we tried to communicate, she served me a lemonade with a little bit of ginger. A song in Portuguese came on the radio and at this moment something struck me like a spark: I scribbled 'encounter' on my left hand. She turned up the radio's volume: “The market is empty, I can do this today”, and we tried to sing together. She knew the lyrics as if she spoke Portuguese better than myself. After that, I stood there he whole afternoon, listening to her talking about the places she wanted to see, in a whole idiom that only existed with her. Going to Buenos Aires was a dive that gave me a new pair of lungs and taught me that, in order to catch a different air, I need to be silent. I believed my whole life that language was our first mother, so choosing silence was like choosing to leave my skin at home. I did not know that I would find lonely people like me and that, without words, I would be able to tell them that I was discovering the world’s real size. I came back home knowing that being latin-american makes me an inhabitant of the middle, always halfway the exalted Western culture and the muted voices of the owners of the land. Now, when I face silence and the uncharted, I see places that may hold the sacred possibility of creating new myths for ourselves. A new myth can invite us to make a home out of other's stories as well as of ours. What i did not know taught me how to re elaborate my language, how to say something about who I am as I inhabit another place. My unknown was just after the border, in such a world that seems to forget that all borders are imaginary. The water I could see from the my window in the flight back was dark, the same color of the iron ore that composes my land. Homer did not have the blue that I do, his sea was iron-black, wine-dark, but also the same sea that I can compare to the Rio de la Plata. It has always been what I now call an Argentinian-blue. What we do not know will always make us find out which is the blue that other's eyes can see. The silence can be blue and talk in very old language that only exists when we are distracted. What I found in my own unknown could never be called an answer, it is a call: find the different kinds of blue, and sing about them near Homer's ears.