On the rails of History

by Jury Dall'Agnol (Brazil)

I didn't expect to find Argentina

There’s a quoting from Goya that doesn’t leave my mind: “The dream of reason produces monsters”. I read this quote for the first time spray painted on the wall of the train station, in Posadas, Argentina. The place is wonderful and decadent. An old secular building built with red solid bricks eaten by time and neglect. When I saw it, I was sitting on the roof of an abandoned wagon, on the patio of the station waiting for “El Gran Capitán” - the train that ran from Posadas to Lacroze. The train is a cheap form of traveling to the capital, Buenos Aires, and attracts unemployed people, immigrants, students and tourists eager for a false adventure. There are, everywhere, street vendors with baskets filled with ‘chipas’, ‘empanadas’ and escalope sandwiches. If you have problems eating street food, you will never try these delicious snacks sold hand to hand, in the open. You will not drink water either. Wheelbarrows, stacked up with frozen muddy water bottles, are sold everywhere. I drank it all as the thermometer hit forty degrees celsius. The station, which was dead, got all fussed. Far away, the whistle. From where I stood, people looked like nervous ants. The sea of indigenous faces was peculiar to me. Burned by the sun, thin, sad, but calm faces. All times fighters, since the first european colonizers. The train left in its paced slowness and it decelerated mind, heart, the time. The chaotic urbanity disappeared and the green fields with their melancholic cattle grazing without knowing their tragical destiny, appeared. For hours, the landscape repeated itself on my window, as a movie of a single scene. And then, the sunflowers came. I left my seat and walked towards the gap between wagons. I wanted to see that wonder with the wind on my face. When I arrived, someone had thought the same. A strong and stern man was smoking a cigarette swinging his legs on the edge of the train. I got shy and, by instinct, tried a ‘Hola, ¿que tal?’. For about an hour, Lionel was my travel partner. The beautiful sunflower fields was the first subject, he spoke with authority and showed his calloused hands to prove. Soccer came up and with it, the classical rivalry between Brazil and Argentina. We moved on to life stories and suddenly his face changed. That man was part of History, as many other men do, but as all the others, with a unique story. He had fought in the Falklands War in 1982. Argentina, in the climax of patriotism during its military dictatorship, had decided to endure the United Kingdom for the sovereignty of the southern archipelagos. In two months, it got defeated. His insurgency was not only to the Bretons, his resentment was in the fact that when he was only eighteen, he was sent by the government to a war against a military power, with no training, no clothes and no suitable boots to deal with an intense winter. He mulled over in between words. Death crossed his way many times in the battlefield. Friends fell over his feet. Scars marked his body, his mind and his heart. His indigenous look lost itself in faraway memories. His voice denoted the grudge. At a certain moment, he stared at me with his deep black eyes and said: “They sent only country people, the indigenous. The sons of the ‘porteños’ did not fight, they stayed home. Buenos Aires hates us!” He spit with anger. I didn’t know what to say, the only thing that came to my mind was the quoting from Goya. The reason of a few can be the terror of many. The war is irrational and its sponsors are monsters. Lionel got up, nodded and disappeared through the wagon’s door forever. The sunflower fields had also disappeared and the night came covering it all. The Falklands War is my age, but memories like the ones Lionel preserves do not get old, do not die, they get more and more alive everyday, thirsty to be remembered by the pain and revolt they cause. I go back to my seat. Sad I fall asleep and sad I wake up in Buenos Aires.