a fold in the map 3

The next morning we were served breakfast, by Daniel. The place looked different in the day – the wooden beams, which looked splendid with soft lights, had split in places and the windows were dirty, other parts of the building seemed unfinished. From the window of the breakfast room (filthy) you could see down to the hot baths. We walked down to them; they had a strange surface texture and were not clean. They gave off a smell which was hard to place.

We walked up to see the car – it was in bits. Mud was caked thick on the doors, and came off only to reveal brutal scratches underneath. The front bumper was shredded and we had to pull bits off it to make it look ok. The headlight was easy to fix though, and it started fine. We were eager to make it to San Martin, or to at least cross the border at some stage (we had 45km of mountain path left, so we got organised and paid the bill. Daniel was waiting for us; before we left he showed us a bowl and a stick made of quartz. It looked like a mortar and pestle, but it was a musical instrument which produced a perfect C note. He told us that quartz is the element which retains the most amount of information. He tapped the side of the bowl the long bar and slowly ran it around the inside, making the sound resonate and amplify until it felt like it was entering my body. He told us that the road we were going to take was one of the most beautiful on the whole planet, that we would see an ancient lava flow, some of the mightiest trees on earth, a turquoise lake whose banks are of black volcanic rock, along with numerous other wonders.

All these things we saw and more, but it was not until two days later that I began to process an abstract feeling that I had during our stay at LahuenCo, and here I need to be clear – from early on at the hotel I felt there was something slightly diabolical about Daniel. In his look, his strange contradictions, I had a feeling, but it was only later in Bariloche, over a dinner of wild boar, venison and rabbit, that a pattern emerged. We were talking about the mountain road, how incredible it was that we would find a hotel along the way, and I told ewa for the first time that I had a moment where I looked to the stars and I asked for help and that I felt that I had been listened to, particularly after we checked into room 13, a number important to me. But from the moment he introduced himself, a slickly devilish air surrounded the gentleman manager. We started talking about this, his slightly demonic appearance, his omnipresence around the hotel, his weird equivocations, his rejection family life and national boundaries, of the way he balked when I mentioned Jagger´s finest moment (you can call me Lucifer!). I thought about what he said about football (he loves it/he´s not interested in it) and I realised that he said it when I told him that the Henry incident was known as the hand of the devil (as Maradonna´s was that of God). I remembered that feeling I had about the corridors when we arrived in the building, as well as where it was, in no man´s land, a non-place, outside political borders, not located on any map, or as if the map were folded and the hotel sat in the fold (what a place to hide!). We talked about how the hotel seemed much better in the dark, that when the day came it seemed to lose its sheen. His name too – a devil in disguise would surely find it hard to resist teasing us with a name that sounded similar, an Old Testament name. As an angel in the celestial army he was known as Satan Sataniel. And then the baths outside. Daniel had tried to persuade us to take a bath that night at 1am, but we didn’t, and when we saw them the next morning they were gruesome, filthy. And they stank. That smell, I couldn’t place it then, but over dinner two days later, over the boar and the deer it came to us – the smell was of rotten eggs. Deep underground, the stench of sulphur was rising up with the hot water – sulphur, which in ancient times was called brimstone, the base element of hell. What if, when I asked for help, my wish was fulfilled, but not by whom I asked?

We ordered another bottle of wine and entertained this idea. What would it mean that we were helped by the Devil? Of the books I had brought with me on this trip, I had just finished a chapter of The Double Flame by Octavio Paz, a beautiful little book on the subject of love and eroticism. In this chapter he writes about the origins of the name Lucifer, a Latin word meaning bringer of light which was used to describe the planet Venus. It is the herald of the dawn, the brightest thing in the sky and it was called the Morningstar. In the old Hebraic bible, it was used metaphorically to describe an old Babylonian King whose fall from power through excessive hubris was seen as parallel to Satan´s fall. Venus rises at dawn as the brightest of the stars, outshining Jupiter and Saturn, but lasting only until the sun appears. St Jerome translated the Old Testament into the Latin Vulgate and used the term Lucifer for the first time as a metaphor for Satan; later in the Tyndale translation of the bible the Latin term was maintained, as it was in most other language translations. Dante had previously used it to refer directly to Satan, but it was in Milton´s Paradise Lost where Lucifer the rebel angel is reborn, almost becoming heroic. The romantic poets took his rejection of the heavenly hierarchy as a source of inspiration – the Morningstar’s light is dimmed by the sun, and it lasts only a few hours, but how it shines! I had read this book before, but had wanted to read it again here, in the original, and I got as far as the chapter in question on the 32 hour bus journey to Bariloche. Of all the chapters in all the books it was this one that I had just read and it was still fresh in my mind so I blabbed on about it to ewa for as much as I could recall. I found out consequently that in the southern hemisphere the heavens are reversed and Venus mostly appears as a star in the evening sky, outshining the rest. (It was 18 degrees from the western horizon on the 24^th of March. The planet shines so bright, I also found out, due to the fact that it is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds which bounce back 70-percent of the sunlight that hits them. The clouds are formed of sulphuric acid.) I finished the last of the boar. We left and walked back to our hostel under a grey sky – still the question remained – what would it mean if all this was to be entertained? A tentative answer was proposed in the morning.

We woke up the following day heady from the wine, and started to pack our bags. We were crossing the border again, this time by bus, to Osorno in Chile, and then north to Santiago. Our stuff was in a mess from when we left; we had camped the night after, and we hadn’t really sorted our backpacks since then. I asked ewa to take the video camera; she opened her bag to put it in, and she took out the little black torch to make space. This was the light that Daniel gave us. But did he give it to us? His words were strange – Tienes luz? Pues ahora la tienes – it was never clear but ewa took it in any case; it’s usually me who fleeces stuff from hotels so I thought I would tease her for a bit that morning. I said – baby you took the torch that Daniel gave us, yeah? Well what happens when you take light from Lucifer? What happens when you steal from the devil? – She wasn’t having it. With an answer, she closed the book on the affair, slicing through all my talk with a sentence. She stuck her head out of the bathroom and looked at me mischievously, saying – What if I didn’t steal it? What if it was offered to me? I am Eve after all. Beauty is, I think, clarity. There are other strange things about that night, coincidences, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile to labour on them. The question what does this mean has an answer; I’m working on the answer to why.