17: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 1"

I had another week off school because of board exams. Sunday night I’d gone to the Paraná Costume Party, dressed as Tintin. I was writing an article about the party for 054, a travel magazine from Buenos Aires.

I’d gotten back at 3:00 in the morning and went to bed. I woke up Monday, wrote my article, packed my backpack, and went to the bus station for an overnight ride northeast, to Posadas, the small capital of Misiones province.

They served us dinner after the sun went down. First they gave us a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray. Inside were a plastic knife and fork, wrapped with a single-ply napkin; a toothpick, wrapped and sealed in plastic; a roll; a chocolate alfajor snack cake; crackers; and a lemon-flavored lozenge. Next they brought out tiny foil trays with our main course.

Inside were steamed rice and chicken rolled up with hard-boiled egg and vegetables. The windows on the bus steamed-up when we opened our foil trays.

The steward poured us Pepsi in little plastic cups, like they have at the dentist.

I was listening to old episodes of Entitled Opinions. First one about Proust, then one on Thoreau, then one on Virgil.

They started playing a Kevin Bacon movie on the overhead TVs. I think it was called Death Sentence. He played a vengeful father. There was a lot of stabbing and beating and running people over with cars deliberately and swearing, too. The TVs were turned way up.

A guy sitting up front had a loud message alert on his phone that you could hear through the whole bus. It played the first half-dozen notes of a Cumbia song; a trumpet and an accordion and a shaker all starting-up.

That guy kept getting messages every few minutes.

It was hard to listen to the radio show.

My seat was in front of the coffee and water dispenser, which is in front of the stairs down to the lower level. After they’d turned the lights out and most people were covered with blankets, a guy came up to the console and leaned against it to steady himself. He took a plastic cup from the cup dispenser, had a drink of water, then put the cup back into the bottom of the dispenser. He returned to his seat.

The guy with the noisy phone sneezed three times in a row up into the air. His phone stopped making so much noise, at some point.

* * *

We got into Posadas at 7:00 in the morning. It was gray and cool and drizzling. I sat in the bus station café and had a cup of tea and a croissant. I bought a bus ticket for San Ignacio, a village north of Posadas that’s got some Jesuit mission ruins and the old home of Horacio Quiroga. It’s along the highway to Puerto Iguazu.

I got into San Ignacio by 8:30. I got off the bus with a couple other people in the main plaza. It was humid and cool and still overcast. There were only a few people out.

A pasty blond-haired kid came up to me, carrying a mate and a notepad. He asked if I was looking for a place to stay. He told me about a hotel down the road, his brother-in-law’s place. He said they can sell me bus tickets there, and watch my bags, too. I asked him the bus schedule for the next day.

He seemed nice, like he wasn’t trying to take something from me.

I left him and walked toward where a Hostelling International place was supposed to be.

An old man was standing on the porch of a souvenir shop and stopped me and asked where I was headed.

He said that there was a cheap, nice hotel in the other direction. 25 pesos he said. I asked him how much the Hostelling International place cost.

He looked aside. 100 pesos, he told me.

I said no thanks and got to the HI place. It was 35 a night. I had a four-person dorm and a private bathroom all to myself.

I dropped off my bag and walked back to the plaza and bought some bread and cheese and apples. I walked to the Jesuit ruins. The site’s called San Ignacio Mini.

It was the middle of the week, and the end of winter. Most of the souvenir stalls were shuttered. It was quiet and damp. I sat on a bench under a tree and made a sandwich and ate a mandarin orange.

I entered the ruins.

A tour had just started so I hurried and caught up with them. The site was one of several in the region that was founded by Spanish Jesuits. The missions were havens for the Guaraní, havens from the other Spanish who wanted to kill them, make them leave, etc.

They say it was a flourishing a project, for the few decades it lasted. That the Guarní mixed their culture and style with that of the Catholics, and in exchange for a few not-so-bad compromises, got to live in pretty well-built, well-run, mostly-autonomous communities.

You can see that in the façade of the church, that’s got Catholic figures sculpted in a pre-Colombian style.

After the tour ended I hung around the ruins some more. There weren’t more than a couple dozen people in the whole overgrown, spread-out site. The main plaza - now just a grassy field - would´ve been a good spot to throw a Frisbee, I thought.

I went to the souvenir shop in the main plaza, where they were selling a lot of Guaraní-style wood carvings. The lady working there liked my hat, one with a knit llama pattern I’d gotten in Jujuy, in the northwest. Her son was sitting there listening to his MP3 player the whole time, not talking.

I walked out of the town, past an army base and down a flooded mud road to get to Quiroga’s old house.

Horacio Quiroga is one of the best-known Latin American writers. He was born in Uruguay in the 1870´s, but spent most of his life in Argentina, and especially in the Misiones jungle.

His best stuff is short stories. He’s influenced a lot by Poe and Maupassant.

It started raining as I got to his house. After you buy your entrance you have to walk down a narrow path through the forest, through a lot of bamboo, to get to the house. There’s signs that explain Quiroga’s life and have quotes of things he’s said about writing and art.

One of his best short story collections is called Tales of Love, Madness, and Death.

Quiroga’s father was killed in a hunting accident when he (Quiroga) was a little boy. Quiroga’s step-father, who he got along well with, committed suicide when he (Quiroga) was a teenager. Quiroga found the body.

When he was a bit older, he killed one of his best friends in a hunting accident like what killed his father.

He married a couple of times. The first wife he brought out to this house in the jungle in San Ignacio, where they were raising their kids. She couldn’t stand the isolation, the heat, everything, and swallowed poison and killed herself.

Quiroga committed suicide when he was in his late 50´s after he was diagnosed with cancer.

There were two houses Quiroga built, by himself, at this place in San Ignacio. The first house has been re-built, but the second is original. The lot is up on a cliff that used to look down to the Paraná River, the same river I live on further south in Entre Ríos province.

Now the trees and bushes have grown and blocked the view.

Inside the house there’s a lot of Quiroga’s actual stuff – his writing desk, his insect collection, a big snakeskin, his radio, his tools and workshop.

There wasn’t anyone else there when I went through the house. I thought I heard people coming along the path but they never showed up. I took some photos, walked around, tried to conjure the atmosphere. There was a sign in one corner of the yard that said “Place of Inspiration”. Next to it was a trail leading into the forest.

I followed the path. I thought there might be a lookout to the river. It got overgrown quickly and I had to turn back.

I left and walked back to my hostel. When I got back into the town a horse-drawn cart came down a sidestreet and turned a corner in front of me. A fat man was driving. He whipped the horse on the side to make it go faster. He keep hitting it on its leg. The horse tried to hurry and trot down the street. There were no traffic, no cars. It was empty, quiet. He drove on down the road and I turned a corner to another street.

I slept a few hours then got up, walked to town, ate a milanesa sandwich at a big empty tourist restaurant. There were some French girls at one table, but they left. Then it was just me and the waiters, standing around. I was reading an article in Ñ by JM Coetzee on an anthology of early Beckett letters. I came back after dark. There weren’t many streetlights and it was hard to see the road.

I read some of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, then went to bed early, about 9:00 PM.