The Golden Age With Mosquitoes

In the afternoon I went to visit the Jesuit’s chapel, but I could not see the interior because it was closed. Someone sent me to the keeper's house next door. He had a strange garden with banana trees and piles of aluminum cans. I knocked at the door for a while but no one replied. I took some shots of the facade of the church and then sat down in the plaza across the street. I was bored and thirsty. I got up again and approached a kiosk, where the options were either fresh coconut water or Coca-Cola. I took a photograph and walked away.

On a corner across from the plaza there was a souvenir shop. There I found some crafts made by a local tribe. I bought a green and red hand fan and a headdress made of blue macaw feathers, probably taken from a relative of the parrot I saw on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway years ago. I interpreted that chance encounter with a parrot flying along the highway as a prophetic sign, which ultimately brought me here in search of earthly paradise.

I went back to the plaza, holding my newly acquired ex-parrot, now transformed into an ornament for an absent indigenous body, and a strawberry ice cream. While I was trying to put the headdress on over my head, I thought about the aura of intensity and mystical energy that would come over my father when he put on his costume. When I was a child, my father sang in a mambo orchestra and wore those colorful ruffled shirts. I remember my mother's irritation while ironing them. When he would put on one of those shirts, he would transform into a birdman and start singing. Once I managed to attach the headdress on my head I felt the same radiant energy: I only needed a ruffled shirt and I would have become a bird of paradise.

My father's orchestra was responsible for initiating my fascination with the tropics as well as my suspicions and ruminations on the nature of identity. His was the largest mambo band in Buenos Aires (at the time also known as "jazz") and featured a piano, bass, drums, tumbadoras, timbales, two trumpets, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones and my father as lead singer. As in a sketch out of a Marx brother's film, the entire orchestra would eventually rehearse in the tiny living room of the house where I grew up. It seems impossible to describe the impression that such a loud production of sound can make on a two-year-old child. I remember it being louder than anything I had ever heard before or after. The band was called "Los Antillanos" although not a single one of its members had ever even visited any of the islands of the Antilles. They were all from Argentina with the exception of the piano player who was born in Uruguay. They had appropriated everything, the music, the style, the costumes, the body language, the scenery, and even adopted individual names that were supposed to sound Caribbean. Nowadays, that kind of blunt appropriation would seem outrageous. But back then they were one of the few local bands of the kind and people loved to hear them and dance to their music. The band fell apart when I was six years old and they received the offer to tour through Latin America. Most of them had second jobs and my mother threatened with divorce.

Fighting against the boredom of the quiet cloudy afternoon I walked around the small town with my sticky ice-creamed fingers and the sense of having restored my paternal nobility by putting on my feathered headdress. Some of the locals, sitting on their porches, were amused at my appearance; some seemed puzzled as I could tell by their expressions. Like the good son-of-a-parrot that I am, I have always enjoyed colors because their presence is so powerful.

On the very edge of town voluptuous clouds appeared in the sky announcing an imminent afternoon shower. I came into an area with lush palms and blooming trees. There were many loud parrots eating the fruits of an enormous mango tree. Perched on a branch of a small tree of pink flowers there was a splendid yellow and blue macaw. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. The scene was so harmonious, the colors and forms so perfectly orchestrated that it seemed unreal, like the incarnation of a utopia. After I photographed it, it started to rain and the bird took off to join the other birds on the mango tree.

I found refuge under a bus stand and waited for the rain to pass. Back in the hotel, the rays of the afternoon sun were already out now sliding over the shining pots and tropical plants of the front patio, illuminating and shading the peach wall like in a baroque composition. I sat down on the hammock hanging in the patio and tried to imagine the interior of the church I had failed to enter earlier.

As I began to fall asleep I found myself before Caravaggio's Christ. He was heavy, like a sacrificed animal, and his dirty feet announced that he had been walking in the market among the odors, the flies, and the yelling. Immersed in a world of shadows, I felt the weight of his body in my arms. Then I heard laughter: It was Velazquez’s drunks. Their shining red noses glittered while they made their toasts, staring straight at the camera. I realized that these vine-leaf-crowned drunks had completely taken over everyday space, and that Bacchus, who once could only be found in those places reserved for the sacred, now visited them as just another friend from the bar. It was boiling hot as I entered the bucolic forest of a Flemish landscape. A group of bashful, robust women aired their fragile skin among fruits and parrots. Eve grabbed the forbidden fruit. Tiepolo’s sky enraptured me with an instantaneous outburst of luminous, changing clouds. The New World was born as plumed Indian women entered mounted on enormous crocodiles, and then I was overwhelmed by dizziness as I was shot from a giant cornucopia and found myself rolling among the fruits laid out on Carmen Miranda’s headdress. I was lost in a world of representations that had sprung to life and overtaken the real world with a strange mixture of fantastic geography and supernatural history.

Falling asleep in the hammock, in my last waking moment I envisioned a golden age with mosquitoes. It was a form desired by everyone, an ultimate moment that never came true but which expanded in new possibilities, every time getting closer to Paradise. It was a virtual return to the Paradisum Voluptatis, the site of voluptuous forms, where the body is one with the whole.

The European baroque, even with all its vulgar naturalism, fell short in a number of ways. It lacked the concrete texture of perspiration--that intimate battle with humidity--the monumentality of spaces, the exuberance of vegetation with that smell of ripe fruits, the exotic flowers in the never-ending heat, those sunburned colors, and the buzzing of mosquitoes, which, like fat angels of a tropical rococo, rule without mercy in the sky of Eden.

I woke up two hours later, thirstier than ever, with a collection of mosquito bites and the feather headdress somehow still clinging, however crookedly, to my head.