Signs of Life
It is winter in Colonia.
The Sycamore trees stand naked: their bare branches reach into the air like flesh-less fingers.
The crooked blue table-clothed tables stay quiet: the finely-wrapped cutlery rolls onto the cobblestoned ground.
Hotel doors are shut. Huge rows of stacked wood rest along the white-washed walls.
The streets are empty. A wooden carriage has been abandoned.
A few antique cars rest beside low-lying colonial home whose doors remain closed. One car has been transformed into a garden: it is a lovely mélange of the abiotic and the biotic, of the living and the dead.
The wind blows in from the Rio de Plata where a few gliding sail boats forefront the setting sun enveloping the horizon in layers of light.
Buenos Aires and its checkerboard-layout is 50 km away. Colonia’s design is organic, unpredictable and dynamic. Its curves reflects its crooked past.
Founded by the Portuguese in 1680, the town operated as a key smuggling center ferrying in contraband goods from the non-Spanish empires. The Spanish captured the town in 1762 and liberalized its trade policies in 1777.
None of this interests me at the moment.
I am enraptured by a scene along the cobbled Calle de los Suspiros. A series of pink and yellow adobe houses connect to one another; their paint is thinning. Lanterns hang just above the stucco-roofs which the fracturing light hits with a ferocious intensity. The street is old. A green shrub fronts each door. The houses sound empty. They weather history. They bleed beauty. They emanate energy.
We pass one final street. I stop in front of an adobe home with a façade of protruding brick and stone. It has a wooden door and iron-barred window. Behind the bars, three green plants collect sunlight; a lantern stays dark above the door. On the pavement, directly in front of the house, there is a pink and white motor scooter. It appears to be a child’s scooter.
There is something impeccable about the scene. Somehow it beautifully encapsulates my brief time in Colonia.
Everywhere there is evidence of life.
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