As I lay these things out for you to understand, please do not pretend that you do. These words are full of tricks. Like taking you to a place you have never been, and making you feel like you know it, making it all feel familiar. I called the place Argentina, but it was no further away than my writing desk. Do you understand now?
You think you can see children playing in the street and laundry hung from high windows, a street vendor honking his wares from an old cart, a cat lounging in a sunny doorway. But what was really there was a bowl of nuts on an old wooden table and a man dressed still in his pajamas, his pant legs tucked into his woolen socks, shaking his pen to get the last few drops of ink down before he consigned it to the waste bin and got another from the kitchen drawer. The coffee that was steaming on the stove might have been from Argentina and the weather could have been balmy and not frigid like the old man’s heart as he tells you his tale.
The old man’s writing had been previously thwarted by his children as they taught him to believe that he was destined and doomed to stay in that lonely old clapboard house forever, but he had escaped to a faraway land. The cat got up and wandered slowly in the trafficless street looking for something to eat. A child with a stick and a hoop came running by and the cat scurried out of the way. A very low rumble filled the air which smelled of cinnamon. No one knew the noise was from tanks because no one there had ever seen one before. A woman with a puffy dress that made you wonder what she looked like underneath it cocked her head out of a kitchen window. A steaming pie beside her revealed the source of the spicy smells. A flock of starlings flew by.
“Raul,” she called, “bring that cat to me. I have some milk for it.” The boy threw his hoop and stick down and chased after the cat which eluded him effortlessly by darting under a low wagon. The barker laughed and held out an apple for the boy and distracted him from his mission.
The old man groaned again and shifted in his chair and sipped his coffee wondering whether he should stop writing with his pen and shift to the keyboard because the pace of the story was about to pick up dramatically and go from a leisurely day in a small old town to full scale war. The old man pushed a button on his keyboard, but nothing happened. He remembered that he had unplugged it the night before and reached down from his chair, groaning again, and nearly fell out of it reaching for the plug. His elbow hit the coffee mug and spilled it all over a stack of bills waiting on the table to be paid and a stream of invectives flew from the old man’s lips. A woodpecker pecked loudly on the side of the old man’s house, and the same flock of starlings flew by his kitchen window. Are you curious enough now to go ahead and turn the page and see what happens in chapter two?