Page 474 - Microsoft Word - Belicena respaldo

The ground was loose because it seemed that it didn’t rain since long time ago and the
wind was enough strong as to make that this course be slow for the rest.

Two hours later I had just travelled 70 km. and I was preparing to cross through the
midst of the Colalao del Valle due to the path continued through the main road. This settlement
is located in the Province of Tucumán, in the middle of the path that traverse the geographic
wedge that a bad layout of limits legated to the actual map. It has some twenty squares long
and four or six of weight. While I was crossing it I observed the same syndrome that is
manifested in thousand settlements and hamlets of the Argentinian North: the decadence.

The poverty is an endemic ill in these, paradoxically, rich Provinces, forgotten by the
bureaucratic centralism of the Megacity Buenos Aires and for the sloth or impotence of the
local governments who have usually their hands tied by a inexistent feudalism beyond the
official speeches.

The poverty is an ill that hurts. But is worse to see the decadence; this is: to contemplate
what was a splendid example yesterday transformed in a censurable vision.

While the car was tolling through the dirt road, I was looking at the houses of Spanish
colonial style, that today are shadows of what they were in past years of splendour. Cruel
caricatures of the hope and faith of their constructors.

–Who edified these houses –I thought contrite– believed in Argentina, they had faith in
America.

The inexorable collapse of these is the overwhelming response to these illusions.

It was seen that this settlement, as many others, evolved up to a height that must be
situated in 50 or more years before, and then came a period of decadence during which none
wall was lifted, neither a brick was put. Windows closed for years, when the wood framework
rotted; chipped and leprous walls; gnawed fronts by the thousand inclemencies of the time and
Soul.

The decadence of an urban community, of its architecture, is a retrogression that is
indefectibly implanted in the Soul of the dwellers. And there were they, looking at me passing
with that absent air, with that contemplative indifference so characteristic of the Indigenous
America.

Because in they the decadence was seen starkly; in those children who spied me from
behind in a corner; in those obscure and slanted eyes that were looking at me guileless when
they offered me a corn tortilla but they turn back distrustful at any question. What difference

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