professor paradox

Horacio’s English is even more rudimentary than my Spanish. He’s gesticulating like the director he is. The Nobel prize winner, who’s work he’s directed, is listening to him explain in his piecemeal English his plans for a rock and roll Peer Gynt.

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It’s sometime in the middle of the morning. The morning morning. About three. It’s not so late for them. I have just about adjusted. They use all of the day and all of the night. Why waste the sleeping hours if there are things to be done or said? Sleep can always wait.

We sit in Ana’s little flat. The conversation is stop start. Sometimes he and I understand each other, sometimes we don’t. He’s a theatre director who works in advertising. Who fills the tiny room. Who shrugs his shoulders and throws his hands in the air, and laughs.

He puts on a video. It’s a series of Party Political broadcasts. From the first election after the dictatorship. He’s there on screen. Looking a little younger. Wild eyed, full of a demonic energy, running around the little screen like no-one you’ve ever seen in a party political broadcast.

He is Professor Paradoja, telling the truths that the politicians could not get away with.

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We get in the car and drive to Stratford. Horacio loves it. They want to see some theatre, but we can’t get tickets. We see everything there is to see in Stratford. Somewhere outside Anne Hathaway’s home, they quarrel, like couples do, but it blows over. In the evening we stop off in Oxford and see Lindsay Kemp at the Oxford Playhouse. Horacio moves around in a blur of energy. England has to try and keep up with him.

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In the last days before I go away, they take me out for supper. We go to a restaurant on The Rambla. It’s a sultry turn-of-the-year night. We eat on the terrace, looking out over La Plata.

Out there, somewhere between river and sea, a storm breaks. Sitting in shirtsleeves, we watch the lightning; listen to the thunder. Tronzos y relampagos. None of it touches us. We are the storm’s spectators. VIP guests of its distant fury.