Sadness

Aging is a continuous loss and contraction. I had a childhood friend in Argentina, lets call him Mark, who searched for me on the internet for years and when he found me, we started to write to each other on Facebook. Today he cut me off and cannot access his page. He had accused me of turning into an acidic, bitter, sarcastic old man and he didnt want to maintain the relation. He lives in Southern Patagonia, married to a native woman, with children and grandchildren, fulfilling Alberti's goal of "peopling the Patagonia". He loved to write me about his military adventures. He had been in an intelligence unit during the Guerra Sucia and had infiltrated Chile to photograph military facilities during "the war". Innocently, I asked what war, since I dont remember any Argentine-Chile war, and it surfaced that some forgotten border skirmish has grown, in his memory, into a World War. He has turned into a fanatic patriot and idolizes Argentine military. I didnt want to criticize his idols, but I count stop myself from obseving that on a strictly professional criteria, General Gualtieri and his colleges had been very poor officers, as they had chosen to attack well armed Britain and led their soldiers into defeat and death. I received a long ideological tirade on "El Proceso" by which the pure and patriotic soldiers saved Motherland. He included some antisemitic references to the Plan Andinia (an Argentine obsession that imagines a secret Jewish program to occupy Patagonia) and I reminded him that his mother was Jewish and he is Jewish. He answered curtly that he is Protestant and before that he was Catholic. And that he does not want to receive more communications from me.

It is sad, because we had been good friends. Fifty years ago we had taken a long and heavy wood trunk in the Delta of the Parana and floated down on it by the Tigre River (pic) till the Port of Buenos Aires. It was a nice summer adventure, the memory of which I had cherished all my life. Now it is lost, and I am poorer for it. And sad.