RadioProfile | The boy and the good river

The river is good. My river is good. He takes me, and sometimes he turns me down those paths, but always head-on, without deceit or cover, without justifications. The river is good and I know that, instead of the inevitable “pulvis”, in me the water will be the true final return. My river is good.

Some have given it strange names, such as “Plata”, which have nothing to do with the enormous simplicity of the Guarani and their “Guazú” which simply means “big”. This river witnessed so many events over the centuries. Sometimes he gets angry, I’m sure because of the thorough pollution we dump on him from the shores every day, with protests of civilization, cybernetics, energy and other trappings. I met him from boats made of cedar wood, the tack, Ybirá pitá and incense, all of his wood, which grows in the north, on the margins of its immediate antecedents, Paraguay, Paraná and Uruguay.

I remember him with respect and true affection. I feel like a friend, whatever face it offers me. Sometimes, anchored in a hidden cove, I caress it.

The river got angry this time. For this, it has to blow from the East-Southeast for several hours. Then it rains and the current, which always drains in that direction, stops; the loin of water swells and everything is drowned. The river goes backwards and advances towards the endless kilometers of its smaller brothers; it spills over into the islands and everything, in the end, is a river, from san fernando to the cliffs of the uruguayan coast. It covers everything, everything gets wet and sinks. And the islander, little informed, does not see the end and his throat becomes knotted. Veterans, on the other hand, know that the current is not eternal, that it lasts a few days and goes away. And that the river pays for its mischief with a few centimeters of thick, shiny and fertile mud.

The river is my friend, but this time it discovered me, and in the crew of my club boat with a portable motor, including a child. It was a mistake, and my friend the river didn’t have time to warn me. Because he talks to me, but about other things: about universes that I sometimes catch a glimpse of when I am anchored to the banks in the middle of the summer night, delighting in silence, and observing nebulae, always new and strange. He let me settle in the stern, locate the cargo, the passengers and set off, as always, full of songs and smiles, heading for the Nagüe Island of all my memories, because that is what it will always be called for me. Even Palmas only challenged me with a few showers. Even in the middle of the wide river, I rocked with some violence, between the crestless waves of deep channel. But later, when there were a few hundred meters left to enter a bay and continue the journey through almost calm waters, he showed me all his grim scowl of a spiteful god. My lightness took over in minutes, and, cruel, like a good pagan, he pounced on the face of the frightened little boy.

There was his first question:

Is it long, sir? and my first answer. Afterward, there were only groans of fear. I felt enraged against my clumsiness and lightness, against that disdained experience of six decades of nautical wanderings.

-The river is my friend, Federico-, I told, -is my friend and he loves me and he won’t hurt you– I insisted, as if to justify myself.

-is very close-, I pointed out later, and with my index finger I marked the line of trees, less than 50 meters from our boat.

By then, the youngest seemed abandoned of all hope. Defenseless and tossed by the waves on the bare wooden bench and barely supported by the other crew member, he sobbed and endured. Otherwise, it would have been one more of the challenges that he accepted from my friend, with which he always tests me and lets me win, I’m sure. The almost involuntary presence of the little boy was the worst challenge of the shower, the most difficult test, the conviction that he had forgotten to deal with the children. Or so I thought. But we had already entered calm waters. And the rain, instead of continuing the despondency of the would-be cabin boy, had revived him.

The chattering and his calm questions returned. The rain, by then, was barely a drizzle and I tied up, carefully, at the dock. The boy, lying on the rail, passed his small and soft hand over the surface of the water and repeated himself, over and over again.

“The river is my friend, the river is good…”

Text by Rodolfo Perri.

by Juan Ferrari