… And if you happen to have a spare moment, precious Ekaterina Sergeyevna, in the midst of your busy day off, between the grandchildren and all the pancakes and pies, do look out the window to catch a glimpse of the sky. And if the weather is favorable and a ray of sunshine appears amid your autumn snowfall, imagine that your Dimas is sending you greetings from his Paraguayan spring.
I seem to recall that you’re not particularly fond of the heat. I can just picture how you’d answer me: what on earth is there to do down there in the south? What haven’t I seen already? It’s all the same everywhere! Haven’t seen the sun? And what would I need so much sun for? I’ve lived my whole life in our neck of the woods, and I don’t need any more sun than that! And the climate there is terrible, and it’s hot, and humid, and there’s mold, and people get sick from all those southern infections!
I’ve traveled all over southern Europe, Asia, and half of South America, and I can’t even argue with you, dear Ekaterina Sergeyevna. The sea, the sunsets, the palm trees, the greenery, the mosquitoes, the shutters on the windows of southern villas, the rooms with fans to keep things cool - it’s all the same everywhere. You find a nice little bar by the shore and settle nearby in a house with a pool. In the mornings, you swim in your own pool, and in the evenings, you watch the sunset on the beach, day after day working your way through the menu and discussing the heat, the mold, the mosquitoes, and politics over a cocktail with your foreign companions. And once you’ve gone through the entire menu three times, the urge to change your surroundings starts creeping up on you - a bar, a village, or a country. First, you change bars, try new dishes, but behind the bar counter it’s still the same characters, complaining about the government and the climate. After the third bar, even the differences between the menus become so uninteresting that I end up ordering the same dish everywhere, now for the fifth country in a row.
And yet - if you were to offer me a trade, my pool and cocktails on the beach for your kitchen, where pancakes and pies are steaming and sizzling away and the window is dusted with autumn snow, I think I’d refuse. After several years of living in the south, I even begin to miss the sun on an ordinary overcast day. Even waiting out the rain indoors for more than four hours straight seems almost unbearable, so you can imagine what an entire winter of freezing temperatures and prolonged snowfalls would be like! No, madam, the ship of Dimas Kalabas was made to sail the vast expanses of the southern seas and oceans, and has no plans to change climates just yet. He’s only just sailed into the quiet harbor of Encarnación. And although everything is the same everywhere, the heat, the mold, the mosquitoes, the sunsets, I still feel like, you know, buying mangoes from a fruit cart in the morning, getting a chipa from a familiar fellow with a basket, and leisurely drinking coffee and splashing about in the pool on a hot Paraguayan morning. And in the evenings, standing on deck, determining the season by the position of the sun, and the weather for the coming day by the phase of the moon and the state of the sky. Will tomorrow bring a bar with white curtains on the beach at sunset, or a gathering around the parrilla on the balcony in the rain? And before going to sleep, gazing at the Southern Cross, feeling a little like a tourist on a cruise ship and a little like the captain of a sailing vessel on a voyage around the world -
