He had arrived as a screenwriter in Monte Hermoso. It was December 31st, I don’t remember what year. The producer had hired me to write a feature film, with the following slogan: a police officer set in Monte Hermoso.
I had concluded it in my office, in Buenos Aires; but the director wanted me to adapt it to the landscape and the particularities of the maritime location.
We were traveling with the director, a cameraman and a technician whose role I couldn’t quite understand. It was summer but it was cold. My three traveling companions went to sea. I didn’t even want to go near the shore. I remained in the room to turn the script again, but not in reference to what reality could give me, but rather due to a problem of plausibility regarding the suspect.
When I was about to press the button – in both senses of the expression – I heard the alarmed voice of the cameraman from the corridor: they had gone out for a walk among the dunes and a cuis had bitten, or torn off, the technician’s finger whose function I have not finished specifying. That was the last time I heard from them and the film. Some time later I published the screenplay in the form of a novel, setting it in a town I invented: The snows of time.
But on that day of December 31 of the unknown year I stayed in Monte Hermoso literally until the following year, the exact date of which I don’t even remember. Since I was lonelier than that crazy cuis, I looked for a restaurant with New Year’s Eve dinner. My return ticket to Buenos Aires was for noon on January 1st.
The room, prepared for that special night, was packed with families, some of whom looked at me like a dangerous madman: what was a man doing alone, there, at that time, on that date? Somehow, the cuis had captivated me.
But a problem soon arose that caught my attention: new families arrived with reservations and there were no tables. The waiters couldn’t cope. Diners complained. The boys were crying.
I witnessed an unlikely dialogue, which no one would have believed in my script: a family man complained to the waiter about the Waldorf salad, which should accompany the matambre. The waiter very kindly pointed out the tiny and classic matambre filling – the egg and carrot crumbs – and cautiously stated that it was the Waldorf salad.
I left that congregation, ready to starve, in the hotel that didn’t even have a minibar. Food delivery apps didn’t exist yet, nor do I think they would have worked that night in that place.
On a street emptier than I’d ever seen, a man recognized me and invited me to spend that transitional night with him and his mother. Not without accidentally recalling Psycho, I refused with the same kindness with which the waiter had explained to the father of the family the unlikely existence of the Waldorf salad.
I literally ate a sweet bread that they had given me there on the bus, and I don’t know why it was forgotten at the bottom of the backpack, reduced to Hansel’s crusts, with which he could not return to the unfortunate paternal house, because they ate it birds.
I woke up eager to return to Buenos Aires, but A drivers’ strike stopped me in Monte Hermoso. It is not known when service will resume.
That midday, my frustrated host reappeared in the city center and invited me to join a barbecue. Her mother had left with her brothers. His girlfriend and a friend were going to visit him. I found no way to refuse. It was January 1st. There was nothing else to do.
It turned out that my benefactor’s girlfriend’s friend was a grandmother very similar to the late Tita Merello, interned with Cacho Castaña. I don’t know why, I had the feeling that they had set a trap for me. In fact, her friend turned out to be her grandmother, justified by the family holidays.
But the misunderstanding was eclipsed by a monumental discovery: dreamlike, more unlikely than any script problem, the Crystal Labyrinth of ItalPark appeared on the bucolic threshold of the open-air house. Installed. Adjacent. Unmistakable.
After almost falling on my face and almost hitting my nose, as had actually happened to me once, I exclaimed in perplexity:
-This is the Crystal Labyrinth of ItalPark.
My host nodded, with a smile that seemed to whisper, “If I had told you, you would have thought I was crazy and would have abandoned the invitation.”
His girlfriend and grandmother arrived, walking bent over and carrying a cane. While the bride began to set up the pagoda for the fire, and the grandmother consoled herself with a bag of camphor, Tito, as the owner of the Crystal Labyrinth decided to call himself, explained:
-I have always feared the Crystal Labyrinth.
“Me too,” I interrupted. I reluctantly encouraged the roller coaster, the ghost train. But never to this (I pointed to the transparent bodoque). In my elementary school there was a legend that a lost child had died in here.
“It was not a myth,” Tito reiterated. He ate one cuis. She wandered the halls for years. They never found it. But I had fallen madly in love with Adriana. And she insisted that she would wait for me on the other side when I crossed over. We were twelve years old.
“Like Ariadne to Theseus,” I quoted, knowing nothing.
Tito shook his head.
“That was ancient Greece, Athens,” he explained, “this was Argentina, ItalPark.” I gained strength, I faced my fears, I went through the hell of panic among those dirty plastics that we incomprehensibly called glass. I feared something worse than death: being locked up forever, like that child. I came out the other side. Adriana wasn’t there. You had left with Mauro, who we could easily call the Minotaur. A bully, cheater, liar.
At least he has the satisfaction of having emerged from the Crystal Labyrinth of ItalPark – I tried to mitigate -.
Tito denied it again.
“All I was left with was the certainty of our solitude,” he concluded, without noticing his girlfriend and grandmother, as the branches began to crackle and the barbecue strip released its unmistakable smell like that of the Labyrinth.
“When the ItalPark games were put up for auction, after the Matterhorn tragedy, I made my offer for the Labyrinth. After a couple of offers – one of the bidders was a well-known Menemist trader – I accepted it. I brought him here by boat. That odyssey would be material for another story. Soon he will leave Monte Hermoso. The labyrinth will accompany me. “I don’t like to stay anywhere too long.”
“I can’t help but notice that Monte Hermoso and Cervino have the same initials,” I noted.
“Our generation has been sealed forever by ItalPark,” Tito acknowledged. Our lives are not a glass bed, like Fito Páez’s, but a glass labyrinth. Who knows if each of us is not that child after all.
I don’t know what I could add to that unalterable closure, but I remember that I opened my mouth; However, grandmother called for dinner and we submitted. Only the next day I was able to return to the capital with a private car.
Source: Clarin
