The Mistery of Belicena Villca
The ground was loose because apparently it had not rained in a long time and the wind was strong enough for this leg of the trip to be over and above slow .
Two hours later I had only traveled 70 km and I was getting ready to cross through the middle of the town of Colalao del Valle because the road continued down the main street . This town is located in the Province of Tucumán , in the middle of the road that crosses the geographic wedge that a bad delineation of limits passed on to the current map . It is about twenty blocks long by four or five wide . As I went through it , I observed the same syndrome that manifests itself in a thousand towns and villages in the North of Argentina : the decadence .
Poverty is an endemic evil in these , paradoxically , rich Provinces , forgotten by the bureaucratic centralism of the Buenos Aires Megapolis and by the laziness or impotence of the local rulers who usually have the hands tied by a non-existent federalism beyond official speeches .
Poverty is an evil that hurts . But it is more punishing to see the decline ; this is : to contemplate what yesterday was a splendid example transformed today into censurable vision .
As the car rolled down the dirt road , I looked at the houses of colonial Spanish style , which today are shadows of what they were in the past days of splendor . Cruel caricatures of the hope and faith of their builders .
--Those who built these houses --I sadly thought-- believed in the Argentina , they had faith in America .
Their inexorable collapse is the overwhelming response to those dreams .
One could see that this town , like so many others , evolved to a peak which should be 50 or more years ago , and then there was a period of decay during which no wall was erected , not a brick was stuck . Windows closed down years ago , as the wooden frames rotted ; chipped and leprous walls ; facades eaten away by a thousand inclemencies of the weather and of the Soul .
The decline of an urban community , of its architecture , is a regression that is unfailingly implanted in the Soul of the settlers . And there they were , watching me go by with that absent air , with that contemplative indifference so characteristic of the Indigenous America .
Because decay was starkly seen in them ; in those barefooted children that spied on me from behind a corner ; in those little dark and slanted eyes that looked at me candidly when they offered me the sale of a corn tortilla but who became suspicious at the slightest question . What ' s the difference between this town , these houses , these villagers , these children , and their equivalents from other parts of America ; from Bolivia , Perú , Ecuador or Colombia ? None .
In that answer also lay the decadence ; in that , paying the high price of isolating ourselves from Latin America , one hundred years of " European Culture " have not left a trace in these creoles forgotten by all . We have not given them anything different from what they have received in the countries mentioned . They are neither more nor less civilized than them despite the belief in the contrary that sustains the Europeanizing oligarchy that has run this country for a hundred years .
Hence an explanation for the general decline that plagues the settlements of American blood , may be this : in five hundred years the European Culture did not take hold in the Soul of the American because , not even those who implanted it on blood and fire , not even those who taught it beatifically , really believed in it . The American Races had their millenary Culture replaced , energized by the action of Great Myths , by the European materialist Culture , lacking spirituality and transcendence . And the religion of America , which preserved the memory of the White Gods , was forbidden in favor of the rationalist Doctrine of Catholicism : henceforth the natives would have to glorify the biblical story of the Chosen People , worshiping a crucified-Hebrew-God from whom they had never heard of , and would be left out of the theological discussion because the new religion came already finished , finished in its philosophical foundation . If there , in the unknown Nicaea , a Council had decided that God was triple what could the recently subjugated pagans say here ? And those who were here did they know what the Catholic Dogma meant ? No ; these killed and looted in the name of the Catholic Dogma that no one understood and no one would care to explain . But the wealth would run out . Finally would come the time to create new wealth , to make those evangelized empires produce cultural objects . And then , at that very moment , would start the decline . The Church would thrive with the conquest of America destroying systematically any vestige of the Atlantean origin of the great civilizations , all evidence about the extraterrestrial nature of the Spirit of man . And the Spanish , maddened as the Great Mother Binah prophesied to Quiblon , would evenly spill the blood and semen on the native peoples . From that Water Holocaust would come out " the Sons of Horror ", the mestizo population of America , men like the ones I now saw when I passed through their decadent villages . Culturally indifferent men ; who are determined to do nothing . If a gringo does not come with faith in something , and returns to build houses and villages , they will not . And everything will fall , to the ground , to pieces , --childish revenge , but effective-- as their Cultures fell yesterday and as the Soul of the West will fall tomorrow if it insists on continuing to be divorced from the blood of America .
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