Flight AR 1892 from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia
Scene 1
That Hektor Maille knew where Patagonia lay is thanks to his mother and Ronald Reagan. The sabre-rattling speeches with which the US President had turned up the heat over the course of his long reign during the Cold War had fired one into devising case scenarios. Maille's mother had on her part owned a large, old atlas (dating back to her schooldays) in which she had pressed and dried flowers that she had stolen from public parks or from other people's gardens.
The stolen flora had left behind some specks and stains on the atlas: these spots looked like little isles in the ocean. There were even a few pages in which one could barely discern the difference between the real islands and the plant stains. That had resulted in the fact that there were occasionally certain differences between Maille's own view of the world and real cartography – differences of perception that exist to this day.
Maille had often slapped the atlas over the years and pondered where the hell he would seek refuge if the bombs started to fall. As an enchanted reader of Jack London, he had first of all thought of the South Seas, the Solomon Islands perhaps – his mother though had squashed between Indonesia and New Zealand a precious orchid from the Gardin Sidarel, the botanical garden of Port Louis, and as the flower dried, the whole sea had, lo and behold, changed into a new yellowish-grey continent. Anyhow this South Sea area, Maille was convinced, was far too close to possible bombing sites for the Americans – like, for instance, communist Vietnam. The search for a region which was as distant from American aggression as it was from Soviet interests had inexorably led the young Maille to the southern tip of the American continent, to Patagonia or, more precisely, to Tierra del Fuego. At this end of the world, where, in Maille's imagination, there existed no more than a few ship wrecks and silvery-glossy rocks filled with squawking penguins, one could hope that neither the Americans nor the Soviets would find sending a bomb here worth their while.