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The ugliest sea in the world
To my great friend Frans Kemper (the “Flying Dutchman” who loved the sea) and my son Mariano, who pushed me to unexpected happiness.
“The waves and the wind/the cold of the sea/the cold of your soul/makes me shiver/the wind and the sand/don't let me see/you are a wave/very ready to break/shivering…walking along the beach/I see the foam of your love vanish/and that's why I've sworn not to love you…”
Thus went the chorus of a song that became popular in my country in the late 1960s: “Las olas y el viento” (The Waves and the Wind). It spoke to us of the sea, and throughout the country, including my small town in the heart of Argentina, so far from the sea, the summer hit was heard hundreds of times on radio stations.
To put it bluntly, it was a true ode to the suffering of a boy who traverses - his love unrequited - across an unfriendly sea. Even so, in that scorching summer in a town just a few degrees below the Tropic of Capricorn, that song brought us a bit of fresh air... and so we grew up dreaming of setting our feet in that cold, windy, and distant sea.
We Argentines are pendular and reductionist beings, and for a large part of the population, it's the ugliest sea in the world. And if their budget allows it, come summer, the beaches of southern Brazil and Uruguay become Argentinian neighborhoods.
It wasn't in my plans to make a pilgrimage to the ugliest sea in the world, but one of my sons had decided to do so thanks to a lucrative job offer, and that's where he went. The days of January…February…March passed… that young adventurer, in his maritime solitude, cried out for the company of one of his five brothers and sister to feel a bit of family warmth, but none of them succumbed to the sirens' song… the ugliest sea in the world wasn't too tempting. It was then that, in a burst of boldness, I said to my wife: "Well, we'll go."
After traveling 1,200 km over two long days of travel and dozens of messages from my son asking how long it would take us to get there, we arrived at our destination. I was finally facing the ugliest sea in the world, and as it could not be otherwise: the wind, the sand, the roar of the waves breaking, the sun that refused to rise to the clouds that covered it, the dark waters, the effervescence of the foam were before my eyes, and almost with tears in my eyes, I knew I was facing the sea… the most beautiful in the world, that friend I hadn't seen for more than thirty years. And like a good friend who has walked eternity, he welcomed me with his roars of happiness, with his windy "caresses", with his clouds that draw themselves across the infinite sky and when they conspire turn it into a black blanket that within minutes throws us a relentless rain, with his warm sand that offers you the best mattress in the world, with his waves that only want to have fun at our expense, with the friendliest hustlers in the world who offer their delicacies or various nonsense, with the inns where they serve you coffee with the most delicious croissants in the world that come to your table crowned by the most beautiful smile in the world, with the coldest water in the world but that you never want to leave, with the most enormous and democratic carpet in the world, where that diverse Argentina (of skin and pocket) lies down without complexes, with whale bones that bring you stories from the seven seas, with the lights of a lighthouse that gave hope to so many who arrived in these lands decades ago expelled from an old and hungry Europe.
And I was with my camera... but the voice of the sea, which commands everything and which must be obeyed, tells me: "Leave these people alone... you're not Martin Parr"... "Stay calm, I tell it... I don't want to be either."
Surely there are thousands of more beautiful seas in the world... one of them is yours.
