Then I put on a cassette I’d chosen at random and the first thing I heard was a cover, by a group I didn’t know, of a song made popular a long time ago by Enrique Rodríguez’s tango orchestra (something like “Hungarian Nights” or “Love in Istanbul”). Listening to it felt wonderful, and I immediately recalled the image of a large warehouse or depot Alicia and I had seen a few days ago on a little beach by the racecourse; an old building covered in panes of glass. Looking at it, I’d wished I had a camera with me to capture that glass landscape (unbroken in some places, but cracked in many more) in the particular light of the sunset. And as well as the glass, there were pieces of disused machinery and metal coils in the fields, among the weeds. Wonderful: I derive an almost erotic pleasure from contemplating certain ruins—empty houses, demolished houses—especially when they’re overgrown with vegetation.

I remember a house I saw on Cerro Pan de Azúcar. It was abandoned or incomplete, almost the skeleton of a house; perhaps it had been abandoned before it was finished. There was a tree growing inside it, and one of its branches had wound its way through a window. Dylan Thomas can say what he likes; this is my idea of beauty. As, too, was a disused church I saw on the same road, which leads from Piriapolis to Pan de Azúcar. Contemplating it, I think, constituted my first genuine mystical-religious experience. The building was completely falling down, and there was a hideous wooden crucifix over the entrance (I was later told that this crucifix had turned up on the coast nearby, carried there by the waves).

Enrique Rodríguez’s orchestra is somewhat similar to all this. Once, when Alicia and I were driving home after a long trip, for much of the journey there was a program about Enrique Rodríguez on the radio. It was extraordinary, marred only by the fact that I couldn’t share it with Alicia—she was at the wheel, concentrating hard, and most unimpressed at having to listen to such a racket.

I can enjoy Bach and Vivaldi as much as she does, and I can tell the difference between Bach or Vivaldi and Enrique Rodríguez. But just then it seemed impossible to explain to her how that orchestra, for me, was like contemplating a ruin overgrown with vegetation. Not because the orchestra was around so long ago, though in a way that heightens the effect, but because, even at the time, Enrique Rodríguez’s original intention was always a ruin overgrown with vegetation. That’s what his music tells me, and it’s what, after breakfast today, was woven into my secret argument with Dylan Thomas and my memory of the sunset on the beach by the racecourse. And that’s how I recovered an essential part of myself, which I’d lost in the chaos of recent years.

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