The Sun Gives Without Receiving: An Old Story

Abstract

Even though as a child I used to watch my mother in the 1940s sewing up, with the skill of a jeweller, gifts of food parcels to send from sunny Australia to her mother, who stayed behind in war-tor Vienna, parcels that always contained, as I remember, several pounds of butter, and even though I marvelled at how thickly she spread her toast, let alone at her cheerfully acknowledging such unhealthy excess, it was not until I settled down in a hot sugar plantation town in western Colombia in 1970, a town without drinking water or adequate sewage, that it was borne upon me what butter could mean as a privileged sign of affluence, golden and creamy, suspended between solid and liquid, dependent on refrigeration no less than on good milk cows, a dairy industry, a nice temperate climate, alpine comes to mind, indeed alpina was the brand name of Colombian butter, fresh cuttable bread to be buttered . . . indeed, a whole other world, an inconceivably different clean and creamy european world transplanted and superimposed, if only for a gratifying instant by the mere thought, let alone taste and incorporation, of butter. And having made his contract with the devil, he earns much more money but can only spend it on luxuries; on butter, sunglasses, a fancy shirt, liquor . .. If you buy or rent a farm, the trees stop bearing. If you buy a pig to fatten up, it gets thin and dies. Secar, was the word they used. To dry, to dry up like a green tree drying out through lack of water, drying to a crisp in the relentless sun. And the same word applied to livestock, the pig getting thinner and thinner, wasting away to skin and bone. Secar. To dry up. Too much sun. Why can only luxuries be bought and consumed with the devil pact? Butter, sunglasses, a fancy shirt, liquor ... a strange list, I thought, being thrown by the butter, a new sign precariously signalling to me both the difference of my new, third world, existence, and the way in which that existence connected