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Alberto Maria De Agostini
The guy with the robe and the black beret is immersed in the air strait argentina, only on the deck of the ferry, leaning against the railing. The day is growing dark, cold. There is wind on the water. There are no other noise in addition to the wind and the boat, the sound of an old internal combustion engine does not distinguish Alberto Now almost the contours of the mountains. Black masses looming over the waters. You see emerge from the bank of small camps with vertical columns of smoke, which sometimes hides the swollen sea. How will the mission is waiting for me? And how will this land on the edge of the world? And the mountains that I see from this railing?
The young Salesian priest repeated these words again, while his long journey from Italy at the end came slowly sailing in the Strait of Magellan. Alberto is now crouched in the bow, at the windward of the small boat. It's cold but you feel you are at home in its Alps, the cold air freezes the bones. The other passengers prefer to stay sheltered in the cabin, he is only against the wind and looks toward the ocean, breathing together, deeply, the sea air and the wind from the Pacific. He is alone, but loneliness defends his emotion. Perhaps he could not imagine that the land would change his destiny.
The water is moved and pumblea. Now and then there's the sight of Alberto, the first inhabitants of those islands. Archaic faces and bodies came from the mists of time, so that the confused and rootless young missionary felt like prisoners in a deep sadness.
They're quiet, waterfront, and look unhealthy. The look seems to set the huge canoe that still bears white men on their land. And then comes from behind the smoke of the villages, the acrid smell of butchered meat and left to go bad, the barking of dogs. Do not know yet the young Albert's "shooting." There are plenty of reports indicating that during the first decades of the last century, the ships that crossed the Strait of Magellan or the east coast played host to travelers who delight in shoot everything that moved in the camps of the Indians. It is not known, today the number of victims of the sport of whites.
Even Darwin had gone there.
The year is 1910, exactly a century ago.
Navigation is always slower, the engine of the ship has a shortness of breath, he meets a small island of prehistoric rock completely covered with sea lions.
Males weigh four or five hundred pounds live in these waters since time immemorial but Alberto see them for the first time. Huge and proud with the mane on the rump Roaring like their brethren in the bush. They are stored in groups surrounded by their harem of twenty or thirty females. Above them, in the rocks as high as thousands of cormorants properties like marble statues.
strip of land ice, which emerged here and there almost by accident. Now we Estare Alberto and think about how these lands will be in the winter with the claws of the cold Antarctic planted on all forms of life. And all around, for six months, dark, cold and silent.
The year was 1910.
A young priest of the congregation Salesian missionaries landed in Tierra del Fuego and so writes her new life. An unknown land, mostly undiscovered, traveled by the wind and frost, inhabited by sparse groups of natives and a poor community of adventurers, finished in the ass in the world for many different reasons.
Patagonia was still a word that evokes a mystery. The ship is docking, and the young Alberto just now felt to have done. Matter of hours and was in front of his future. The future that awaits you at twenty-six.
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