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I once knew the names of all the constellations. My father taught me them, while warning that the German sky above us was totally foreign to him. I was obsessed with the sky, the stars and aeroplanes. I knew that a plane had brought us to Heidelberg and that a plane would take us back to where we belonged. For me, planes had faces and personalities. And I prayed that the one that would take us back to Buenos Aires wasn’t one that would fall into the middle of the ocean and kill us all. The night before our trip, our big trip back to Argentina, our house on Keplerstrasse was filled with philosophers. We ate in the garden because it was an unusually warm and clear night. There were some Latin Americans: a Chilean who played the guitar, a serious Mexican philosopher with the requisite beard, and Mario, a young Argentinian student who was staying at our house. The Latin Americans made an effort to speak German and the Germans responded amiably in Spanish. My father argued loudly with a very tall and completely bald philosopher from Frankfurt. At one point they noticed I was frightened and they explained that they weren’t fighting, they were just discussing Nicolai Hartmann. When I was a bit older I tried to read Hartmann in order to understand what could’ve driven them to argue with such passion, but I didn’t find anything. I should sleep now but I can’t, I’m still full of nerves from the trip. I look out the window of my new room at a slice of the Heidelberg sky. The last night I was here I stared up at this same sky for a long while trying to memorise it, saying goodbye, storing its image in my mind. The Chilean philosopher played the guitar and began to sing in a gravelly voice ‘Gracias a la vida’ by Violeta Parra; and all around him the group of enthusiastic, friendly, drunk Germans sang the chorus with ridiculous accents. How many sleepless nights had I spent in the past month? Yesterday in Buenos Aires I was anxious I wouldn’t be ready for the taxi and I kept waking up long before my alarm. When I arrived at the terminal I had a strong coffee to wake me up enough to face the brief airport procedures. On the plane I was dizzy with anxiety again. But this time I wasn’t afraid of it falling, I was afraid of landing safe and sound, not knowing what to do or why I was there. Going down with the plane would’ve been easier than landing in Germany with my life in shambles, without having told anyone in Buenos Aires what I was doing. The prospect of dying on the flight was less terrifying than the thought of riding this surge of impulse to my final destination, without enough money, in a desperate attempt to find peace. And a long-lost happiness, lost and buried forever along with my father. This is not the right way to do things, but it’s the way I’ve done them and here I am. Tomorrow I’ll find a phone and call Buenos Aires, and I’ll explain as best I can. I think I’m going to be able to sleep in this place, in this bed. The room is prettier than it had looked online, and I liked everything else the caretaker showed me: the dining hall, the kitchen, and the whole downstairs of the residence. I’m sure it’s a great place for a student. But I’m not here to study anything. I’m here to sleep, to get well, and to find a bench in Marktplatz where I can sit and think calmly and eat a pretzel.
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