My parents and I lived for nearly ten years in San Clemente del Tuyú.

 

(1970-1979). . . San Clemente is a town located on the mouth of the Plata River.  Thesea water is maroon, with small waves.  The sky is cloudy and lead-colored.

 

During the summer, the beach of San Clemente becomes flooded with tourists.  Boisterous families, insolent and cheerful youngsters.

 

But the summer lasts very little and tourists leave soon after, taking their laughter away.  Then the true owner of the beach arrives: the wind.

 

A ceaseless, apocalyptic wind that blows incessantly.  The sand dunes are stripped naked.  The sea water is ashen.

 

You can hear the sound of seagulls crying and dogs barking.

 

Our house was on the beach. The sea reached towards us, invaded us on stormy days.

 

I think the three of us loved this threatening and hostile landscape.  We let ourselves be hugged by the wind.

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While we lived there, my mother and father and mother painted a thousand times those distorted clouds and languid horizon, that beautiful melancholy of earth roads in the village. I keep their landscapes from that time. . . 

 

But much later, in 1990, when we had left San Clemente and immigrated to the Mediterranean city of Cordoba, where we were surrounded by uproar of a city, the cars, and commotion . . my father kept occasionally painting the sea that he saw in his memory.

 

In those days, my father was obsessed by abstract painting andInformalism, but he sometimes made a pause-- a parenthesis in his contemporary obsessions-- and returned, like he who comes home, to paint the beach landscape.

 

That grey horizon and merciless wind, the hostile open surroundings that we so yearned for: our desolate home.