March 14. A blue ball.

Santiago still. The museum at the Moneda, near the government seat has an interesting interior but the current exhibitions are not interesting enough to lure us inside. Instead, the swimming pool we saw the day before is much more attractive. The hot day makes me lazy and I played in the water with a small blue ball only for about half an hour before snoozing in the fresh grass. Take the fact for example that the ball is blue. Its diameter was about eight centimeter by the way. It could have been a red ball, or a green one. I could have left out the color altogether. With the color mentioned, and not the children that lend it to me, nor the curvature or the temperature of the pool, nor the fact that my towel was a bit dirty and in the middle of the pool was a rock formation, nor the English-speaking kid with a grandmother in Chicago that played with me – with the color mentioned I take a certain path. A small blue ball is reproduced in the corner of your eye; the swmimming-pool story is structured around that ball. You see? Now try to apply this to other concepts too, concepts that are more abstract than a blue ball, like knowledge, truth, beauty.

Pablo took us to a friend and then to another friend. We had good Caipirinhas in several Santiago homes. Most of Pablo’s friends are tv-reporters or students of that subject, and most of them grew up in Punto Arenas, in the very south of Chile.