Memories and mixed emotions in a visit to the Falklands War former scene.
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Driving away from Stanley, it’s all country and silence, and the wind, always the wind. The low temperatures in January remind you the proximity with the South Pole. Once in a while along the rural road you can see an isolated farm surrounded by some sheep, the animal in which it’s based part of the local industry, like those hand made warm wool sweaters and the gorgeous lamb steaks.
We -the members of the TV crew- go to Darwin, where the Argentinian cemetery is located, an obligated stop. It seems to be in the middle of nowhere and it doesn’t have any walls of fences. Just a group of simple gravestones and white crosses on the colorless grass, without any hint of recent visitors.
After the war, only around two hundreds corpses were identified, so in most of the gravestones you can’t even read their names, what’s replaced by the script: “Argentinian soldier, only known by God”. When we read that, we suddenly feel even colder, and it starts to rain.
We don’t have enough flowers for everyone, but we know there are no flowers enough.
I think about the relatives of the dead soldiers, some of them who I interviewed in Buenos Aires, lots of them who never could visit this cemetery and I would like to cry, not only for them, but also for my own naive infant memories of the war.
I’m an adult now and I have learned the lesson that teachers usually don’t teach, but life does: the good doesn’t always win and most of the times there aren’t even good and bad sides, but a lot of misunderstanding between people from different cultures.
Embraced by the solitude of the dead, I can’t sing the march anymore, but now I know exactly what the wind is crying out.
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