A product of his time and place . . .

Posted on ManuelPosted in Excerpts

I knew that inner strength comes from devotion to an ideal, only I had none. Or maybe I did, but I never thought about it. Antonio on the other hand was devoted to an ideal, I was sure of that—his type always are. I wasn’t sure what it was, and perhaps there was more than one, but men like him have simple, straightforward ideals, like love of country, freedom, or liberty: uncomplicated ideals that become the moral beacon that lights the footpath their lives follow. For them, a few, simple to understand ideals provide the sturdy, rock-hard foundation around which their lives are built. They live by them and die with them, but one thing they never do is waver.

If a person’s territory and way of life had anything to do with a person’s ideals, then it was easy to see how Antonio would be a tough nut to crack. He had to be to survive here. And it wasn’t that he had bravado, he had certainty.

The problem, I finally decided, was that I had too much refinement in my blood: I was the result of countless generations of city living with the police keeping order and for the most part, people behaving well, living in a structured society, observing its rules. Antonio, on the other hand, had native Fuegian blood in him, not too many generations removed; maybe one, at most two. Part of him was still wild, with his own rules and code of conduct, largely untainted by modern civilized society. There was a difference between us, I reckoned, a bridge of time and place that could not be crossed. I would have to be content with being me, and let him be what he was: a product of his time and place: a time dating back to the origins of mankind in a lonely, mostly uninhabited, windswept place.

From the sequel to In the Land of Fire (unpublished).

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