If a person wanted to start a new life, away from a busy world full of big cities and dense population centers, Tierra del Fuego seemed like the ideal place to go. According to the map, an archipelago made up of sparsely populated islands tucked away into a remote corner of the planet: it offered solitude and lots of it. That and seagulls, seals, and no end of empty gravel beaches. Looking inland, the promise of an empty land with mountains in the distance; looking out to sea, nothing but water.
Segundino decides to go there. He was looking for solitude, for time to be alone, for time to contemplate life and perhaps make a new start. That, however, was not how things worked out. Actually, nothing worked out the way he intended, but he’s not one bit sorry. His life there takes a different turn and he realizes that no amount of planning can overcome destiny. In the process, he learns about Tierra del Fuego, the land and its people, and what makes a strong community.
To say more is to tell the story, but far from getting himself marooned in a deserted island, as was his original intention, he finds himself growing fond of the people around him, not to mention the land, and before he realizes it, he’s there to stay.
“In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.”
Mark Twain
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First, Arturo finds Cuco the penguin, and that was an accident. Then, he’s hardly used to Cuco, when Cuco finds Pia, the eight year-old girl he finally adopts, and not that he had a choice—not with his wife Elsa having a say-so. Then Pia finds her mother, Olimpia, who is now staying with Arturo and Elsa, and soon after, while rowing in an out of the way place looking for a sunrise, Cuco finds a wounded Pelican that Arturo brings home. Wasting no time, Pia names the pelican Julio, and Arturo gets the feeling that Julio is not planning to leave any time soon.
Life on the river was never easy for Arturo, but it was simple. Not anymore. In his eighties now, when most man would be thinking of retirement, he’s busy raising a girl and his wife is acting like a different person, so much so, she’s hard to recognize. Empowered and no doubt emboldened by the responsibility of raising a young girl, Elsa decides to get into politics through a side door.
While Julio is helping Elsa get her candidate elected, they discover that someone is shooting birds, like Julio for instance, and just for fun. Then a ship comes into the bay with no lights and no name that anyone can read.
For Arturo, nothing is simple anymore, and there’s a lot going on in his life he wasn’t planning on.
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Arturo preferred to mind his own business, if only the world would let him. More and more his life was getting complicated; if not one thing, then another. Nowadays, not only did he have a small girl to worry about, but her mother Olimpia also, and if that wasn’t enough, his wife, Elsa had ideas and plans of her own.
Excerpt: “As mentioned previously, Arturo was a born worrier, seemingly not happy unless he was worrying about something, usually lots of somethings, one or two worries never being sufficient. With Pia, he had found a true fountain of worries, or better said, a fountain of true worries. Since Arturo was entirely ill-prepared to deal with all the questions and decisions that an eight-year-old girl could generate in any one day, and he being the protective sort of papá by definition, he tended to make even the little nothings into big problems. At present, he was worrying about what the group of Elsa’s card-playing, know-it-all friends would teach a girl, he was worried about her insect collection that seemed to grow on a daily basis, and especially the handling of the nasty ones that stung or bit, along with the handling of the chloroform used to put an end to them before they could be safely pinned to the cork board, where supposedly, they belonged. He worried about her piloting a friend’s tugboat, and about her opinions on the weather and tides, something that he had always thought of as a man’s area of interest and expertise, certainly not becoming of a girl still not dry behind the ears. More unsettling still, was that Pia, when she offered an opinion on the weather and tides, was usually right—therefore worrying and annoying to boot. He worried about the girl’s upcoming first day of school, and whether the not quite three months they had spent teaching her and getting her prepared for her initiation as a student had been enough. The fact that she and Cuco, were as close as twins should have had a calming influence on his nerves, but knowing Cuco, it had the opposite effect. He worried about what the two were plotting all the time, the last big scheme of the two resulting in not only a month of industrial strength worrying, but almost resulting in losing the girl . . .
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Once upon a time, in Valdivia – a remote river-town in southern Chile, there lived a man called Arturo. He was in his eighties, had been married to Elsa for nearly sixty years, and considered himself a simple riverboat man whose job was to ferry people back and forth across the river. At one time his life had been simple, ordinary, conventional, and all his days predictable: he rowed to work in the early morning, he rowed back in the evening, and if it rained, and it rained a lot, he stayed home. At home he played chess, rested, visited with friends and neighbors, and listened to soccer games on the radio. His life, wife, and work, gave him little if anything to worry about. It was a perfect existence, quiet and serene, and he liked it that way.
Nowadays, all that was in the past. His life had changed starting the minute he found a penguin in the water, by accident. Since he couldn’t get rid of the penguin, he named him Cuco, and somehow or other, they became friends. What he didn’t know at the time was that with Cuco came change. Constant change. “A whirlwind of changes,” according to Arturo, and changes that kept coming one after the other like an endless daisy chain. In a few short years, and mostly due to Cuco, he became celebrated, famous, and regarded as a leader in the community of vendors and fisherman along the waterfront. At present, he was also a successful fly-fishing guide, with a new boat, and in the last two months, of all things, he had adopted an eight year old girl. Her name was Pia, and he figured it was a good thing he’d been getting lots of practice with penguin generated changes; it more or less got him prepared for girl generated changes, and, as he was about to find out, that was a whole different kettle of fish.
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Arturo was trying to get used to all the changes in his life brought about a random act of kindness―that of saving the life of a penguin. And what a penguin it turned out to be!
Happily living his life, pretty much on cruise control, until he happened to rescue a penguin. How he revived him, nobody could hazard to even guess, but revive him he did, and now he was paying the price of having a penguin in his life. He named the penguin Cuco, and Cuco turned out to be a force of nature. A force of nature bigger than any ol’ earthquake or occasional tsunami, and one that brought lots of changes to an unsuspecting and totally unprepared Arturo. And not only to him, but to his wife Elsa, to his friends, and to everyone else in town as well.
Arturo lived in Valdivia, a river town in southern Chile, and for the most part, unknown to most of the world until Cuco showed up. The people of Valdivia, unlike Arturo, had no problem getting used to Cuco and his doings, and came to expect the unexpected, and enjoyed reading about it on the front page of the town’s newspaper. The newspaper for one, threw in the towel, and knew better than to forget to publish something about Cuco on a daily basis, no matter if it was new news, or old news, or no news. It was expected of them, and the town’s people would stand for no less.
And it’s not that Arturo couldn’t handle some changes, but sometimes he felt like he wasn’t ready for them; at least not ready for them all at once. He was barely getting used to one, when another one arrived―one after the other like dots and dashes, and he lived overwhelmed half the time. Not only that, but every time he imagined things were getting back to normal, (not that anything in his life was normal anymore), Cuco came up with something different, totally different, totally unexpected, and Arturo had to make a giant leap and adapt.
Time and again he leapt, time and again he adapted, until eventually he got tired of all the jumping and adapting and decided to go with the flow and try to stay one step ahead of Cuco. It’s the one thing he could think to do. And that’s when he discovered the limitations of being human.
Still, they were a team, constant companions in fact, and they couldn’t imagine a life without each other―they learnt from each other, they helped each other, they played jokes on each other, and enjoyed each other’s company to no end.
Staying one step ahead of Cuco, however, was not easy, and try as he might, it was never enough. Not by a long shot. Not even close.
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Cuco es la historia de un hombre y un pingüino. Arturo era un botero, un hombre del río y su trabajo era transbordar a sus clientes de un lado del río al lado opuesto. Él vivía y trabajaba en Valdivia, Chile, una ciudad poco conocida a nivel mundial, incluso, poco conocida en Chile, y considerada de estar al extremo sur del país y fuera de la ruta principal. El río que Arturo cruzaba un sinfín de veces todos los días era justamente el Río Valdivia, el río más grande de la zona y uno que pocos kilómetros más abajo desembocaba en el mar. Arturo tenía más de ochenta arriba, y remar era lo que había hecho toda su vida. A él le encantaba su trabajo, su río, y nunca quiso ni pretendió hacer otra cosa.
Un día al amanecer vio lo que pensaba era una bota, o un zapato flotando en el agua y algo hizo que estirara la mano, lo agarrara, y lo aventara adentro del bote. La cosa resultó no ser un tipo de calzado, pero un pingüino, y no cualquier pingüino, pero un Pingüino de Magallanes que estaba ya en sus últimas, y por lo visto, ya vencido y resignado a su destino.
Cómo lo revivió, y por qué llegaron a ser inseparables nadie tenía la más mínima idea, y todo era demasiado nuevo y extraño para siquiera los numerosos sabelotodo, que nunca faltan, tratar de adivinar.
Los Pingüinos de Magallanes son conocidos por ser extremadamente tímidos ‒ este no lo era. Supuestamente, preferían vivir en una colonia al lado del mar ‒ el que supuso eso estaba muy equivocado.
Arturo estaba acostumbrado a una cierta manera de ser, a un cierto trabajo, y tenía una vida tranquila y cotidiana – por lo menos así pensaba.
Como consecuencia de imprevistamente y sin querer estirar la mano, los cambios llegaron rápidamente a la vida de Arturo y de su esposa, Elsa. Y no solamente eran ellos los que vieron cambios en sus vidas, pero todos en Valdivia notaron un cambio, por no decir un gran cambio, y no había nada que se podía hacer al respecto. “Dejarse llevar por la corriente” era aparentemente una buena opción, y si no la única opción, sin duda la más fácil, y viviendo cerca de un río, disfrutaba algo de lógica.
Arturo nombró el pingüino Cuco. Cuco era la palabra que en esas latitudes significaba un susto, un julepe, un sobresalto, y le explicaba a medio mundo que esto era justamente lo que le pasó cuando Cuco aterrizó ¡Plaf! como saco de plomo adentro del bote el día menos pensado y sin previo aviso. Por supuesto que ésto nunca pasó, pero según él, podría haber pasado ¿por qué no? y de todas maneras era una buena explicación y fue inmediatamente publicada en el periódico local, tal cual, y se convirtió en la purísima verdad.
Cuco resultó ser una fuerza de la naturaleza ‒ un fuerte imán envuelto en plumas que atraía a todos, especialmente a los niños, y en bien poco tiempo Valdivia figuraba prominentemente en el mapa mundial, que era precisamente donde todo Valdiviano deseaba figurar, y Arturo y Cuco se convirtieron en verdaderos y acreditados célebres.
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Cuco is a story about a man and a penguin. Arturo is a riverboat man, and his job is to ferry people back and forth across the river in the city of Valdivia, Chile. He’s in his eighties, and has being doing that for as long as he can remember—he loves his job, his river, and never wanted to do anything else.
One day he sees what he thinks is an old shoe in the water, something makes him reach out and grab it, and toss it in the boat. It turns out the “shoe” wasn’t any kind of footwear, but a penguin, and not just any penguin, but a Magellanic penguin on his last legs and fading fast. Of course it’s no secret that the bird quickly recovers, and they become inseparable.
Magellanic penguins are supposed to be shy—this one wasn’t. They are also supposed to stick to their own kind, and live in a colony, out in a rookery—Hah! Who came up with that?
Arturo was all set in his ways—or so he thought. He also ferried people across the river for a living—but not for long.
“Some call it luck, some providence, others a break, a fluke or just a plain ol’ fashioned good roll of the dice. Most life-changing events are that way and cannot be planned or counted on, and by the very laws of nature, they happen when least expected, and to no one in particular. That was the case in this town and in this story.” (From Cuco)
So, whether they liked it or not, change came fast for Arturo and his wife Elsa. And not only did the two of them see changes, but everyone in Valdivia noticed a change, a big change, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. “Go with the flow” was apparently a good option, and if not the only option, at any rate the easiest one, and living by a river it at least made sense.
Arturo named the penguin Cuco. Cuco is the Spanish word for “boogeyman”, and Arturo explained that the name was due to the scare he got when one day Cuco crash landed without warning inside the boat. This never really happened, but it might have, and anyhow, it was a good story that was immediately published in the local paper and became the accepted truth.
Cuco as it turned out was a force of nature, a plumy people-magnet, and before long he and Arturo became quite the celebrities.
And perhaps because he was such a celebrity, it wasn’t long before Cuco found a mate, Novia, and they became part of the household at Arturo’s. In fact, it somehow became easier for Elsa to accept having penguins around, as long as one of them was a girl penguin.
Perhaps also because his life was upended already, it was easier for Arturo to change jobs, and probably because of Cuco, he became a fishing guide. A fly-fishing guide to be exact—with a feathery fish finder by his side better than any high-tech one ever made, and a lot more fun. Before long, Arturo had customers arriving from all over the world, Valdivia became a known city, and was finally on the world map. Not to say that it wasn’t on the map before—only a lot harder to find.
Along the way, the reader will meet Fosforito, Arturo’s adopted son, and Agapito, Arturo’s friend, known mostly as FM, and owner of a radio-like modulated voice that explains the nickname. Arturo and Cuco also rescue Carlitos, a boy that like any good tourist got in a row boat and one way or another ended up scooting downriver on a fast outgoing tide, and ahead of several things, including the fog, the night, the unseasonable cold air, and any would be rescuers.
Also because of Cuco, Arturo has a chance to build a new and bigger boat. A boat more suitable to fly-fishing, and not simply because with his higher income he can now afford it, but also because with Cuco around, even the maestros at the boatyard who would normally take a year or two, or para siempre (forever) to deliver a boat, now get right on it, and presto, a boat gets built. Finally, Arturo is convinced that a penguin around is better than any ol’ magic wand—with Cuco by his side, and according to Arturo, “for better or for worse,” things happen.
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