The following is an article written by journalist Matías Sereno for the Maxim Magazine, meant to be published in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2009. Foundation personnel followed Sereno for two weeks after Dr. Rodriguez was informed of unusual activity from an outside reporter near Perimeter 71-Gamma, and successfully intercepted the article before his editor could publish it. 32 people from the Maxim Magazine office in Buenos Aires and Sereno’s family were amnestesized. The article has been translated from Spanish. Some colloquialisms and expressions have been localized according to the language selected by the reader.





When Myths Become Reality

I was vacationing in the Humid Pampas, visiting family and friends when my brother-in-law mentioned I couldn’t leave without spending a day riding with him and his friends. And I, being a man of the world who could never pass on a first time like that, of course accepted the invitation to potentially fucking kill myself by falling off a horse. But if I’m being honest, however not humble, I am still surprised by how easy I got the hand of it initially, and by the time we needed hats to stop the sun from hospitalizing us, I was riding completely on my own.

Even though we like to think of the sky as an endless sea of blue, that evening was characterized by a total lack of shade in a long, never-ending meadow. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit right now that witnessing so much empty space wasn’t a mind-bending experience. We rode for hours on end, entering the newest of worlds to me, yet so ancient to others, chasing one hill after the next, only to find absolutely nothing on the other side. It wasn’t my first time in that place (I had visited it before in ‘95, when I first started dating my now wife), but for some reason it felt like I had never been there before. I had seen it, but I had never really seen it. And it’s probably because time changes our perspective, because age gives us insight, that that day I wanted to listen more than usual. The air had something in it that opened my eyes to the world around me, and as a journalist I forcefully tend to stay quiet to pay attention to everything being said around me. You never know when the next story will pop up, and with an evening as memorable and soul-changing as that one, lost in an incommensurably large sea of green, I just felt something was on the horizon.

And so, as the mate we were drinking turned to wine, the night took us by surprise, the moon rose on the horizon, and as I contemplated it in all its majesty, one of the guys in the group said “careful now, you don’t want to end up like Alfonso”.

I got the pleasure of meeting with Alfonso Ayatega the day after his story was mentioned to me, and I pushed that meeting into existence as hard as I could because I had never heard a more absurd and ridiculous story being told with such sincerity and respect as that one. The only thing that had ever come close was well within the realm of myths and legends, of holy texts and long sermons by a priest on a Sunday morning.

It was like something taken out of the bible, except this time they promised me I would actually meet Jesus.

Now, Alfonso is not crazy. Not more than your average neighbor, at least. He is one of the handful of men that tends to the cows at the Romero Farm, and he does so with an uncharacteristic peace and tranquility that is very much alien for someone like me, who was born from the melodic noise and beautiful filth of Buenos Aires. He is a gaucho, straight up. He doesn’t fuck around nor likes to waste his time with nonsense. He can handle his drink and the heat of the sun alike, his skin filled with wrinkles and marks of sunburns past.

And he can’t talk. Or… he doesn’t want to. I still don’t know for sure to this day.

“It wasn’t enough”, he said in sign language. “It just wasn’t enough anymore”. Our conversation was difficult because his wife was being my translator and she wasn’t happy with it. So we moved to pen and paper eventually.

“I don’t know for sure if it was Kupuka the one leading or it was I. Perhaps we took turns, since I think we both wanted to go the same way”.

Back in 2001, Alfonso was riding his horse Kupuka and tending to the cows as always. His daughter had given him a camera to take pictures of them for a school assignment, and as the moon rose from behind a hill, he captured the moment that changed his life. He rode towards the hill, towards the moon, and a chill took over him. The world faded, and only white remained.

The old folk tale had warned him: never look straight to the full moon. It will drive you insane. It will take your heart and soul, scramble your mind, when the white flash appears in front of you, in the middle of nowhere and when you least expect it. Out of the ground it will come and your life will be over. But his mind was somewhere else. All of our minds were somewhere else back in 2001, and he simply forgot the warning and rode straight to it. It was an imperative he could not avoid (as all imperatives are, right?). Keep riding. Just… keep riding. And so he did.

After the world faded, a new one appeared in front of him. Or the same one but different. The Pampa unfolded in front of him like an infinite leaf and the distant moon lighted his path forward. It called to him somehow, because he never heard voices or anything like it. And as he rode, other men in their own horses accompanied him, for the calling was not just for him, but for others that, Alfonso promised, I could meet any time I wanted. They were very much real, just like him. They kept each other company on their journey to the moon.

A moment of sincerity: have any of you ever done acid? Because this was both like it and completely not like it. “Time stretched”, Alfonso wrote and then accompanied with hand movements. His face was tenacious, his eyes were on fire. He confessed: “I rode for so long, it was year after year after year, and I would just keep riding towards the moon regardless of how much time had passed. I couldn’t stop. I just couldn’t.”, but the confession didn’t look painful at all. But… it also didn’t seem like he was removing a heavy weight from his back. Instead, he was just having a conversation with some dude.

He claimed he spent years riding his horse, yet for his wife and daughter he was gone for the usual time, with one little problem: when he returned, he couldn’t speak anymore.

How can someone just stop talking, or completely lose their voice, and not be phased by it? Saying his wife was fucking pissed when this happened is putting it lightly. And Alfonso, a man who never twists his arm for anyone, that time he gave in. He didn’t fight back, and instead wrote to her that this was him now, and that their marriage would have to be stronger than that.

“She came around eventually”, Alfonso continued. “I tried to tell her what happened, but I didn’t try that hard either. She is not interested in believing me, and neither am I. That makes us the only two people in town, however. The men I met during that journey towards the moon, their faces sometimes come back to me, like the faces of old friends from high school. Friends that you grew up with, and so you never notice their faces change with time. She is like that as well, changing but I can’t tell how. They are both so real to me. Everything changes, and it’s not enough”.

I asked him how someone can move on from something as life-changing as this, and he remained as cryptic as always.

“You don’t”, he said. “But you do. The cows need attention, and if you don’t get up the next morning and go to work then how do you live? My life would be over, and so it stays with you.”

I think I know what he meant, though. Change is both permanent and invisible. It stays with you even when you don’t know it’s there. It behaves like a dormant feeling, ever-present in every action, in every moment. It leaves an imprint in everything you do. The feeling lingers, like the faces of old friends that change and don’t change at the same time.

Then I realized a more pressing question had to be formulated: what did he mean when he said that it wasn’t enough anymore? But, as you can probably tell by now, I couldn’t push too hard for an answer.

“The moon is unreachable. They never went there, I know it because I tried. The immensity of that white, pale thing. It’s just so big and so far away, and even then with each step Kupuka made I could see it become bigger and bigger. I was getting closer, and the moonlight was inside of me, piercing my eyes. I touched it eventually. It was nailed to the universe, to the background of reality. Wherever I looked, up or down, left or right, it was all the moon, it was all white. I had to ride back after realizing it, that it wasn’t enough anymore”.

I told you it was like an acid trip. And yet he was so lucid and sure about what he lived. It is so hard to put that experience into a cohesive statement like Alfonso did that day. Everything still lives in his memories, so clear and within reach… he didn’t imagine it. I can’t believe he did.

Alfonso invited me that night to a barbeque, but I had to decline. I thought: his life is this way now, and some things are a certain way and that’s it. I couldn’t digest what he had told me. Not yet.

To this day, I still don’t know if the rest of the conversation I had with him and his wife was either complete nonsense or something that changed me in a very profound way, but I feel like I should ponder on it for some time before diving into it once more. That trip moved something in me, generated a realization. Something not linked to a universal truth or answer, however, but a little bit closer to a question. Turns out that, like The Man in Black said, the great mystery of the universe is not life, but size. Size encompasses life, and, at least in this case, not a Dark Tower but a White Moon encompasses size. Perhaps the meadow and its peaceful drift was too large for me to understand and it scrambled my brain. Perhaps facing the realization of size screwed me up. Maybe it was the silence, and the green. The distant horizon that you never reach, with a powerful entity looming over it, watching, guiding.

Because, like Alfonso said to me in relation to his newfound ability to not speak, “the grasslands were always quiet, so there wasn’t much talking being done anyway”.