Paradise Lost By Louis Martin It did not seem so bad: I was living in a crawl space called the "playroom" in Paradise, also known as Puigcerda. There wasn't enough room to stand up but I had gotten used to that. I began to call myself "Pooch, the hunchback of Da." At least it was isolated from all the noise and nonsense of this world. Then I was cast out, or made to voluntarily evict myself. I could not take the sneers, the innuendos, and the open insults. Paradise is not something you can share, I guess. Only my granddaughter, my niete, gives me a kiss when I leave.  "Ill miss you," she says. Then smack, right on the lips, and she is a kid who is reserved about touching or being touched. What's at fault are facts that aren't, erroneous logic, or no logic at all, but above all a desire, so it seems, to insult or wound. And of course a person—an evil spirit, a demon, even a warlock?—associated with all that. But this is all too obscure, isn't it? Like all family stories, it is confusing. Okay, let me explain before I go on: I have a daughter who lives in Puigcerda in northern Spain in the Catalonia region. I refer to it as Shangri-la (Swan Lake, Puigcerda), it is such a rare and perfect place. I also have a son-in-law and a granddaughter. The son-in-law is from Argentina and he likes to argue more than anything in the world, especially with me. I don't quite get it. Kill the father and marry the daughter? Has he got his mythology mixed up? He has already married the daughter, so why kill the father? There is no competition. At times it makes it hard to like him; at other times it makes it impossible. He usually waits till dinner time to start the argument. It needs no basis; anything will do. A simple statement of any kind by me will get it going. "Sarkozy lost the election in France," would do. I can hear the response: "What makes you think so?" "I read it in the paper and on the Internet," I might respond. "And you believe everything you read?" ... For a long time I have longed for a single peaceful meal. But it never happens. A couple of other things I should add: He hates the United States, which he refers to as "North America," with a passion. I happen to be a citizen of "North America," though I spend little time there and am also not completely happy with the North American Monster either (American Dream). But that does not count with him. The father-in-law baiting, the barbs are incessant. You would think I was George W. Bush sitting at the dinner table plotting "regime change" in Argentina. This hatred infects everything he says, including similes and metaphors. If coffee in some cafe is weak, it is as "weak as coffee in North America." If water from a stream is pure or uncontaminated, it is "as clean as the water in any swimming pool in North America," a broadside aimed at North Americans and their swimming pools. Or if a movie is a good one, it is "not some Hollywood piece of shit." You see the pattern? Anything from "North America" is bad; and of course anything from South America, especially Argentina, is good. If North America invented whatever it is, he ignores that. For example, if he is illegally downloading copyrighted material from North America, which he often is, and doing so on software and hardware invented and maintained in North America, he acts oblivious to all this. One other thing: My son-in-law is armed with many strong opinions, all fixed and unalterable "facts," and does not believe in reason or open discussion. For him ideas are like heavy rocks used to bludgeon and destroy an enemy; they are fixed things, weighty, unalterable in discussion.  Where they come from I do not know. He has esoteric sources, like many young people these days, and does not reveal them. The mainstream media he regards with total disdain. And he believes that all reporters are bribed to present a certain point of view. He does not trust Le Monde, The New York Times, Deutsche Zeitung ... All are one-hundred percent corrupt. Only some secret source he has, likely a blogger with strong, fixed views like his own, knows the truth. I share his distrust of standard news sources but not nearly so deeply. I think one has to read a variety of sources, then make up one's own mind. He also believes that the United States heavily censors the Internet. I ask him to prove this by supplying me with a single URL that the United States censors other than ones related to child pornography. "That is your responsibility," he says. He does not seem to understand the rules of debate. It is his responsibility to prove his argument, not mine! As to censorship in China and Cuba, he says that is "what they do there," making it okay. Strange thinking. Reduced to absurdity, it is like saying that so-and-so is a murderer, therefore it is okay for so-and-so to kill people. He also loves to derail any discussion on any topic. Let me give an example. This happened on the previous visit and not even at dinner time. I am sitting all alone at Sol y Sombra bar on Plaza Santa Maria reading EL PAIS and sipping a glass of vino blanco. I am at peace with the world. The owner's perro pequeño, small dog, sits nearby, and he seems at peace with the world too. Along come Luciano and my granddaughter, Bella, three and a half years old at the time. They stop by my table and I make the big mistake of saying that I'm reading an interesting article on the debt-ceiling debate that is going on in the US Congress. I explain it briefly. "Do you think anyone cares what's going on in North America?" asks Luciano, rearing up. "But this has impact on the world economy," I say. "Do you think a farmer down there cares?" Luciano point towards the fields to the west of Puigcerda down in the valley. "Well, EL PAIS seems to think it's of interest. There is a big article about it right here," I say, pointing to the paper, which I have spread out in leisurely fashion on the table. "Why do you read EL PAIS?" he asks. "It's trash." Six month later, on my latest visit, he forgets he has called EL PAIS trash and praises it. How can you have a discussion with someone like this? You learn to avoid all serious discussions. But it is hard, when the barbs are bared, to completely ignore them without becoming an intellectual wimp. One evening he comes in muttering about the "great wall of shame." This was completely out of the blue. My daughter and I had been discussing going horseback riding next week. I was looking forward to it. Also, I'm exhausted with politics. Before coming to Puigcerda I had participated in most of the Wall Street protests in San Francisco, including the one that shut down the financial district for the whole day; I needed some relief from politics for awhile. But I looked up and asked—probably a mistake—what he was referring to. "The wall that Israel—along with its friend, North America!—built in the West Bank to keep the Palestinians out!" I wasn't aware of a new issue here. The wall was started in 1994 and had been condemned by many, including George W. Bush. I guess Luciano was running out of fresh causes for attacking "North American." There were other incidents. One evening I jokingly asked, when aspersion was cast on "North America," if he were referring to Greenland or Cuba. That lead to a strange one. He asserted that Mexico, Cuba, and all Central America were part of South America. I meekly countered that Cuba and Central America were part of North America. I was correct, of course. What was his response? "They have a strange way of teaching geography in North America," he stated with a sardonic grin. I suggested he look it up. "You look it up," he said. "I know." If schools in Argentina teach that Mexico and Central America are part of South America, I am worried. What other falsehoods do they teach there? If you really want to see him go "ballistic," mention the Falkland Island, which he firmly believes were stolen from Argentina by the British. The issue is considerably more complex than that. To understand it you have to be willing to study it with an open mind. The clincher came towards the end of my latest stay. One evening over dinner I brought up what I thought might be an interesting topic, and one that was scientific and objective and that I did not think would result in either a personal attack or one on North America. I mentioned the concept of entropy, which I had been studying for some time. It is interesting partly because it is related to the "arrow of time" and knowing whether time is moving forward or backwards. Entropy states that in a closed system, order tends to decrease and never increases. So that my daughter and Luciano had the idea in mind, I mentioned the classic example of an egg falling off a counter and splatting on the kitchen floor—the Humpty Dumpty example. "You can easily surmise the direction of time in that example because of the obvious increase of disorder associated with the state of the egg on the floor." Luciano knows no physics. I tested him a few days later. Nevertheless, he completely derailed the discussion by stating that he could determine the direction of time from gravity and, failing that, by the use of observers to watch the egg fall. He had no sense of the intellectual and philosophical questions involved but it did not stop him from having a strong opinion about it. In the end, he completely derailed the discussion—it ended in a senseless argument about a force acting upon an object in space—which in fact was a perfect example of entropy in discussions where no moderator is present (closed system). At the end of the discussion he suggested with an arrogant sneer that "you should perhaps review your physics," not quite suggesting that physics as taught in nemesis North America  was inferior to physics as taught in Argentina. Perhaps he could not think of enough Noble Prize physics winners in Argentina to support the notion. As one person put it to me later on, he is a person who would have you think he knows a great deal about things he knows nothing at all about. So what does that make him? A poser, and a rather skillful one at that. His art is in affectation, not knowledge. After the conversation on entropy I decided that limiting all conversation between the two of us might be best, as there seemed to be no topic from which I might not suffer attack. But that action on my part seemed in itself to be provoking. While washing dishes a few days later—it seemed a safe and mutually beneficial thing to do—he tried to explain his immunity from facts and logic by virtue of his passionate nature. "Do you ever make a mistake?" he asked. "Yes," I said, "and I aspire to readily admit it when I do." He suggested that our misunderstandings, and my mistaken interpretation of them, were due to his passionate nature and lively style of debate—and, I suppose, my own bloodless, wimpy but logical method of argument based on provable facts.  You sense another putdown here? The good thing? North America was not mentioned. I asked if we might defer the discussion to another time. I was tired and doing the dishes was therapeutic. "You prefer doing the dishes?" he asked sharply. "Yes," I said, "right now I do." The man of passion stormed out of the kitchen; the wimp continued washing the dishes, which probably proved the case in the mind of Luciano. I couldn't win for losing. Shortly I decided that my visit had been long enough; I would leave. And I'm sure that Dear Abby would concur, only adding, "My dear man, why did it take you so long to come to this conclusion?" But leaving was a two-sided thing. I gained and I lost. Leaving gave me peace of mind, sanity, and spared me additional insults. I also had the little additional pleasure of letting go in a tug-of-war and seeing the surprised look on my opponent's face. And while it would leave Luciano feeling, as always, superior, that was okay with me. Feeling superior is a lot of work. He was welcome to it. But leaving Puigcerda was hard, almost heart-breaking. I had come to love the little town in the Cerdanya Valley. And it meant cutting short my visit with my daughter and granddaughter. But I had thought about it carefully. There were higher values involved—truth, honesty, and respect. Sometimes it paid to respect those time-honored values that had temporarily lost so much favor. Something good would come of it, I thought; and I did not think I would lose my daughter and granddaughter, as Luciano later suggested I would. A day before leaving, I walked across the border to the train station at La Tour de Carol in France and bought a ticket to Paris. It was a lovely day walking through the farmlands at the end of Winter, little streams of water from the mountains and the melting snow crossing the fields and flowing in trenches along the road. The last time I had made the walk, everything was in bloom. Now all the vegetation was dead but the flow of water offered the promise of a glorious spring. I could almost picture it, the pink and yellow flowers along the roadside, the dark ripe berries on the thorny vines, the green lush grass in the fields. But it was a strange walk too. I felt both happy and sad at the same time. The lovely day made me happy but my feelings of loss left me tearful. At last I arrived at the station, bought my ticket, rested a little by a stone wall by the road, then headed back. My sadness lifted as I walked along the narrow road. My father had died about six months earlier, and walking along the road back to Puigcerda, I looked up and could almost see his image in the clouds. I am not a mystic dreamer and one who is "visited" by the dead. Moreover, I had not been thinking of him recently. Thus it surprised me. Moreover, if I were going to see his image, I did not expect to see it so far away from where he died; he never travelled out of the United States and rarely outside California where he was born. Then for awhile it were as though he were walking along beside me, at ease walking in the Cerdanya Valley as he had been walking almost anywhere in California. He loved to walk and talk. It was a good feeling—even if it were a total hallucination. There was snow on the mountains—plenty of it from my perspective. I don't own ski resorts and don't judge nature on the basis of the money it generates (Snow). And the outlines of the mountains were clear and sharp, like the facts and logic of a good argument, but far more beautiful. There were bulls in the fields, some regarding me over the stone fences that had a single stand of barbed wire along the top. Was I safe? At least they weren't trying to trip me up in a conversation. If they were going to charge, I could at least see them coming and run down the hill to the creek on the other side. The next day I took a taxi to the train station. It was too far to walk with a suitcase and I wanted to be the least burdensome. On the way there, the young, handsome driver asked me if I liked Puigcerda. Oh, yes, I said, my heart almost breaking. "Me gusta mucho Puigcerda." But given the circumstances right now, I thought, I preferred a clear mind. Losing Paradise, I would leave politics and hatred and lies behind. A net gain, according to my spiritual accountant.