Here is the strait that opened the world wide.
The phrase echoes one of the many paradoxes that surround the labyrinth of islands and bays, of meanders and alleys, of channels and glaciers through which European seafarers discovered that their world was less than half the real world — and that the Earth it was round and that the Atlantic looked more like a swimming pool compared to the immense ocean that, in yet another irony surrounding that “discovery”, the intrepid Fernão de Magalhães still chose to name the Pacific.
In the midst of an epic journey of hunger and torment, of overcoming difficulties and misfortunes, Fernão de Magalhães, a resentful Portuguese, naturalized Spanish, lame and one-eyed —and one of the greatest navigators of all times— decided to call the last corner of the planet the Earth of Fogo and its inhabitants of Patagons, although neither that land nor that people were neither.
In any case, there is no doubt that it was Magalhães who put this tangle of fjords and sandbanks on the map, of endless inlets and false passages.
The labyrinth that connects the two halves of the world, the winding strait that once more aptly called the Dragon’s Tail. The place where, like a threadbare carpet, the continent crumbles and releases its last breath, composing a song of fire and ice, a symphony of reluctant lands and waters that beat so hard they pierce.
An unforgiving world. Unless, of course, you are a Tehuelche, a Selk’nam (or an Ona), a Yaghan, a Haush, or an Alacaluf — natives who, because of their blazing bonfires, spotted by Magellan and his crew, would enter to the story with the name of Fueguinos, inhabitants of the so-called Tierra del Fuego.
They were—in a way they still are—the original occupants of the most ruthless part of the continent. And it was in the midst of that universe of spectral sounds and colors, of the whirlwind of winds, sands and tides, that the “Fueguins” built their material and spiritual life, their set of beliefs, their ancestral customs, their place in the world.
And if there the physical world seems to decompose, crumbling piece by piece, clod by clod, ice cube by ice cube, everything rushing, now with a roar, now with a groan, this is also the metaphor of the way in which the life of the natives was decomposed after the disembarkation of the Europeans — a moment from which that finisterra also became the end of the world, as an avant-première of the apocalypse.
However, everything that seems to be ending is perhaps just being reborn. After all, the moment an astonished, frozen and hungry Fernão de Magalhães crossed the strait that made the planet much wider, what really collapsed were the geographical conceptions of the Old World from which he came.
And if the new world that was born at that moment didn’t become more peaceful, at least it turned out to be definitely round — although some boring ones still think the Earth is boring like them.
But the Earth is round and rotates. And so, every single day, the Sun casts its flames on the dragon’s tail.
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