"Felipe!" the children called once more.

The islands in the middle of the great Paraná River were being swept over on this Christmas Day by a sudden wind, and the tall grasses seemed to undulate in the breezes, hurried into one another in soft, moving hillocks and vales.

"Felipe!"

Juan Ramón Jiménez published a book entitled Platero y yo (Platero and I) in 1914. A Spaniard, Jiménez was one of the most influential poets of his time in the entire Hispanic world. Platero and I is by far his best-known work, and I had read it for the first time in an English translation when I was fourteen.

Platero is a small donkey whose master is a kindly, observant, and humorous man who spends a great deal of time contemplating the stars, natural wonders, the humorous foibles of human behavior, and the intricacies of Andalusian village social life. He shares his observations with his friend Platero. The "conversation," if you will, between them makes up the entirety of this book. It's a slight book, easy to read.

I was reading it again when Bea and I were visiting a small town in Argentina a few years ago, named La Paz. It's in Entre Rios province, several hours by road north of Buenos Aires. Entre Rios is, as its name explains, "among rivers," and there are several of them flowing through the province. The greatest is the Paraná, which descends from Brazil to the south through Argentina. It is the second largest river in South America behind the Amazon, and so it is immense.

The Olivera family has lived in La Paz for many generations, and we were visiting Mario and Cristina Olivera as the guests of Mario's sister, Nora Dinzelbacher and her husband Ed Neale. As a 17-year-old, Nora left La Paz to move to Buenos Aires, where she eventually became a noted maestra of Argentine tango. She's been living in the United States for many years now, and is generally acknowledged as a seminal figure in the resurgence of tango's popularity in this country.

We were to have Christmas dinner at the Olivera's that evening, but just now, at 1:30 in the afternoon, it was about 95 degrees, and the humidity was simply seeping up from the river, which itself appeared hardly to be moving. The many palm trees on the grounds of the Pension Surubí had little effect on the intensity of the soporific heat. Reminiscent of snails on the march, my fingers left little trails of liquid where they had caressed the pages of Platero and I. I felt like a puddle sitting in a lawn chair. The trails did not dry.