de acasos e legados

"It is the perverse logic of love that the reverse was true for Angélica: what kept her by my side when things didn't seem to be working out was, she has told me, the very fact that I came from some other place, her intuition that I would not treat her the way Chilean males treat women, that I could be totally trusted, that I was transparent, that I was naïve: in other words, that I was a gringo. A gringo that happened to be searching frantically for a country that would be the answer to his loneliness and transience.
Angélica possessed that country within her merely by virtue of having been born here, simply because her forefathers and foremothers had made love under these mountains and intermingled their races, their Iberian and Mediterranean and Indian and African stock, at a time when mine had even dreamed if emigrating. She possessed this country in the nursery rhymes in Spanish she had sung when I was reciting Old Mother Hubbard. [...] Her presence by my side as we strolled through the center of the city I had lived in for seven years suddenly transformed me into a tourist arriving at this foreign destination for the first time."

Ariel Dorfman, in "Heading South, Looking North. A Bilingual Journey" [pag. 179 -181]