from The Literature Conference
Part One: The Macuto Yarn
On a journey I recently had cause to make to Venezuela, I had the opportunity to admire the famous Macuto Yarn, one of the Wonders of the New World. It is the legacy of nameless pirates, a tourist attraction, and an enigma without answer. It constitutes a strange moment of naivete that traversed the impenetrable centuries and in the process became one with a Nature that in these latitudes is as rich as every new growth it engenders. Macuto is one of those coastal resorts that lie at the foot of Caracas, close to Maiquetia, near the airport where I had first landed. At first I was temporarily placed in The Fifteen Letters, a modern hotel built facing the inn and restaurant of the same name, right on the coastline. My room overlooked the sea, the Caribbean that was at once so vast and intimately blue and brilliant. The Yarn was barely a hundred yards away from the hotel; I discovered it looking through the window, and went