It happened again forty years later, as I say, on the road to the vineyard. I was so enthralled by the beauty of the trees, that it was some time before I finally saw the sign sitting there by the side of the road. The sign had been there for years.

'Puta Provincial', it said. 

Provincial Whore. 

What happened is this.  It had said, Ruta Provincial, or, Route of the Province, but someone in a fit of creativity had erased a leg from the 'R', changing Ruta to Puta. Hillbilly genius. Hillbillies and Red Necks have nothing on Argentines. Especially when surrounded by firewood.

I had asked my finquero to plant the pomegranates I had labored on for so long.  Returning from a trip abroad I was driving out to the vineyard to see the handiwork of three years.  My finquero had assured me that the pomegranate was a weed, but I explained that in the US and in Europe, the pomegranate would command as much as a dollar apiece, and I was assured of a ready market. We could and we would grow thousands. Make millions.

I was also anxious to see the vintage farm house which I was remodeling on the vineyard. At times, when one is aboard one sends a signal of what one wants, but one doesn't always get what one envisions.

It was a pleasant surprise to find the house had progressed and was looking like I envisioned. It should be noted, that if one entered the end of the farm where the house was located, one was about a mile away from the other end of the farm where the pomegranate nursery was located, hence most of the first morning of my return was spent looking at the evolution of the house. I anticipated going to the other end of the farm after lunch and seeing how the pomegranates had been planted.

The house was a simple structure, that included no air-conditioning, central heating, nor other modern inconvenience.  It was wood heated by an ancient wood burning fireplace. It had no broadband, it was beyond reach of telephone lines. The nearest town had a market, gas station, and post office. No chic cafes. No cafes at all.

In short, there was much about it that was agreeable.

There was a 'through' road that transversed the farm, but it entailed the opening and closing of several gates, crossing bridges precariously erected of logs, driving on a dirt road that resembled the surface of the moon, and dealing with mean horses. One could more easily return to the highway from the farm house, and circumnavigate the farm on a paved road, Puta Provincial number 5, and reenter the farm from the other end.

When I arrived at the far side I was first shown the plum trees that had been planted. Excellent. I saw lovely rows of small trees that had tripled in size since they were purchased. The finquero was very talented at his task, an excellent grower. That he was talented at other things, was soon to be discovered.

Admittedly, there is money to be made growing plums, but not from the plums themselves. The plums are dried, and sold as prunes, for which there is a fairly consistent market.

In keeping with highly creative nepotism of Argentina, the price of prunes usually drops at harvest time, so that those who grow plums recognize little profit, but if one can afford to store the prunes under proper conditions, the price returns to normal after all of the poorer farmers have been sufficiently cheated.

It should be noted that I was seldom the recipient of much money from the sales made by the farm. The money usually flowed out, away from my pocket towards the finqueros pocket; and when a sale was made, it was usually to one of his established friends. I would adjust all this with the pomegranates, as I would use a foreign corporation to receive the money for the sale of the pomegranates outside of Argentina, and report to the government of Argentina a price received from one offshore corporation for a sale of the pomegranates to another offshore corporation. Cheating the cheaters and returning to Argentina only a percentage of the profits; rendering them safe from the 'old boy' confiscation of locals. Who was it that said the surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than others?

Luca Brazi sleeps with the fish! Okay, I'm sure you've already guessed it. Yes, 'my' finquero had planted the young pomegranates directly next to the tall Alamo trees, and all the young pomegranates had strangled and died. So what we need to do is to understand why. Why would someone purposely destroy three years of intense labor and kill several thousand young cuttings?

Let's look at this from the finquero's perspective, the view, and the actions are thereby perfectly understandable. He could not confiscate the profits if the product was sold outside of Argentina, and he viewed everything grown on the farm as his to sell. He probably couldn't even confiscate the profits if a product was sold to another region of Argentina. His 'old boy' team of cronies was a local phenomena, created through a life-time of living and farming in one area.

Pomegranates did not sell locally, or if they did sell, they sold as a junk crop in small vegetable markets, and for very little money.  Everyone had a pomegranate tree, and the fruit was viewed as a worthless annoyance.

He, 'my' finquero, had never been as far as Mendoza, the capital of the province in which he lived; Buenos Aries was viewed as a foreign country, the US and Europe, were viewed as one would view the moon. Distant, and irrelevant. In short, he was a knowledgeable yokel, whose range of knowledge consisted of only one town on the entire planet, and one process; that of growing those things that he believed to be realistic to grow and sell locally. 

He knew the worth of pomegranates; their worth was based on what he could sell them for to one of his friends. Zero. So, the most expedient thing was to kill them, and prevent the dumb gringo from causing him to work on a commodity, the sale of which could not result in any sort of those tried and true local sales that allowed what he viewed as his justly deserved 'creative' price fixing.

Now this makes perfect sense from his perspective. The innocence he professed about the matter was not convincing, and I was not in the mood to spend more years, and more money, to recreate what had already taken three years to create. 

I sold the vineyard.

I wish I could report a happy future befell what was a lovely vineyard, but it has been made known to me that those who bought the vineyard did not faithfully pay the finquero, sending him back into unfinanced poverty. The vineyard fell into disrepair, and the house remains unfinished, open to the weather. Home to mad men and wild dogs.

So, let's move along. With the vineyard sold, I had escaped from duplicity, it was time to leave Argentina without flying on Aerolineas Argentina, and escape with my life. This would involve a motor trip to Córdoba. What could be simpler?