Although by birth Tio Coco was a magus, his favorite pastime was making kites. Perhaps because I was his first nephew, he indoctrinated me in the exclusive, delicate and precise art of the kitemakers. “Anyone can make a kite,” he would say, “but only a few can give it life. Like magic, kite making is in your blood. In time, we will see if you have inherited either of these two gifts.”

 I don’t exactly remember when we began to make kites together, but I do know that after I reached the age of five, Tio Coco had already named me his first apprentice, an occupation that filled me with pride and that I took very seriously. In those times, Centenario was a tiny town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The houses in Centenario were separated by great empty fields, where the neighborhood children organized their soccer matches. Some of these games became legends.

 The soccer matches were entertaining, but it was the visits of Tio Coco I anticipated – and celebrated with an enthusiasm comparable only to when the circus arrived, or to the incursions of the gypsies, who in those times would camp in Sirito’s fields, half a mile from our house.

 Tio Coco would appear mid-morning on his drop-handlebar racing bike, “professional … it doesn’t just race … it flies,” he would say, a smile igniting his face with a glow that would light up the faces of everyone who gathered around to listen to his stories and watch his performances of magic.

 I would say, “I knew that you’d come.”

 “I knew you knew, so I came. And what are we going to do today?” He would say, pretending not to know.

 “Guess, if you are a real ‘brujo’”

 “I will guess if I am a magus,” he would correct, repeating the dialogue we always started and finished with the word I wished for, the word that kept me awake every night of the week.

 “A kite…maybe? It’s a kite you’re thinking of, right?”

 A kite, I would say silently to myself, imitating his gestures. Tio Coco had already invented many kinds of kites, some had become aerodynamic models that were eventually popularized. Initially he built stars, bombs, comets and they were followed by planes of all sizes and shapes, with single and double wings, propeller-driven, jets, one-seaters, cargo planes and even blimps. There were so many kites, I can’t remember some of the names.

 As his skillfulness increased, Tio Coco began to design complex objects that in our normal day-to-day reality were earthbound, but that he, by the sheer power of his creative fantasy caused to take flight: houses, frying pans, horses, people, even brooms. And then, he convinced me and my brothers that fantasy and conviction were the powers that could, in the long run, transform reality. This was a radically different idea and one that was in stark opposition to the ideas of my paternal grandfather who, besides being an agnostic, only believed in the things that he could see and feel, or failing that, in those things that could be demonstrated through logic or scientific investigation. And so we grew up surrounded by a mixture of philosophies, which explains, in part, why in our home nothing ever fell outside the realm of possibility, and no idea was ever discarded, even the most esoteric.

 Eventually, Tio ended up creating all kinds of flying objects that seemed less and less like kites, and more and more like real objects. As a kitemaker, he gave birth to ships, frigates, automobiles, Trailways buses. When things went well, his creations defied gravity in spite of their enormous size. Each one ascended and floated as if it had no mass at all. And each one could move in the sky, as though the air had become the earth to which they were accustomed, and their movements and functions were unimpaired by the absence of solid ground.

 From one day to next, the inhabitants of Centenario would wake up to a sky filled with all kinds of objects. To see them was to be mesmerized as you watched: intermittent fountains spurting water, smoking locomotives whistling as they passed through imaginary stations, giant bells calling arishioners in the sky, and giant clocks that told time on the hour, disrupting the afternoon siestas.

 Eventually, some of his prototypes, unique works of art, were copied by foreign firms that appropriated his ideas. Mass production of Tio’s creations for commercial purpose failed to match what he had first created, what was unique and personal in each of his kites. Mass production made Tio sad, but not because he never made any money with his inventions, which he considered to be everyone’s patrimony, like air or poetry, but because, “objects produced in assembly lines,” he would say, “are made without love and therefore have no soul.” Factories can only copy form and shape. The most important part, can’t be copied –the essence of the kite, what we put into the kite. We are the kites and they hold our spirit.” This, he repeated, to me, with his great passion as we worked together on a kite.

 We discussed our designs first over sketches drawn on the ground under the shade of the weeping willow my father planted just before our home was built. As we worked on those designs, Tio introduced me to geometrical and architectonic principles that I assimilated, not even noticing what I had learned. Each kite’s dimensions had to be suitable in order for it to tolerate strong winds, unexpected downpours, and, more often than not, humiliating storms. “Even if the kite is in the stratosphere, it should be visible from the earth.” With the added help imagination brought to us, we always managed to see that the kites reached the stratosphere. Besides, and this was very important, each kite had to lift off and fly elegantly, climbing into the sky with ease, rising up smoothly as if the space and the air were its elements, so that it barely needed our help holding the string that both anchored it but also allowed it to soar. Occasionally, when Tio was teaching me to fly a kite, he would say, “We are like our kites. To fly we need the fragile and unstable equilibrium between the thread that anchors us, and the freedom of space. If we let go of the string, we know what happens, but without space it makes no sense to fly.”

 To choose a kite’s colors was quite an event, and required precise arguments and full and proper justification. Very often, we chose the colors of Boca Juniors, a soccer team with which, neither of us had any affiliation. But we liked their combination of gold on blue. Occasionally, out of pure loyalty for our own teams, Tio would vote for the colors of Lanus, and I would vote for Banfield’s colors. No matter how we came to it, there was always an excuse to select the colors that we really loved: Boca’s.

 Once we had agreed, it was time to procure a thin cane from among the many that grew in my parents’ backyard. We cut it longitudinally according to the dimensions previously determined, and then we would tie the kite at its center with a string, a thin but very strong string. I always believed this string had been invented only for kites. But time demonstrated that it could also be used to tie matambre*, or chorizos or other things, not necessarily dignified enough to be worthy of our trade.

 Once we had built the kite’s skeleton, we paused for the sacred moment when we would dress this new and eager structure with gloriously colored paper we purchased for a few centavos at the local kiosk. This “professional” paper was very thin, almost transparent, but it possessed tensile strength that defied all logic and more than one Newtonian law. The paper was stuck using engrudo , our own special formula made with water and flour. The recipe for engrudo included an elevated proportion of hope, and sometimes it had much more than was permitted by the secret code of the kitemakers. Hope, always required in this business, was even more necessary when we had no money for paper from the kiosk, and were forced to use other kinds of paper. Sometimes we used newspaper. This created special problems because of its origin and the processing it had been through, and more importantly because of its content, which could change the very nature of the paper, and thereby, in some instances, affect the aerodynamic capacity of the kite it would become. It is well known, that the paper used for newspaper has other physical characteristics, quite different from the best kite paper, for it can be corrupted by the news that it carries. So we always tailored our dose of hope to the type of information printed in the paper.

 So it was that when making one particular kite, in the rush of excitement, and with no money, I used a single sheet from a local newspaper that, I later learned, described with fantastic and intricate detail all manner of crimes, accidents, and scandals. The stories printed on this paper were enough to take away hope and sadden a full and measured half of humanity.

And the fact is, this kite did not work as we would have hoped. I ran like a madman, pulling that string, turning back and pulling again and again until I was completely out of breath. Even though there was a magnificent updrafting wind, the kite would not lift even a few miserable meters off the ground.

Tio Coco explained to me how ideas and feelings ascend according to their degree of purity. “Greed, hate, and guilt carry enormous weight, beyond the physical,” he said, “restraining, obstructing, bringing down, like a barricade that will inevitably prevent flight.”

This was the day I had to ask him if the same thing would happen to human beings.

* matambre: An Argentinian meat roulade. The name derives from “mata hambre,” meaning “kill your hunger.” No comparable cut for matambre exists in the U.S. The best approximation is a butterflied flank or skirt steak. The traditional cut is from one of the muscles on the surface of the abdomen, underneath the skin of the belly. The filling includes spices, vegetables and hardboiled eggs which are rolled in the meat, tied and baked. It is usually sliced and served cold.