by Paul Theroux
After the barrel-chested Indians living among wind-haunted rocks in the high plains, and the farmers in the tumbledown villages near the border, and the yawning cracked-open river valleys of the north, I was prepared for anything but Tucuman. It was gloomy, but gloom was part of the Argentine temper; it was not a dramatic blackness, but rather a dampness of soul, the hang-dog melancholy immigrants feel on rainy afternoons far from home. There was no desolation, and if there were barbarities they remained dark secrets and were enacted in the torture chambers of the police stations or in the cramped workers’ quarters of the sugar planations. It was four in the afternoon before I found a bar – Tucuman was that proper.
I spent the day walking. It was cloudy and humid, and the light was so poor, the box-camera man in the Plaza Independencia (Argentina’s independence was declared in Tucuman in 1816) could not get a likeness of me until he had made two tries. And what was it – perhaps the sombre tones of a Buñuel movie? – that made me think of Tucuman as the sort of place a sad innocent child would be sent to spend a terrifying week with his maiden aunt, among her dusty heirlooms. I imagined pretty, persecuted servant girls in the narrow houses, and the steady tick of ormolu clocks in high-ceilinged parlours. But this was fantasy, a stroller’s embroidery. I found a tourist office. The lady gave me three brochures, each urging me to leave Tucuman: to go to the mountains, to the woods outside town, or – and this amused me – to visit Jujuy. One of the attractions of Tucuman, it appeared, was that it was a day’s drive from Jujuy.
The curios in Tucuman were versions of gaucho kitsch – sets of bolas, toy horse-whips, overpriced daggers; and there were also salt shakers, aprons, calendars and little boxes made out of cactus fibre, all stamped Tucuman. The bookshelves were vastly more impressive than any I had seen on this trip, or was this a stubborn bias I had formed after seeing three of my own titles on display in Spanish translation? I made a note of the publisher’s address in Buenos Aires: I would look him up when I arrived.
I did little else in Tucuman but buy a pizza – a thick Neapolitan-style pizza, garnished with anchovies. This reminded me of a sad remark I had heard in Peru. ‘Times are so bad in Peru,’ a man said, ‘even the anchovy has left our waters and swum away.’ As the day wore on I became firmer in my resolve to leave Tucuman on the North Star. I ran into Wolfgang later in the day and we walked together to the railway station. He was happy. In twenty-four hours the dollar had risen five pesos, ‘and tomorrow it will be more.’ He was delighted with the way things were going, and I saw him in Buenos Aires, waking each morning to examine the rise in the inflation rate. For Wolfgang, inflation was a great dividend.
The North Star was waiting at the platform.
Wolfgang sighed. ‘After this,’ he said, ‘I take no more trains.’
‘Want something to read?’ I took out the Dürrenmatt novel and handed it to him.
‘I have read it before, in German,’ he said, after examining it. But he kept it all the same: ‘I can practise my English language.’
Oswaldo, who had the lower berth in my compartment on the North Star, was a jumpy, fast-talking salesman on his way to Rosario to sell some meat. He had wanted to take a plane, but his company said it was too expensive. ‘This same train crashed about a month ago. Lots of people got killed – the coaches were burning, it was terrible.’ He looked out of the window, jerking the curtains apart. ‘I hope it doesn’t happen to us. I don’t want to be in a train crash. But I have a very bad feeling about this train.’
His conversation was so depressing that I took myself to the dining car and sat at a table with the Tucuman newspaper and a bottle of beer. There was a gloating report in the paper about the right-wing parties having won in the French elections and about kidnappings in Italy. (‘Our terrorists have all gone to Europe,’ an Argentine man said to me in Buenos Aires. There was something vindictive in his commiseration. ‘Now you will have a taste of what we’ve been through.’) The press in Argentina made political capital out of reporting other countries’ news.
‘With your permission,’ said Oswaldo, seating himself at my table. He carried a comic book. It was a Spanish one, about an inch thick, and its title was D’Artagnan – the name of the goonish swashbuckler in the cover story. It seemed fairly unambitious reading, even for a meat salesman.
I ignored him and looked out of the window. We left Tucuman, the city, then the province, and entered the adjacent province of Santiago de Estero. In the misty dusk, the cane fields and orange groves were richly green, like Ireland at twilight. There were fires in some of the farmyards, and enough light for me to make out the cane-cutters’ brick sheds in a terrace row, and far-off the roofs and pillars of the owner’s mansion, and the beautiful horses standing by the fence. Then night fell on the cane fields and the only sign of life was the yellow headlamps of cars wobbling down the country roads.
‘This is where it happened,’ said Oswaldo. He had put down his comic book. ‘The crash.’
He braced himself against the table, as if he expected to be thrown off his chair. But the train continued to rock through Argentina and a man was singing in the kitchen.
Dinner was served at ten o’clock – four courses, including a fat steak, for two dollars. It was the sort of dining car where the waiters and stewards were dressed more formally than the people eating. All the tables were full, a well-fed noisy crowd of mock-Europeans. Two men had joined Oswaldo and me, and after a decent pause and some wine, one of them began talking about his reason for going to Buenos Aires: his father had just had a heart attack.
He spoke in slushy Argentine Spanish, turning every double-L into a Russian zha sound. ‘My father’s eighty-five years old,’ said the man, stuffing his mouth with bread. ‘Never got sick a day in his life. He smokes all the time, practically eats cigarettes. He’s very strong and healthy. I was surprised when they called me up and told me he’d had a heart attack. I said, “That man’s never been sick a day in his life.’ ”
‘My father was the same,’ said the second man. ‘Very tough, a real old-timer. He didn’t die of a heart attack. With him it was his liver.’
Oswaldo said, ‘Well, my father –’
The first man was smoking and eating compulsively; smoke trickled out of his nostrils as he chewed bread. Every so often he’d call out, ‘Boss!’
‘Boss!’ he yelled. ‘Bring me an ashtray. I need an ashtray when I eat.’
He ate all the bread in the basket.
‘Boss! More bread – I’m hungry. And, while you’re at it, another beer – I’m thirsty.’
They had a lot of swagger, these men; they were full of talk and rather deficient in humour. They were not idle; in fact, they struck me as being hard-working. But, of all the people I met in South America, the Argentines were the least interested in the outside world or in any subject that did not directly concern Argentina. They shared this quality with white South Africans; they seemed to imply that they were stuck at the bottom of the world and surrounded by savages. They had a bluff bullying tone, even when they spoke to one another, and they were philistines to the core. This was my assessment on the North Star. It was not until I arrived in Buenos Aires that I met sweeter-natured people, and even intellectuals, and had to revise my opinion.
For the next half-hour Oswaldo and the other two talked about football. Argentina had just beaten Peru, and they were confident about Argentina’s chances in the World Cup in July.
‘Do you speak Spanish?’ It was the first man, whose father had had the heart attack. He held a segment of bread near his mouth.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it’s adequate.’
‘You don’t say very much. That’s why I’m asking.’
‘I’m not interested in football.’
He smirked at the others. ‘I mean, you don’t join the conversation.’
‘What conversation?’
‘This one,’ he said, growing impatient.
‘About football.’
‘No, about eve
rything. We talk – you don’t. You just sit there.’
‘So what?’ I said.
‘Maybe something is wrong.’
So that was it: suspicion, fear, the sense that my silence meant disapproval; the old South American insecurity.
I said, ‘Nothing is wrong. I am very happy to be here. Argentina is a wonderful country.’
‘He is happy,’ said the man. He still held the segment of bread in his hand. He moved his wine glass closer and said, ‘Want to know what they do in Spain? Watch. This is what they do. Ready? They dunk their piece of bread in like this.’ He dunked his piece of bread in the wine. ‘Then they eat it. Like this.’ He ate the soggy bread and, still chewing, he said, ‘See? They put bread into wine. In Spain.’
I said, ‘If you think that’s strange, listen to this.’
They smiled: I had joined the conversation.
‘The Italians put fruit into wine,’ I went on. ‘They chop up pears, peaches, bananas, and put them into a wine glass. They stir it, eat the fruit, and then drink the wine. Imagine doing that to a glass of wine!’
This did not go down well. They stared at me.
Finally, Oswaldo said, ‘We do that, too.’
The meal ended with coffee and creme caramel, and then the second man launched into a boring description of what bread was called in different parts of Argentina. ‘Now this, in Tucuman, we call a bun. But if you go to Cordoba they’ll call it a roll. Over in Salta they call it a cake. But loaf – that’s what they call it in –’
He went on and on, and the others chipped in with their regional differences. I felt I could add nothing to this. I said good night and walked through the speeding train and went to bed.
A dream claimed me. I was with a lovely sly woman in an Edwardian house. The house shook, the floor dipped and bobbed like a raft, and cracks made their way up the walls. The woman pleaded with me to explain this shaking. I looked out of the shattered front window, and then walked into the yard. There was such a wobble in the yard I could barely stand up; but it had to be felt – it could not be seen. The woman was at the window, and all the bricks around her were split.
‘You are over a magnetic field,’ I said. ‘There is a wire down there loaded with electricity.’ I was balancing unsteadily as I spoke. ‘This magnetism is causing the house to shake –’
I woke up. The train was shaking like the yard in my dream, and I no longer remembered the woman’s name.
It was a sunny day, and moments later we stopped at San Lorenzo on the Parana River. Across the river was the province of Entre Rios, and beyond that Uruguay. The land was flat, the fences entwined with morning glories, and horses cropped grass in the open pastures.
Oswaldo was packing. ‘Those fellows we were having dinner with last night,’ he said. ‘They got interesting after you left. You should not have gone to bed so soon.’
‘I didn’t have anything to say.’
‘You could have listened,’ said Oswaldo. ‘It was interesting. One of them is in the meat business. He knew me! Well, not personally, but he had heard of me.’
Oswaldo was very pleased with this. He finished packing. His comic book still lay on the seat.
‘Want my book?’
I picked it up and glanced through it. D’Artagnan was a Spanish comic, luridly illustrated. Super Album, it said. Ten Complete Stories in Full Colour. I looked at the stories: ‘Goodbye California,’ ‘We, The Legion,’ ‘Or-Grund, Viking Killer.’ It was cowboys, detectives, cave men, soldiers, and ads for learning how to fix televisions in your spare time.
‘I’ve got a book,’ I said.
‘I’m offering it to you for nothing,’ said Oswaldo.
‘I don’t read comics.’
‘This one is beautiful.’
Comics are for kids and illiterates, I wanted to say, but one was not supposed to criticize these people.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Do you ever read Argentine authors?’
‘This,’ he said, tapping the comic book in my hand, ‘is an Argentine book. It is from Buenos Aires.’
‘I was thinking of the other kind of books. Without pictures.’
‘Stories?’
‘Yes. Borges, for example.’
‘Which Borges?’
‘Jorge Luis.’
‘I don’t know him.’
He was bored by this and rather annoyed that I hadn’t enthused when he had given me his comic book. He said good-bye a bit curtly and got off the train when we drew into Rosario. Rosario was industrial, suburban, and also on the Parana. These smells were mingled: factory smoke, flowering trees, the hot river. It was in one of these solid middle-class villas, in 1928, that Che Guevara was born. But it was not Rosario that made him a revolutionary, it was his experience in Guatemala – when the CIA gave Arbenz the push in 1954 – that provoked in him the conviction that South America was badly in need of another liberator. My peregrinations through these countries had led me to the same conclusions. In a way, Guevara’s fate was worse than Bolivar’s. Guevara’s collapse was complete; his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes boutiques in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable. That Guevara succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.
There was a look of September in the fields beyond Rosario, the depleted furrows, the litter of corn husks, the harvesters fuddling with hay bales. Farther on, the farming ceased and the grazing land took over, cattle stilled on green grass, windbreaks of gum trees. It could not have looked quieter or more orderly.
Here was an army camp, a suburb, a factory. Elsewhere in South America army camps could look as menacing as prisons, but this one was unfortified, and the soldiers on manoeuvres – they were attacking a tank in a field near the tracks – looked like boy scouts. The suburb did not look stifling, nor was the factory a blot on the landscape. It was easy to be fooled by appearances, but after what I had seen I needed the reassurance of this order, the lightness of this air, the glimpse of this hawk steadying itself in the sky.
There were many small stations here on the line, but the North Star did not stop at them. The land grew swampier – rivers, tributaries of the Parana, were brimming their banks and flooding the dirt roads. The flooding showed in the greenery it had produced: very tall blue-gums and thick woods. The ranch houses had elegance and space, but there were small square bungalows, too, each on its own fenced-in plot, the tiny house, tiny garden, tiny swimming pool.
Then the houses began to pile up – sheds at the marsh’s edge, bigger houses and buildings farther on, water towers and church steeples. It was lunch time. Schoolgirls in white uniforms skipped on the pavements, and at the station called J. L. Suarez there were suburbanites waiting for the local train, and beyond them, beyond the graffiti (Give Peron the Power), were stern little houses in tight streets, and hedges, and, purely for decoration, banana trees. The cooks and waiters from the dining car got off at San Martin, where nearly all the houses were one-storey affairs; and, at Miguelete, more people got off and walked past the golf club – here a player waited for the train to pull out before making his putt.
The city itself, I knew, could not be far away. The houses became more splendid and with this splendour was a haunted look, like the ghostly houses in Borges’ stories. They were built in the French style and had gothic grille-work and balconies and bolted shutters. They were the colour of a cobweb and just as fragile-seeming and half hidden by trees. The next open space was a park in a burst of sunlight, then a boulevard, and a glimpse of Europe and the hurry and fine clothes of people on a busy pavement. It was as if I had been travelling in a tunnel for months and had just popped out of the other end, at the far side of the earth, in a place that was maddeningly familiar, as venerable as Boston but much bigger.
Retiro Station was English-made and built to an English design, with a high, curved roof supported by girders fo
rged in a Liverpool ironworks, and marble pillars and floors, ornately carved canopies, shafts of sunlight emphasizing its height and, indeed, everything of a cathedral but altars and pews. The stations and railways in Argentina are British in appearance for a very good reason: most of them were built and run by the British until, in 1947, in what was surely one of the worst business deals ever, Juan Peron bought them. If he had waited a few years, the British railway companies – which were losing money – would have given them to him for nothing. The Argentine Railways have been losing money ever since. But the equipment remains, and it was a relief to me, after such a long trip, to arrive at this station, in the heart of a complex and beautiful city. It reminded me that I had travelled a great distance, and this kind of arrival mattered more than the unearthly sights of the Andes and the high plains. It was not enough for me to know that I was in uninhabited altitudes; I needed to be reassured that I had reached a hospitable culture that was explainable and worth the trouble.
Buenos Aires is at first glance, and for days afterwards, a most civilized ant-hill. It has all the elegance of the old world in its buildings and streets, and in its people all the vulgarity and frank good health of the new world. All the news-stands and book shops – what a literate place, one thinks; what wealth, what good looks. The women in Buenos Aires were well-dressed, studiously chic, in a way that has been abandoned in Europe. I had expected a fairly prosperous place, cattle and gauchos, and a merciless dictatorship; I had not counted on its being charming, on the seductions of its architecture, or the vigour of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and walking I decided it would be a pleasant city to live in. I had been prepared for Panama and Cuzco, but Buenos Aires was not what I had expected. In the story ‘Eveline’ in James Joyce’s Dubliners, the eponymous heroine reflects on her tedious life and her chance to leave Dublin with Frank: ‘He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday.’ Frank is an adventurer in the new world and is full of stories (‘he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians’); soon, he proposes marriage, and he urges her to make her escape from Dublin. She is determined to leave, but at the last moment – ‘All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’ – her nerve fails her. Frank boards the boat-train and she remains in Dublin, ‘like a helpless animal’.