The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  The stories in Dubliners are sad – there are few sadder in literature – but ‘Eveline’ did not seem to me such a chronicle of thwarted opportunity until I saw the city she missed. There had seemed to me to be no great tragedy in failing to get to Buenos Aires; I assumed that Joyce used the city for its name, to leave the stinks of Dublin for the ‘good airs’ of South America. But the first girl I met in Buenos Aires was Irish, a rancher, and she spoke Spanish with a brogue. She had come in from Mendoza to compete in the World Hockey Championships and she asked me – though I would have thought the answer obvious – whether I too was a hockey player. In America, the Irish became priests, politicians, policemen – they looked for conventional status and took jobs that would guarantee them a degree of respect. In Argentina, the Irish became farmers and left the Italians to direct traffic. Clearly, Eveline had missed the boat.

  In the immigrant free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which a full third of Argentina’s population lives, I looked in vain for what I considered to be seizable South American characteristics. I had become used to the burial-ground features of ruined cities, the beggars’ culture, the hacienda economy, the complacent and well-heeled families squatting on Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colours of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard to become exercised about press censorship in Argentina, which was ambiguous and arguable and mainly an idea. I had been dealing with enlarged visual simplicities; I found theory rarified and, here, in a city that seemed to work, was less certain of my ground. And yet, taking the measure of it by walking its streets, restoring my circulation – I had not really walked much since I had left Cuzco – it did not seem so very strange to me that this place had produced a dozen world-class concert violinists, and Fanny Foxe, the stripper; Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolf Eichmann had all felt equally at home here.

  There was a hint of this cultural overlay in the composition of the city. The pink-flowered ‘drunken branch’ trees of the pampas grew in the parks, but the parks were English and Italian, and this told in their names, Britannia Park, Palermo Park. The downtown section was architecturally French, the industrial parts German, the harbour Italian. Only the scale of the city was American; its dimensions, its sense of space, gave it a familiarity. It was a clean city. No one slept in its doorways or parks – this, in a South American context, is almost shocking to behold. I found the city safe to walk in at all hours and at three o’clock in the morning there were still crowds in the streets. Because of the day-time humidity, groups of boys played football in the floodlit parks until well after midnight. It was a city without significant Indian population – few, it seemed, strayed south of Tucuman, and what Indians existed came from Paraguay, or just across the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay. They worked as domestics, they lived in outlying slums, they were given little encouragement to stay.

  It was a divided culture, but it was also a divided country. The Argentines I met said it was two countries – the uplands of the north, full of folklore and mountains and semi-barbarous settlers; and the ‘humid pampas’ of the south, with its cattle ranches and its emptiness, a great deal of it still virgin territory (pampas derives from an Aymara word meaning space). You have to travel a thousand miles for this division to be apparent, and Argentines – in spite of what they claim is their adventurous spirit – only travel along selected routes. They know Chile. Some know Brazil. They spend weekends at the fleshpots of Montevideo. The richer ones own second homes in the Patagonian oasis of Bariloche. But they do not travel much in the north of Argentina, and they don’t know, or even care, very much about the rest of South America. Mention Quito and they will tell you it is hellish, small, poor and primitive. A trip to Bolivia is unthinkable. Their connections tend to be with Europe. They fancy themselves Frenchified and have been told so often that their capital is like Paris they feel no need to verify it with a visit to France. They prefer to maintain their ancestral links with Europe; many go to Spain, but almost a quarter of a million visit Italy every year. The more enterprising are Anglophile. They are unsure of the United States, and their uncertainty makes them scorn it.

  ‘But what do you know about Argentina?’ they asked me, and by way of forestalling their lectures – they seemed deeply embarrassed about their political record – I said things like, ‘Well, when I was in Jujuy –’ or ‘Now, Humahuaca’s awfully nice –’ or ‘What struck me about La Quiaca –.’ No one I met had been to La Quiaca or taken the train across the border. The person in Buenos Aires who wishes to speak of the squalor of the distant provinces tells you about the size of the cockroaches in near-by Rosario.

  I had arrived in Buenos Aires exhausted at the beginning of a heatwave which people said was the Argentine autumn. Five days and nights on the train from La Paz had left me limp. I had a bad cold, my wounded hand throbbed, and for several days I did nothing but convalesce; I read, I drank wine, and I played billiards until I was completely myself again.

  At last, I felt well enough to see my Argentine publisher. But I had no luck with the telephone. The receiver honked and buzzed, but no human voice could be heard on it. I decided to see the hall porter at my hotel about it.

  ‘I am having difficulty calling this number,’ I said.

  ‘Buenos Aires?’

  ‘Yes. A company on Carlos Pellegrini.’

  ‘But Carlos Pellegrini is only four blocks from here!’

  ‘I wanted to call them.’

  He said, ‘You will find it much quicker to walk.’

  I walked to the office and introduced myself as the author of the three titles I had seen in the book stores in Tucuman.

  ‘We were expecting someone much older,’ said Mr Naveiro, the managing director of the firm.

  ‘After what I’ve been through, I feel eighty years old,’ I said.

  Hearing that I had arrived, a lady entered Mr Naveiro’s office and said, ‘There is a certain general in the government who has read your books. He is Minister of Transportation, and he would like you to take the train to Salta.’

  I said that I had already been to Salta, or at least a few miles away.

  ‘He would like you to take the train from Salta to Antafagosta in Chile.’

  I said that I would prefer not to.

  ‘The general was also wondering where else you would like to go.’

  I said south, to Patagonia.

  ‘He will give you tickets. When do you wish to go?’

  Like that, the arrangements were made.

  ‘We hope you will enjoy your stay in Argentina,’ said Mr Naveiro. ‘We have passed through terrible times, but things are better now.’

  It seemed so. There had not been a political kidnapping for two years. My friend Bruce Chatwin, who had recently returned from Patagonia, said that the urban guerillas were on holiday in Uruguay or skiing in Switzerland. Isabel Peron had been overthrown; disarmed, she lived under house arrest in a remote valley with her pet canaries and her maid. I was more sceptical about the official reports of political prisoners. ‘There are no political prisoners in all of the Argentine Republic,’ said Colonel Dotti, Director of the National Prison System. ‘They are subversive delinquents, not political prisoners.’ Shortly after I arrived, sixty ‘subversive delinquents’ died in a prison riot in Buenos Aires; some had been shot, others had been asphyxiated.

  I could not draw Mr Naveiro on this issue, and it seemed rude to insist. He was anxious to please. Did I want to send anyone a telex? Did I wish to dictate some letters to his lovely secretary? Was my hotel comfortable? Was there anyone in Argentina I wished to meet? Did I want someone to fly to Patagonia to make arrangements for me there?

  ‘My idea,’ he said, ‘is to get someone to take a plane to Patagonia. You take the train. When you get there, you will have someone on hand, if any problem arises. All you have to do is say yes and
it will be done.’

  I explained that this might have been helpful in the mountains of Colombia, but that I did not anticipate any difficulties in Patagonia.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I suppose you know that this is the country of meat. You must have a big piece of meat to celebrate your arrival in Buenos Aires.’

  It was the biggest steak I had ever seen, the shape of a size twelve football boot and tender as a boiled turnip. In this particular restaurant it was necessary to specify the cut as well as the steer. You said rump, then long-horn; or tenderloin and short-horn.

  ‘Yes, things are very quiet at the moment,’ said Mr Naveiro, pouring the wine. He said that Isabel Peron had been a disaster, but that most people regarded her as pathetic rather than malicious. General Videla, a man so corpselike in appearance he was known as ‘The Skull’ or ‘The Bone’, was a shy, cautious man whom most people hoped would return Argentina to civilian rule.

  It struck me that Argentina was bureaucratic and ungovernable in the same way that Italy was. This was a developed country which was attached geographically to the Third World, but it was under-developed politically, with a distrust of government and a contempt for politics. Patriotism, without a tempering faith in legality or free elections, had become muddled aggression and seedy provincialism. Politics was seen to be a cheat because it was ineffectual. With the highest literacy rate in Latin America, and one of the highest in the world (91.4 per cent), there was really no excuse for Argentina to be a tyranny. Even the most charitable witness had to find a carelessness in the attitude that tolerated authoritarianism and said that the alternative was anarchy. Wasn’t this, I suggested, rather infantile?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Naveiro. ‘But I will tell you what I suspect. This is a very rich country. We have resources. We have a very high standard of living – even in the north where you have been it is quite all right. And I think I am right in saying that we work hard. Some people here work very hard. But we have one great defect. Can you guess what it is?’

  I said no, I couldn’t.

  ‘Everyone works well separately, but we cannot work with one another. I don’t know why this is so, but we just cannot work together as a team.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought a self-appointed government of generals was much inspiration for people to work together,’ I said. ‘Why don’t they hold an election?’

  ‘We keep hoping,’ said Mr Naveiro. ‘I would like to change the subject, with your permission.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I have been reading your essay on Rudyard Kipling. It is very good.’

  It was a book review, but a long one, which had appeared a few weeks before on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. I was surprised that Mr Naveiro had seen it – I had not seen it myself; but, unlike Mr Naveiro, I did not have an airmail subscription, and anyway I had been in Peru or Bolivia when it was published.

  Mr Naveiro said, ‘Do you know who would be interested in your views on Kipling? Borges.’

  ‘Really? I’ve always wanted to meet him.’

  ‘We publish him,’ said Mr Naveiro. ‘I’m sure it can be arranged.’

  I did not hear from Mr Naveiro immediately. In the meantime, his publicity director sent a reporter to my hotel to interview me. The reporter was small, thin and anxious to know what I thought about Argentina. I hardly knew where to begin. Apart from the difficulty of expressing political complexities in Spanish (how did one say ‘muddled aggression and seedy provincialism’?, there was the caution I had been usually scrupulous about observing: Don’t criticize them – they hate to be criticized.

  The reporter took my hesitation for timidity. He prompted me.

  ‘Argentina is cultured, eh?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes, very cultured.’

  He wrote this on his pad.

  ‘Civilized – true?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  He scribbled; he was very pleased.

  ‘Good trains – English trains?’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘Pretty girls?’ he said, still smiling, still writing.

  ‘Ravishing.’

  ‘And Buenos Aires? It’s like –’

  ‘Paris,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and screwed the cap back onto his pen. The interview was over.

  That night I went to a party with the man who had translated my books into Spanish for the Argentine editions. He had earned my admiration by finding the source of a quotation I had mischievously left unattributed in the text of one. It was two lines from Thomas Moore’s Intercepted Letters. But, then, Rolando Costa Picazo had taught in Ohio and Michigan, where such things were common knowledge. He too urged me to meet Borges.

  ‘The question is not whether I want to meet Borges, but whether Borges wants to meet me.’

  ‘He is reading your Kipling piece at the moment. If he likes it, he will want to meet you,’ said Rolando. ‘Now, here is someone you must meet,’ he added, easing me towards an elderly gentleman.

  The man smiled and shook my hand and said in Spanish, ‘Delighted to meet you.’

  Rolando said, ‘He has translated Ezra Pound into Spanish.’

  In English – the man was a translator after all – I said, ‘It must be difficult to translate Pound into Spanish.’

  The man smiled. He said nothing.

  ‘The Cantos,’ I said. ‘They’re difficult.’ And I thought: difficult, if not complete balderdash.

  The man said, ‘Yes. The Cantos.’

  ‘Which ones do you like best?’

  He shrugged. He smiled at Rolando now, but he was seeking help. And it was only after the longest time that I realized that this man, who had been recommended to me as an Argentine intellectual and translator, could not speak English. But how appropriate for a translator of Ezra Pound, I thought. Surely this ignorance was a great advantage, and I had no doubt that his versions were more felicitous than the originals.

  Late the next afternoon, my phone rang.

  ‘Borges wants to see you.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘When?’

  ‘In fifteen minutes.’

  20 The Buenos Aires Subterranean

  Despite its eerie name, the Buenos Aires Subterranean is an efficient five-line network of subway trains. The same size as Boston’s subway, it was built five years later, in 1913 (making it older than Chicago’s or Moscow’s), and as in Boston it quickly put the tram cars out of business. The apartment of Jorge Luis Borges was on Maipú, around the corner from Plaza General San Martin Station, on the Retiro-Constitucion line.

  I had been eager to take the Subterranean ever since I heard of its existence; and I had greatly wished to talk to Borges. He was to me what Lady Hester Stanhope had been to Alexander Kinglake: ‘in all society, the standing topic of interest’, an eccentric genius, perhaps more than a prophet, hidden in the depths of an unholy country. In Eothen, one of my favourite travel books (‘ “Eothen” is, I hope, almost the only hard word to be found in the book,’ says the author, ‘and signifies … “From the East” ’), Kinglake devotes an entire chapter to his meeting with Lady Hester. I felt I could do no less with Borges. I entered the Subterranean and, after a short ride, easily found his house.

  The brass plaque on the landing of the sixth floor said Borges. I rang the bell and was admitted by a child of about seven. When he saw me he sucked his finger in embarrassment. He was the maid’s child. The maid was Paraguayan, a well-fleshed Indian, who invited me in, then left me in the foyer with a large white cat. There was one dim light burning in the foyer, but the rest of the apartment was dark. The darkness reminded me that Borges was blind.

  Curiosity and unease led me into a small parlour. Though the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed, I could make out a candelabra, the family silver Borges mentions in one of his stories, some paintings, old photographs and books. There was little furniture – a sofa and two chairs by the window, a dining table pushed against one wall, and a wall and
a half of bookcases. Something brushed my legs. I switched on a lamp: the cat had followed me here.

  There was no carpet on the floor to trip the blind man, no intrusive furniture he could barge into. The parquet floor gleamed; there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The paintings were amorphous, but the three steel engravings were precise. I recognized them as Piranesi’s ‘Views of Rome’. The most Borges-like one was ‘The Pyramid of Cestius’ and could have been an illustration from Borges’ own Ficciones. Piranesi’s biographer Bianconi called him ‘the Rembrandt of the ruins’. ‘I need to produce great ideas,’ said Piranesi. ‘I believe that were I given the planning of a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it.’ It was something Borges himself might have said.

  The books were a mixed lot. One corner was mostly Everyman editions, the classics in English translation – Homer, Dante, Virgil. There were shelves of poetry in no particular order – Tennyson and E. E. Cummings, Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Hardy. There were reference books, Harvey’s English Literature, The Oxford Book of Quotations, various dictionaries – including Doctor Johnson’s – and an old leatherbound encyclopaedia. They were not fine editions; the spines were worn, the cloth had faded; but they had the look of having been read. They were well-thumbed, they sprouted paper page-markers. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.