Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  This appeared as if it would be an exercise in frustration, since just getting the attention of someone behind the wall looked to be a several: hour proposition. Raul Capuano, however, saw someone he knew in the hallway. The man had worked for him at GM before GM pulled its operation out of Argentina. Many of the GM people had gone to work at customs. This man was an expediter assigned the task of helping people with complex customs problems. It was best if the persons with complex customs problems also had money in their pockets.

  The expediter opened a door, and Garry and Raul were inside looking out at the faces of the men looking in.

  The truck, it seems, had come in late and had not been “put in the system.” It would have to be done “by hand.” This took five minutes. There was a storage charge of 1 percent based on the stated worth of the truck ($25,000), or $250, for which Garry got a receipt. As for the problem of the stated worth on the airbill ($50,000) as opposed to the $25,000 on the carnet, well, the expediter had to agree with Garry that the airbill was the stated worth for insurance purposes, while, in fact, it was perfectly obvious that the worth was as stated in the carnet. “Flying Tigers,” he said, “made a mistake.” Still, it would take two or three days to work this all out.

  Unless …

  It was a pretty straightforward deal. Fifty dollars to the expediter and two hundred australs to be distributed to the other workers. Garry cleared customs in two and a half hours.

  In all, it was $250 for storage and about $100 for unreceipted services. This was all accomplished with much smiling and a great number of handshakes all around. Garry gave a copy of the trip description—a heavy paper handout with our pictures, an explanation of the run in Spanish, and a map on the back—to one of the customs officials, who promptly pinned it to a bulletin board.

  Garry was convinced that it was a good deal. In the normal course of events, it would have taken three or four days to get the truck out of customs, and we surely would have paid well over $100 to stay in Buenos Aires for that amount of time. (Indeed, because of the stated airbill value of $50,000 as opposed to the carnet value, Garry might have been a week or more sorting out problems.) The overworked customs agents made a few dollars. This was not, we were given to understand, bribery of any sort. We had simply paid some individuals to “find” our work on their desks.

  Garry had a drink with Sr. Capuano. About a decade ago, GM had pulled out of Argentina. It was a time of extraordinary turmoil. In 1946, Juan Perón had come to power, supported by the military and the labor unions. Perón’s wife, Eva, was particularly loved for her devotion to the poor, the “shirtless ones.” The government practiced Robin Hood economics: the living conditions of the workers improved but the economy was left in shambles. In 1955 a military coup unseated Perón. A succession of five governments—three military and two constitutional—followed. Perón again took power but died in 1974. His vice president and widow, Eva Perón, “Evita” of rock-opera fame, assumed the presidency. The shirtless ones gathered at her office every morning, but Robin Hood economics left the country in chaos. Radicals—unionists, students, intellectuals—mounted an armed insurgency and there was guerrilla warfare in the streets. Murder and kidnapping.

  GM executives were often targets of the radicals. They were men whose parents had immigrated from Italy as peasants and had risen to high positions in the country. They would get telephone calls—“there is a bomb in your house”—and a man would have to decide whether to evacuate his family. Were killers waiting for the family out behind the hedge with guns? Or was there really a bomb in the house?

  It was the kind of decision executives were making in the mid-seventies.

  The military deposed Señora Perón and set about suppressing dissidents with extraordinary brutality. In the “dirty war” that followed—it was called “the process” or “the trial”—the military crushed the insurgency. Some radicals were killed without a trial.

  With the insurgency in tatters, virtually destroyed, the military continued its campaign. “We have,” one highly placed Argentine official told me, “a German-trained military.”

  Intellectuals were rounded up. Members of unions. People who had once been members of unions. People who once knew someone who had once said something critical of the government. The terror was now sanctioned, official, and torture was its instrument. People named names and those they named disappeared, nine thousand of them in all.

  The official terror did nothing to improve economic conditions. Still, the one thing the military was supposed to be able to do was fight wars, and after Argentina lost the Falklands conflict to Great Britain in 1982, pressure for a return to constitutional government was irresistible. A civilian candidate won the elections of 1983. In 1985 two of the former ruling generals were sentenced to long jail terms for their part in “the trial.”

  But in the mid-seventies, with terror in the streets and a failing economy, GM had a decision to make. They realized that in order to be competitive, they would have to introduce a new car. That involved tremendous expense. GM simply decided to cut its losses.

  In 1987, Argentines were making an old GMC pickup, importing parts for a truck that was partially built at the Sevel plant, in accordance with Argentine law. Sevel, a consortium of Fiat and Peugeot, was authorized to market the truck under the Chevrolet name and GM had a skeleton staff installed there.

  Raul Capuano had been called out of retirement to help with the project at Sevel. He was delighted because it got him out of the house and out from under his wife’s feet. We were looking for an electric heating coil for the truck—something to heat up water for our freeze-dried food—and Sr. Capuano called several places, then said he’d look for one for us tomorrow. Garry said, “But you must be busy.” Sr. Capuano said he’d love to do it and his wife would thank us as well. It seemed strange to have a former director-general of GM working as a gopher for us.

  MEANWHILE, I was burning up the phones at the Sheraton. It seemed wise to hire a translator in my quest for visas. My Spanish was rusty and, in any case, I speak it one painful word at a time, all in the present tense, like Tarzan: we eat much food now; I have many women now.

  I finally contacted a translator named Andreas Polacek who spoke good English, seemed enthused about the project, and said he would call the various embassies for me.

  At two, Garry returned with the truck, introduced me to the very pleasant Sr. Capuano, and went off to lock the truck in a secure compound at Sevel. The consortium was having a convention for dealers and wanted to display the truck, take some pictures of us. Garry was happy we didn’t have to park the truck in some city lot where one of us would have to sit with it twenty-four hours a day.

  Polacek called back and agreed to accompany me to the various embassies the next day. He said he would be at the hotel at 8:00 A.M. but that it could take a couple of days to secure the necessary visas.

  We went to dinner at La Cabaña, a snazzy steak house featuring enormous slabs of meat. To get into the place, you walk by two stuffed Herefords in the lobby. It was all dark-paneled wood and waiters in tuxedos. A gran baby beef at La Cabaña weighs enough to seriously injure people who might try to eat it. If dropped from a moderate height, a gran baby beef could squash a small animal, say a cat. The Argentine wine—an ’83 pinot noir—was as smooth and complex as all but the most aristocratic of French or California wines. It took a couple of bottles to wash down the beef, which was exceedingly tasty although not nearly as marbled in fat as the best U.S. cuts. It was the finest steak I’ve ever eaten.

  A cabdriver in one of the yellow-over-black Falcons offered to take us to a nightclub where there was “a striptease.” He gave us a card for the club with his name scrawled on it. The last time we had been in Buenos Aires, only a few months ago, a cabdriver had taken us to just such a place. Two lovely young women sat on our laps and told us that, as soon as we had walked in, their hearts had begun to burn for us, bearded gringo adventurers that we were. The women were cuparas, c
up bearers, B-girls, and a waiter in a tuxedo put an opened bottle of champagne on the bar along with a check for what amounted to $190. This seemed extravagant for the vintage and when I said as much, the young women lost their desire for us. More men in tuxedos appeared. There were negotiations that involved a bit of pushing, a few curses in English and Spanish. It seemed that the lovely young women, standing a safe distance away, were doing most of the cursing now. They were, I thought, somewhat fickle.

  Garry and I, shouting and shoving, made our way to the door, and I believe that I gave someone a ten-dollar bill. The ten, it appeared, was not enough. More shoving. Garry found a five. Still not enough. By this time we had pushed our way close enough to the door that a quick head fake, a little juke, and a brisk stiff arm took us out into the Buenos Aires night. Our new friends stood in front of the cabaret and shouted merry good-byes. It seemed they believed we were homosexuals.

  “I think,” I told Garry in the cab, “the place the guy wants to take us? That’s the same place.”

  Since our experience with Argentine striptease had, to date, been neither uplifting nor satisfying in any way, we chose a path of wisdom rather than valor and went back to the hotel.

  THE NEXT DAY, Garry telexed the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica concerning the problems involved in bringing a truck into Nicaragua. (The Canadian embassy in Costa Rica handies Nicaragua.) We had been getting conflicting reports. On the one hand, we had been told we would need no visa; on the other, the U.S. State Department’s background notes on Nicaragua say that U.S. citizens arriving by land or sea (not air) need visas.

  Meanwhile, I met with Andreas Polacek and set off to secure those visas we still might require. Andreas was twenty-two, a slender, handsome young fellow who wore a neatly trimmed beard; he was dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks, carried a backpack that doubled as a book bag, and might have been a North American student, right on down to his ambitions for the future. He was studying marketing and publicity.

  We took cabs to the various embassies, all of which seemed to be in venerable buildings with heavy wooden doors equipped with peephole-intercom security systems.

  Panama was easy.

  Honduras was a piece of cake.

  Ecuador was simpático.

  More cabs. Because inflation runs at rapid and unintelligible rates, metered cabs in Buenos Aires simply cough up a number every few blocks and that number is a code. The driver hands you a sheet of paper that translates the code into money. It is easier to print a new sheet of paper every month than to recalibrate the meter.

  Guatemala was simplicity itself.

  Central Buenos Aires might be Manhattan in some places, with garment workers bustling to off-load double-parked trucks and fashionable women in furs walking past glittering shop windows. There are wide boulevards—the widest in the world, the Argentines say—and with the early-morning temperature standing at fifty degrees, it seemed anomalous to see well-dressed businessmen in overcoats hurrying to some meeting while the palms trees were being whipped about by a brisk wind.

  Buenos Aires is certainly the most European city in the Americas, a sophisticated metropolis of restaurants and shops. There are great plazas, wooded parks, lakes, sports stadia, and horse tracks, all interspersed with crenelated buildings that call up the architectural wonders of Europe. The National Congress building, for instance, carries all the options for political buildings: a dome, pillars, battlements, and cupolas.

  Buenos Aires, except for the central area, has been almost completely rebuilt since the turn of the century. It is a city of functional skyscrapers and buildings that are more experimental in nature. Novelty buildings. Certain experiments are carried too far, however. Art nouveau bathrooms may be momentarily amusing, but square toilet seats are neither charming nor particularly utilitarian.

  We passed the Casa Rosada, the office of the president, an imposing pink building which is the same color as the National Museum of Fine Arts. Grand hotels flank the boulevards, and a few hardy patrons were drinking strong coffee at the sidewalk cafés.

  People in Buenos Aires are nothing if not urbane. Forty percent of the population of Argentina lives in the greater Buenos Aires area, and the people are almost exclusively of European ancestry.

  They call themselves porteños, but it wasn’t much of a port, not until the 1870s. In 1852, the population of Argentina was just over one million. In the next few decades, during the Industrial Revolution, with Europe booming and the population there rising exponentially, a great demand developed for inexpensive food, for wheat and cattle products. The first refrigerated cargo ships intensified the demand. In the flat, fertile grasslands south of Buenos Aires, called the pampas, cattle were bred and wheat was grown. Argentina never looked to the north, to Canada or the U.S. In point of fact, the three countries were in the business of exporting the same products. And the same process, beginning with subjugation of native peoples, took place. The cattle ranchers came next. Cowboys were called gauchos and a romance as persuasive as that of the American West grew up around them.

  The pampas were perfect for sheep. Agriculture.

  The riches of Argentina brought immigrants, mostly Italians and Spaniards, with a smattering of Germans and Jews. A significant number of the Jewish immigrants became gauchos. Between 1857 and 1930, over six million people immigrated to the country.

  Argentina still stays afloat on the returns from export agriculture. There is little trade with the north. The United States does not need wheat or beef. Argentina looks to Europe for trade and for its considerable style. Europe, in turn, borrows from Argentina.

  In the 1880s, a disreputable dance called the tango swept through the teeming lower-class districts of Buenos Aires. By 1915, the dance was a European craze. These days, the tango is a kind of mustache cup of a dance, a quaint anachronism, performed for tourists in immense clubs full of Japanese aficionados.

  To a North American, the lyrics of the tango seem familiar: it’s country and western gone urban. Take any American C&W song that hints of danger—something like “(Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in) Tulsa,” a bit of musical advice to a man who has treated another man’s woman with a certain lack of respect—take this song, dress it up in a tight suit, slick back its hair, put patent-leather shoes on its feet, paste a thin black mustache on its lip, and you have the lyrics of a proper tango. Put a razor in its pocket for good measure: my wife ran away with the milkman and now someone bleeds. It’s arrogant and stylish, dangerous and sometimes sappily melancholy.

  The form, it is said, is moribund. Yet the tango, in its sensuality and arrogance, its ardent self-pity and provocative romanticism, somehow informs the character of Argentina.

  In the cab with Andreas Polacek, I found myself noticing all the Falcons. The vehicle you most often see on the streets of Buenos Aires is the Ford Falcon. It is generally gussied up with elaborate chrome bumpers, with different arrangements for headlights or taillights, but the car is a Ford Falcon with the dowdy twenty-five-year-old side panels: instantly identifiable.

  I told Andreas that I was beginning to think of Buenos Aires as the city of Falcons. Andreas didn’t much care for the vehicle himself: it wasn’t that hot a car. The new car young and sporty folk wanted was the Ford Sierra, like the Mercur sold in the U.S. The Falcon, Andreas thought, was “for conservative people.”

  Indeed, during the dirty war, the unmarked black Ford Falcon inspired a kind of mind-numbing fear. Men in leather jackets came into your home in the middle of the night and took your sons away and you never saw them again. They took them away in Ford Falcons, in frumpy little cars designed thirty years ago. It was the banality of evil writ large: terror as a black Ford Falcon.

  Falcons, as far as Andreas was concerned, were politically crummy cars. As for the dirty war, he believed that the generals had given the orders, certainly, but that lesser officers had carried out these plans with a brutality that extended even beyond the generals’ orders.

  There were other
s in Argentina who felt that the generals had been punished, were being punished, and that expanding inquiries down into the ranks of lieutenants, for instance, constituted a witch hunt of sorts. The lower ranks were only following orders. It was time to sweep the dirty war into the dustbin of history, time for Argentina to look to the future rather than the past. So some people thought.

  Crowds gathered in the street to support both points of view. Andreas believed that the dirty war was a shameful episode in his nation’s history. Still, something of the sort goes on at a much lesser level in the United States, yes?

  I told him that no, I knew of no systematic program of torture, murder, and disposal of corpses directed at any group in the United States. Andreas shrugged. He was under the impression that all governments do pretty much the same thing. He was a young man of liberal opinions and his comments were vaguely frightening. In a country where kidnapping, torture, and “disappearance” have been rampant for years, terror becomes as mundane and ordinary as an old Ford Falcon.

  After securing the necessary documentation for Colombia, Andreas and I met Garry for lunch at the Sheraton. We had only Costa Rica and Nicaragua to go. It would be a piece of cake. We could leave tomorrow for Tierra del Fuego.

  THE NEXT DAY, Garry called Jacques Crete, our contact at the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires. Crete said they would call the Nicaraguan embassy for us. All we would have to do was appear. They’d have our documentation ready for us.

  Andreas and I left to do some shopping. We walked down Calle Florida, a shopping street full of expensive shops, newsstands, and good bookstores. The street is reserved for pedestrians. We visited five bookstores before we found a Spanish copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, which we felt might be useful in demonstrating to border guards and others what the project was about. There was Garry’s around-the-world record, right there on page 120.

  “You are a writer?” Andreas asked. “You will write a book about this trip?”