Why should this be so? What was the secret of that sure attraction in a mere salesman’s unadventurous round of the coast? The old Adam can be left out immediately. No one would exchange the variety of enjoyment which Europe offers to body and mind for the highly specialised pleasures of Spanish America; nor am I looking back nostalgically upon the beauty of the women, which again is a specialised perfection. In any case the object of my sole attack of infantile pink tou-touism was half English and half North American with nothing Latin in her except that she had been born in Lima and spoke beautiful Spanish.
Landscape, then? One could, I think, fall deeply in love with the little towns of Central America, high up in the long, green valleys between spectacular and unaggressive volcanoes; but unless a man were fortunate enough to be born in the highlands of Guatemala or Costa Rica, he would not go out of his way to choose them. Mexico, Chile and the altiplano of Ecuador attract me, yet for my taste they are not to be compared with Wessex or the Valley of the Loire or the coast between Bilbao and Oviedo. In fact I am no great lover of immensity of landscape, and to my eighteenth-century mind the horrid mountains bristle unnecessarily upon a pleasantly rolling earth. While I love to read of those who climb them, as of those who shoot elephants, I have not the slightest wish to compete. I am prepared to marvel at their conquests from Alpine and Andean restaurants or from a safe seat in the zoo, but marvel is enough.
There is left only the South American attitude to life. It must be that which fascinates me, and it must be closely related to my own or to a romantic illusion I have of my own. It is a mixture of nobility and brutality—and by that I do not mean cruelty. I mean a quality which in youth tends to prefer the coarse flavour for its own sake, and in middle age at least refrains from shrinking. It is the utterly uncloistered virtue to which nothing human is alien provided it has power and individuality, and it seems to me more common in the Spanish Americas than anywhere else. Add to this import from Spain an easy gaiety and a cosmopolitanism which the mother country lacks; impress it upon every immigrant, British, German or Italian; and you have South America.
I leave out, quite arbitrarily, Brazil, though that was the first republic where my catalogues and I were welcomed. The Portuguese spirit is discordant with the Spanish, and a temperament which is in tune with one will not readily respond to the other. For most Englishmen Portugal should be the easier host, since it is an Atlantic country, conservative, tolerant in manners and darkly emerald as Cornwall. In both the people and their home there is a softness of outline; and, for myself, I miss the bitter and glowing virility of Spain. The two cultures are different as red gold and platinum. One is as fitted as the other to the finger of the Peninsula, or to marry through all impediments Atlantic and Pacific; but though the reflections of the grey perhaps be subtler I prefer the superb tradition of the gold.
Neither the roaring life of Rio de Janeiro nor the European solidity of São Paulo attracted me, but in Spanish-speaking Buenos Aires I was immediately at home. There I appointed an Anglo-Argentine agent, and first came in contact with that contribution of my own country to Latin America which is more valuable than capital or railways. The adventurers in the sub-continent have always been the flower of our emigrants, rejecting the deceptive ease of a common language for the sake of a way of living which they loved. The permanent resident of British ancestry, whether or not he has retained his passport, is very much a man.
My agent I might have met in Europe, but not his father. He was eighty years old and had lived most of his life in the mountain forests of the far north-west. He painted the country vividly in words for me, and had, though quite untrained, painted it on canvas after canvas in a style of such marked individuality—something of Blake and something of Douanier Rousseau—that he was far nearer genius than amateur.
In the fascination which Latin America holds for me the presence of such observers also counts. I like to be near a frontier of the imagination, though I myself have no desire to be a frontiersman. Not for me are the handful of rice and what the worms have left in a banana skin; but to meet the men for whom such a diet was sufficient and to understand why it was, to feel that I myself may be the collecting point of memories and that from my own mind, if only for me, may come a synthesis of observations till then wholly unconnected—that is what I mean by a frontier of the imagination. Its proximity can only be felt in conversation, not in the reading of books unless scene and the way of thinking are already familiar—for to read of the unknown is not enough. To feel upon the frontier, one must be aware at first hand of the individual pieces of the puzzle, each depending on the observations of individual man or woman. Then even the garden where one dines in peace may have some bearing on problems of zoology, geography or archaeology.
I could not take the train from Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile, since the line had been destroyed by landslips and the only communication between railhead and railhead was through the high passes by mule. I should have enjoyed this, but John Kidd were insistent upon speed, and I doubted if they would approve. So I went up to Mendoza at the foot of the Andes and waited for a plane.
Sharing my sleeping compartment was a Lithuanian Argentine whom I liked at once—an instance of the veneer of Spanish manners upon a European of little other culture. I cannot conceive myself so quickly at ease with a Lithuanian from Europe or North America. The next day, determined to show me Mendoza and its delights, he drove me out through the desert hills to a tavern and a swimming pool. There did not seem to be any living thing within miles but an Indian girl with long black plaits whom we contented ourselves with complimenting, her mother who ran back and forth with bottles of red wine, and a young goat which we grilled upon embers and ate—little by little and regardless of swimming with full stomachs. That country Argentine and I, though different in blood, background and education, had the same tastes. Without discussion or hesitation he had chosen for his hospitality to the stranger a place of lonely beauty rather than a place of crowds.
Very properly he allowed the evening to be governed by tradition and took me to the Mendoza public brothel: a glass-roofed palace admirably appointed and large enough to supply the wants—though I can but guess at statistics—of a city the size of Birmingham. It appeared to have all the tolerance of a good mixed club, for no one thought any the worse of me when I chose, abominating brothels, to sit upon one of the roomy red-plush sofas in the central hall and chat to the members.
The plane to Chile twisted like a startled wood-pigeon through the high passes below the peak of Aconcagua, while I endeavoured to master the difficult art of sucking oxygen from the tube beside my seat without returning into it my lunch. Those were the days before pressurised hulls, and the crossing of the Andes was the highest passenger flight in the world. It lasted only an hour or so, for the southern Andes are just as narrow and abrupt as the hatchings on a map. I landed in a world of rushing water where every woman seemed to be attractive and every German sympathetic.
Though the standard of the first, in the two main cafés of the capital, far surpassed that of any musical comedy chorus, it was the second which most surprised me. Where Germans are concerned, my Europeanism is suspect. It is probable that their foreign policy during my lifetime has conditioned me to dislike their character, their language and their literature, and that in the days of good Prince Albert, given a German governess whom I liked, I might have been as fond of the Teuton as the Latin. But there it is. In every individual of pure English blood it may be that the battle between the Mediterranean race and the Anglo-Saxon—with the Celt as a casual umpire—still goes on and that one of them has to win.
But here were Germans, by passport Chileans and with Chilean wives and mothers, enjoying their mutual love affair with South America as thoroughly as the British and my solitary Lithuanian. The brotherhood of the Spanish-speaking foreigners, like the old brotherhood of the buccaneers, undoubtedly corresponds to a real and deep community of tastes.
The book which for me best gives the flavour of the whole continent and its separate parts is Tschiffely’s Ride. Yet Tschiffely was a temporary immigrant from Switzerland—the nation which of all others is the most self-satisfied and farthest in spirit from Spain.
I appointed as agents a firm of German-Chileans. They did not care from what country their imports came so long as the manufacturers were honest and intelligent. Their opinion of Hitler was aristocratic; he appeared to be efficient at setting the ports and industries of Germany to work, but he was obviously too vulgar to last. They were thinking of him in terms of a Spanish-American dictator and underrating that German adoration of vulgarity which had been educated out of themselves. Both partners of the firm were Chilean to the core—though one of them could have played a Prussian officer in any movie. They opened the life of the country to me, and begged me to come back when I had finished my tour and stay. Given some capital, I might have done so. On the other hand, if I had had any I should never have seen Chile at all. Poverty has its advantages.
My memories of the journey up the coast from Valparaíso to Lima and Lima to Guayaquil are dominated by archaeology and history and the traffic of the small desert ports under the shadow of the Andes. The few passengers seemed to be all searchers: one for cosmic rays on the top of Mount Misti, another for gold in the Montana, another, returning from the Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires, for new missionary fields. Business was excellent all the way up the Pacific coast, but the meditative part of my mind must have overwhelmed that which was satisfied by commerce.
My only regret is that I do not possess a Peruvian pot in the shape of two amorous and ecstatic cats which was offered to me absurdly cheap by one of the custodians at the pre-Inca city of Chan-Chan. As the export of antiquities was forbidden and all passengers were closely observed by the Customs when they returned to the ship, I think I was right in supposing that custodian and customs officer were in collaboration to improve their standards of living, and that the pot would have been confiscated and myself subjected to a heavy official or unofficial fine. Yet the thought always haunts me that the custodian was genuinely short of money and appealing to me as one gentleman to another. If I had not been so suspicious, the cats, though heaven knows how I would have concealed them, might now be on my desk.
In none of the capitals did I bother to call on the British Legation. This was, I fear, a discourtesy; but agents, printers and their hospitable friends left me no time for my own countrymen. Experience in Europe had taught me that commercial attachés, while they might be useful to government contractors and representatives of heavy industry, were never in touch with the sort of agent I wanted. They could see no difference between the honest, energetic businessman employing his small capital to the full, and the bright local boy selling buttons or dirty postcards on commission. Closer and most friendly contact with diplomats during the war has not changed my opinion. They are well informed about the trade and politics of the country to which they are accredited, but are too busy to know the middle class.
At Lima I was pleasantly rebuked for this attitude. Strolling off to dinner with a highly intelligent Englishman whom I had partnered at bridge, he asked me if I had called at the Legation. I said that I had not, and protested that I was very capable of travelling, selling and enjoying myself without its aid. He replied that he himself was the British Minister in Peru and Ecuador, and pointed out that though indeed he might have little to offer me—beyond the contents of his cellar and the attentions of his cook—I to the exile from London had much to give. That point of view had never occurred to me. The gilded youth of Bucharest had travelled too far to remember that he too, by courtesy of education, had once belonged to the servant class.
In Ecuador I temporarily replaced the Minister. My fellow traveller in the toy train which zigzags down twelve thousand feet from Quito to the coast was a former Vice-President of the Republic. He was a man of immense distinction, resembling a well-fed but still slender Don Quixote. At Riobamba, where we stayed the night, he decided to show me the town and—since the possibilities seemed to be limited—called upon the Mayor to help us. It was a memorable night, some parts of which I used, long afterwards, in a short story. In the morning we were inserted into the train—I hope regretfully—by a delegation of local politicians who had been informed by the Vice-President that I was the British Minister. This legend he had developed himself, wit piling upon wit, from an earlier statement about midnight that I ought to be the British Minister. And so, if only sympathetic misbehaviour had been enough qualification, I ought.
Nowhere else but in South America could a stranger have been so quickly judged, and accepted as a tolerable and discreet companion. The mood is not only for parties. By assuming that every individual will contribute such powers of entertainment as he has, a party generosity is carried into daily life. Sometimes it has a resemblance to the facile comradeship of youth—even when a Vice-President is in command—but it is still another cause of the fascination of Spanish-American manners for those of us who have surrendered to them.
Of Colombia I saw only the coast, passing between Barranquilla and Cartagena by the stern-wheel boat on the waterways of the Magdalena delta. The country was a great plain of tropical marsh where anything solid was covered by a convolvulus-like trailer, which then grew upon its own dead litter until it had formed a lump the size of a cottage. The Indian settlements where the stern-wheeler loaded and unloaded sacks and bundles were indistinguishable from the bog except by smoke-fires lit on the doubtful shore to protect stevedores and steamer from the mosquitoes. At sundown and after, the insect life was all-pervading as air. Such individuals of the swarm as managed to penetrate my cabin—a wired cell with no furniture but a camp bed—were snapped up so promptly that my dislike of spiders was overcome by admiration. It was a journey which gave me some idea of the desolation with which the conquistadores had to contend, and indeed at Barranquilla I met one of them in person, four hundred years out of his time.
He was a Spaniard and a printer, and for some unaccountable reason we could not be separated. He was the original of Manuel Vargas in The Third Hour, and even in that boldly romantic novel I hardly exaggerated his adventures. He had blown up trains in the Mexican Revolution. He had been condemned to an Indian campaign in the swamps of Yucatán. He had travelled all over Latin America and at last settled in Barranquilla as manager of a printing shop—a trade at first unfamiliar to him as to me, but in which his flaming Spanish energy made dust of his more leisurely competitors.
I had a lonely Christmas in the Port of Colón upon a formal and overfed Dutch liner which took me on to Costa Rica—a most friendly miniature republic where the coast was pure black and the highlands pure Spanish. The capital had even preserved the old communal bull-fight of Spain. I have never seen anything so dangerous. At one moment the ring was full of chatting, parading, laughing youth as in any Sunday square of any Latin city; at the next the bull was among them. There must have been over a hundred men in the plaza, eddying to form avenues for the bull and rings for any outstanding amateur performer. Yet the only casualties—and those not mortal—were among spectators perched on the barrier who were pushed off by the enthusiasm of the crowd.
There followed a lazy week among my own countrymen on the S.S. Salvador, a little steam yacht of a ship which plied up and down the Pacific coast of Central America and upon which I was the only passenger. Usually we travelled in darkness and spent the day discharging into lighters in some forested bay where a ring of volcanoes, each with a little plume of smoke like that of the resting ship, suggested far-off industry around our dock. At midday with ritual exactitude the mate and I would drink three pink gins of such colossal size and lasting effect that I was peaceful as the sea till nightfall. He too, though a more distant and sardonic observer than the settler on land, knew very well that he was living as near to earthly paradise as he was ever likely to approach in his career.
I l
eft the Salvador at San José de Guatemala—the most ramshackle port of all I had visited, where a sand road ran down to the shore between grass-roofed huts, and on the red-hot lines of the railway iguanas were stretched full length, regarding me, as I sat desolately upon my bags, with as little curiosity as the inhabitants.
Guatemala City was a pleasant and civilised spot except for the loud and continuous tinkle of marimbas. Like any other folk instrument a little of it in its proper setting was delicious, but, as the main recreation of a considerable town, the marimba too closely resembled the barrel organ—a hundred barrel organs turned at random by a hundred enthusiastic monkeys. There was also a festival for the selection of the Central American Beauty Queen. The standard was ethereally high and added to the mild exasperation caused by marimbas.
Apparently I chose an odd way to enter Mexico. It seemed straightforward enough. One took a train to the frontier, crossed the river by ferry and went on by rail from Tapachula to Mexico City. When, however, I had followed my porter shuffling through the night down a track into the bush, had shied away from a coiled snake—fortunately dead—upon the river sands and had crossed to Mexico in a leaky punt, I realised that either there were few travellers between Guatemala and Mexico, or else they went by sea.
On the far bank the Mexican customs were in the open air. The counters, lit by flares, looked like fair booths. In charge of the passport bureau was a grim and magnificent young Indian, hung with pistols instead of obsidian knives and garlanded by a khaki shirt open to the navel. He at once and completely fulfilled all I had ever heard or read of Mexico.
He told me, with a fine contempt for all Europeans, that I could not enter Mexico, that my visa was in order but that I had no receipt for a large monetary guarantee which should have been deposited with the Bank of Mexico. The Consulate in London had told me nothing of this, and it looked as if I should have to return to Guatemala.
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