Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  He blinked at the page and admitted that it did seem to say so. "Too bad, really. Sorry not to accommodate you."

  "Then this thing put out by our State Department is wrong? Maybe it would be a good idea to write and tell them so."

  "Well, it is not exactly wrong. But I once granted an Australian visa and became involved in such a dreadful bother that I decided never to do so again."

  Ticky took a deep breath and I could see her muscles tighten. I jabbed her in the ribs, thereby saving temporarily an appearance of international amity. "Perhaps I did not make clear our situation," I went on. "We haven't time to send these passports around to each consulate separately. Couldn't you stretch a point, since you have the authority, and help us out?"

  He shrugged. "Awfully sorry."

  I stepped on Ticky's foot. "Well, I suppose you can issue the Singapore visa?"

  He reluctantly conceded the point and we started filling out the same old forms-age, sex, occupation, place of birth, purpose of visit, means of transportation, race, permanent residence, marital status, et cetera ad nauseam. I was tempted to emulate a friend of mine who for years has been putting down his occupation as "necrophilist" without once having it questioned.

  Presently we handed in our homework with our passports. After about ten minutes the young man with the beard stuck his head out and said cheerfully, "I seem to have ruined one page in Mrs. Heinlein's passport-the wrong rubber stamp. Sorry. I'll just scratch it out, eh?"

  I grasped firmly Ticky's upper arm. "Quite all right."

  It was about four-thirty when we got out of there, having at last received permission to change ships in Singapore but nothing else. Our British cousin relented a bit as we left. "If it turns out that you simply can't get those other visas any other way, come back another day and I'll see what I can do for you."

  I thanked him and got Ticky out of there quickly before she could start quoting Patrick Henry. It was a cold, gloomy drive back in the dusk and Ticky was unusually silent. Once she spoke up. "I'd like to set fire to his beard."

  We gave up and loaded the problem on the patient shoulders of my friend and business agent in New York, Lurton Blassingame. His secretary took the passports around by hand to each of the consulates in New York. Even this process cost twenty-seven dollars in long-distance tolls (to obtain questionnaires first) plus (as near as I can guess) about sixty dollars of his secretary's time, plus fees-all totaling around a hundred dollars for a ritual as useless as stamping white horses.

  All but Indonesia-The Indonesian consulate in New York refused to have anything to do with our passports. We lived in Colorado Springs; Colorado lies west of the Mississippi; therefore our visas would have to be granted by the Indonesian consul in San Francisco, Q.E.D. and ipse dixit.

  I pointed out, by long-distance phone, that while we might be in Colorado, our passports and paperwork were physically present in New York and would be delivered by hand along with the cash; couldn't they please stamp a visa on each of them under the circumstances?

  "So sorry. No."

  I explained with tears in my voice that there was no longer time to have some visas granted in New York and then send the passports to San Francisco. But their spokesman was adamant; rules were rules and had to be enforced.

  As we were to learn later the new government in Indonesia is quite unable to enforce rules about murder and pillage, much less rules about public health and sanitation. But when it came to red tape, they had learned fast; they were as Western as a school board. ("Come to Beautiful Bali, Last Home of Romance.")

  All during the long campaign for reservations and the subsequent battle of the visas Ticky had been overhauling our wardrobes and we had both been stuck at odd intervals with hypodermic needles-cholera, typhus, typhoid and paratyphoid, tetanus, smallpox, yellow fever. This is one requirement for foreign travel with which I do not quarrel, since it is obviously of benefit not only to the countries visited but to the traveler. For technical reasons of biochemistry the yellow fever shot is very hard to obtain unless you live close to one of the half dozen U.S. Public Health offices which dispenses it. We did not, not by nine hundred miles, but we were able to obtain it as a courtesy from a nearby army post. The U.S. Public Health Service will supply on request a booklet telling what inoculations are required for travel in any part of the world; appended is a list of places dispensing cholera shots, free. They are not available commercially. Any traveler who needs one had better find out how he can get it most easily and plan for it ahead of time; the problem is not one of red tape nor of bureaucratic stupidity but one of inconvenient fact having to do with the present stage of medical art. There is no one to blame.

  Ticky did not accept the requirements of inoculation easily. She stated that the navy medical corps had stuck enough needles in her to last her the rest of her life. I agreed and pointed out the alternatives: either she could let me go roam among the señoritas without mama to watch over me, or she could leave the country without inoculations-no one would stop her-and then find herself placed in quarantine for two or three weeks at the first port we reached . . . a process which would be repeated a dozen times around the globe, including San Francisco on return.

  She stated positively and explosively that she would not go at all. But in due course she was baring her arms and her thigh and various other parts of her skin in Dr. Mullet's office and wincing as she was jabbed. I don't think the threat of señoritas convinced her. Ticky is as hard to convince as a cat, but, like a cat, she will submit to the inevitable. Just barely.

  The first typhoid shot gave me a mild headache; I had no other reactions. Poor Ticky was distressingly ill from each and all of them-even her vaccination "took." I stipulate (though she does not) that it may have been psychosomatic, but the illnesses were real. She lost the better part of two weeks, just when we were busiest.

  Because of the book I had to finish writing, almost all the endless running around necessary to get us started had fallen on Ticky. She was especially busy planning and shopping for our wardrobes. I first became aware of this early in the summer when she said thoughtfully, "I suppose we had better get some more luggage at once."

  "What for? You take your big suitcase and your hatbox; I'll take my Valapak and the other suitcase. That'll be plenty. I can even let you have some room in my bags."

  She shook her head. "We'll use the big suitcase for our skates and I'll pack my skating dresses around them. I was thinking of a wardrobe trunk for each of us."

  "Skates-" I said, then took a deep breath and screamed, "Skates! Ice skates? Who are you? Barbara Ann Scott?"

  "Don't be silly, dear. This trip is supposed to be fun, isn't it? Won't it be fun to look up the skating clubs everywhere we go? I'm thinking of doing an article for Skating magazine about it. Skating My Way Around the World, or Blades under the Southern Cross, or something like that."

  I answered with dignity that Skating magazine did not pay anything for copy and that I hoped she would never bring up an immoral proposal like that again.

  "I'm not asking you to write the article. I'll do it myself."

  "It's a bad precedent," I answered sulkily. "Start a thing like that and it could lead anywhere. First thing you know I'd have to take a j-b-if you will excuse the expression-and go back to working for a living. You wouldn't want that to happen."

  She did not answer. "Or maybe you would?" I went on, not quite so firmly. "Anyhow, it is absopreposterously out of the question. We can't drag thirty pounds of skates and a bushel of skating costumes around the globe just to skate a few times. If you find any rinks open in the southern hemisphere-which I doubt-we will rent skates and try them. I'll go that far with you. You can even take one skating dress. One."

  "Rented skates," she said quietly, making the words an obscenity.

  "Then don't skate. We live two blocks from one of the best rinks in the world. We are not repeat not spending all this dough just to compare one piece of frozen water with another. Ice is ice in any lan
guage."

  "No, it's not. In Spanish it's hielo. I looked it up."

  I withdrew to a previously prepared position. "Look, darling, I had been meaning to talk with you about this. The secret of happy traveling is to travel light. We'll take two bags each, one for each hand. That way we can always move them ourselves if we have to. There is nothing worse than to be stuck out in the middle of a pouring rain with a big stack of baggage and no porters or taxicabs to be had for love or money. And even if you do find a taxi, in a lot of those hot countries the first thing the driver does is size up your luggage. If you've got a lot of it, then you must be rich and fair game; he multiplies the normal charge by the number of your bags."

  "So you tell him firmly you won't pay it."

  "And sit there in the rain? No, if you have just the baggage you can carry, as we will have, you walk off and look for another taximetro. He follows after you and offers you the right price."

  "Robert A., if you think I'm going to show myself to people all over the world in clothes that came out of one bag-and look it-think again. You like to see me nicely dressed. The very first remark you ever made to me was, 'Your slip is showing.' "

  "You can be nicely dressed with just two bags. Pan-American puts out a list that shows you just how to do it."

  "Written by the same chap who tells how to make tasty meals out of left-over scraps, I'll bet."

  "It isn't like dressing here at home. You're not going to be seen by the same people each day, so each outfit is as smart as the first time you wore it."

  "So? We are going to be in that Dutch ship for six weeks. Do you want me to wear the same black dinner dress every evening for forty-two days, not forgetting the Captain's Dinner?"

  I shifted tactically. "Another thing, if you have a lot of luggage, it takes forever to get through customs."

  "Why? It can't take long to mark a chalk mark. I've seen them in New York."

  "Honey, do you know what that chalk mark means?"

  "Should I know?"

  "It means that the customs officer has unpacked everything in it, searched it, and passed it. You have a lot of stuff, tightly packed, and it takes him forever to paw through it."

  "Paw through my clothes?"

  "Of course. That's what he's there for, to search the stuff."

  "But that's silly. Where did you get that idea? When Aunt Lou got back from Europe she just handed the man a list of what she had bought outside the country; he took it and made some chalk marks. It took about thirty seconds."

  I nodded. "So it did. She had declared a reasonable amount, she had her list made out in advance, and she didn't smell like a smuggler to him. So he passed her. They can't do a skin search on everybody and we are granted such liberal free allowances that most people don't try to smuggle. But if he had been suspicious-well, they are quite capable of taking you to a private room, stripping you down and going through your bags with knife blades and probes. When it comes to dope or jewels they even go after the body cavities-and I do mean all of them."

  Ticky slapped the table. "That settles it! I'm not going."

  "Slow down. Level off and get your flaps down or you'll overshoot the field. That sort of thing happens only when the customs authorities have received a tip from their informers abroad that a particular person is going to attempt to smuggle-and they rarely make a mistake. If a foreign customs officer tried it on us, I'd yell for the American consul so loud that they would hear it in Washington. But they won't. Customs officers aren't fools. What they will do is to search our baggage. Most other countries have much stricter import and tariff regulations than we have-so they search everything that comes in. But nobody is going to lay hands on my redhead, don't you worry."

  "And they aren't going to go pawing through my clean underwear either. I won't stand for it."

  The discussion continued without reaching a conclusion. Ticky did not insist again that she was not going, but she never gave in to the idea that a strange man should be allowed to handle her clothes. Once she suggested that she could carry along white gloves and tell the inspector to put them on before he touched her things. I was tickled by the picture of Ticky holding them up and saying, "One moment, Señor, before you commence-" But I was scared by it, too. She was quite capable of doing it-and what a proud Latin official would do when he finally understood that the norteamericana señora was suggesting that his hands were too dirty to touch her possessions I did not like to think about.

  He would not touch Ticky. Latins are much too gallant for that, no matter what the provocation. But I enjoyed no such immunity; I would wind up in the calabozo.

  What Ticky would do then I did not even dare guess. It would be something like the behavior of a lioness deprived of her young and it would not even have a speaking acquaintance with the amenities of international law.

  Maybe we really should stay home.

  The question of how much we should take with us got lost in the muddle. I made feeble protests from time to time but the number of evening dresses and sports clothes and accessories grew. Then she started in on me and I got slacks and tropical suits in these new materials that can be washed, so it says on the label, and do not require pressing. This seemed sensible so I shut up. Then a new white evening jacket. Then a stack of sports shirts for shipboard wear. I quit fighting and decided to enjoy the lovely new wardrobe instead.

  There were ten pieces of luggage when the day arrived, all packed to bursting. It took two trips to get them to the station.

  II

  South to the Southern Cross

  SANTIAGO, CHILE-Manuscript found in an Old Pisco Bottle: "Is anybody listening? Is there anybody there at all? I am stranded on the fourteenth floor of the Hotel Carrera and I seem to be about to fall out of touch with the rest of the world entirely. I can't sleep properly. Almost every twenty-four hours I wake up at least once and have to struggle up two flights or pisos to the piscina on thee rrroof and sip a pisco sour while I watch the seÑoritas sunning themselves and swimming in the piscina. Then I crawl back down and fall again into the mañana coma.

  "Orion is upside down and people eat dinner in the middle of the night and a simple request for drinking water requires endless protocol and much waiting. But all forms of alcoholic beverages are readily available everywhere and the chambermaids whisk busily in and out of thee bath while I am bathing, cooing gently at each other like turtle doves (rootly-boo, rootly-boo!). The hired help work in committees, talking and using their hands and very cheerful, but not necessarily accomplishing anything. The same hired help is evident at all times and everywhere. If Ticky and I close the roof garden at four, the same patient waiter with the Indian ancestry and total lack of English offers us breakfast in the grisly light of noon. They must hang them on hooks.

  "Can you hear me? Can you speak English? The guidebook says that almost everybody here can speak it but the guidebook is wrong. I am beginning to feel unreal. I-"

  The above is roughly the effect on a couple of gringos of first exposure to the druglike, almost unbearable sweetness of our Latin American neighbors. We visited seven such countries; I state the simple truth when I say that not once did we hear a harsh word, never were we scowled at, no one was ever too tired or too busy to be patient and kind to us. Nor is it fair to attribute this continent-wide courtesy to the Yankee Dollar; most of these encounters had nothing at all to do with money.

  It seemed to me to be the finest outward expression of true individualism: each man respected himself; this inner respect, his awareness of himself as a unique person, required him to extend to every other human being everywhere and of any economic station a dignified courtesy which recognized tacitly the unique worth of both his fellow human and himself.

  My analysis may be wrong, but the outward fact remains. This account reports what I have seen, with my opinions tossed in to fill up some of the white space. I have never understood how globe-trotting columnists can take a quick look at a country and come up with all the answers to all proble
ms, economic, political, and social. I can't possibly do so because I don't know enough history, geography, psychology, economics, science, anthropology, or whatever, nor can I keep up with the endless spate of new facts. Even my own home town confuses me; every time I think I have reached the "facts" I find another layer underneath, like peeling an onion. How can I do justice to a country, a continent, a globe?

  Nevertheless, it does not take a biochemist to detect a rotten egg in an omelet. Some things that are right, others that are wrong, about a country can be seen even from a tour car. When you see a 65-year-old woman staggering along under a load that would cause an American stevedore to fetch a fork truck it does not require a Guggenheim grant to determine that something is crumby about the way that country is run. I shall set down my opinions whether they constitute complete answers or not.

  We left Colorado Springs on 12 November by train, after having shipped half of the ten suitcases by express in order that we might go by air, only to receive a telegram immediately after shipping telling us that S.S. Gulf Shipper would be three days late in sailing-a routine mix-up in traveling. So we left in the middle of the night from a bitter cold railroad platform instead of in bright daylight in the gala atmosphere of an airport. But a biggish crowd of our friends came down to see us off anyhow, the Knowleses, the Herzbergers, Eileen Seigh Honnen, the staff of the World-Wide Agency, three assorted young ladies whose names I did not catch, and a Free Press photographer came down to see us off, and Bob Wirt of World-Wide presented Ticky with green orchids and the Nelsons and Mrs. Feyock gave us candy (which we ate to the equator). We had our pictures taken on the steps, then waited through a long anticlimax for the train to pull out late.

  We were off! Into the Wild Blue Yonder, enduring the hardships of a Pullman drawing room. Actually, I had forgotten just how dismal a way to travel a train is. Like most Americans I have learned to go everywhere in my own car (needs a tune-up and one new tire, but reliable) or, if really in a hurry, by air. This is not counting a mule descent into the Grand Canyon, or a week's pack trip by horse of which the less said the better. Now a Pullman drawing room is luxury travel and it costs a bit more than air travel. It is noisy, dirty, uncomfortable, monotonous and slow, and sleep is almost out of the question. The engineer employs a spy to make sure that he uncouples the diner just as the razor reaches the point of my chin and the water tastes of old iron.