Life's a Scream

by Ingrid Pitt

  The school term ended in England and Steffanie caught the first flight to Buenos Aires. I went to meet her at the airport with warnings from Tone ringing in my ears not to embarrass her by shouting ‘Baby, Baby . . . !’ as was my wont. So I played it fashionably cool and watched as Steffka, still in her British fur-lined anorak, long scarf and woolly hat, came out of the aeroplane, looked around, decided I wasn’t there and went back in. I didn’t know what to do, but a few moments later she emerged with a stewardess and they walked across the tarmac and into Immigration. I dashed downstairs, cursing myself for having heeded Tonio’s advice, threw open the door of the Custom’s shed and stormed in. Steffka was standing by one of the tables, the contents of her bag strewn around. I marched in, scooped everything into the case, picked it up with one hand and grabbed my child with the other. The Custom’s officers looked on, stunned, but didn’t make a move to stop me. Steffi told me later that it was like a scene from a James Bond movie. When I’d crashed through the door in my rather skimpy waistcoat and eye-wateringly tight jeans the sun had been behind me and even she had felt as if the SAS had arrived. We took her straight down to the Costa Nera, the embankment on the Rio de la Plata that boasted hundreds of tiny asado stalls. It was heaven to have her there with us. I felt whole and ready to take on whatever was thrown at me: Perina, Olivera, de Benedetti – they would all bend to my will and do exactly what I wanted.

  When copies of my films arrived, Isabel Perón asked if we would come to the presidential residence for lunch and a viewing. With uninspiring guests we scoffed an uninteresting meal, then went to the projection room. I had brought Countess Dracula, The House that Dripped Blood and The Vampire Lovers. I had wanted to bring The Wicker Man but even then it wasn’t easy to come by. We watched Countess Dracula and I felt everyone was bored sockless, so at the end of the film, before anyone had a chance to upstage me, I yawned and declared I had to be off. Isabel suggested one for the road and we drifted back to the drawing-room. When the drinks were served she drew me to one side and said she wanted to show me something before I left.

  She led me down into the cellar, which was lit by a sort of ceramic chest of candles and an incongruously bare 40-watt bulb. The ceiling was high and plastered, and supported by half a dozen or so brick pillars with metal braces in between. The floor was stone-flagged and scrupulously clean. It was the centrepiece of the room, however, that held my gaze and sent a shiver down my spine. I realised that I was looking at the sarcophagus of the embalmed Eva Duarte de Perón.

  Isabel led me closer. ‘I’m looking after her while we sort out where her final resting place will be,’ she said softly. ‘She speaks to me.’ When Isabel had run for the office of vice-president all her publicity had been along the lines that she was the reincarnation of Evita. She pointed to a plain plastic kitchen chair beside the coffin. ‘I sit here for a while every day,’ she explained. ‘Why don’t you sit there. I’m sure she’ll talk to you.’

  I was not at all keen but Isabel seemed so happy at the thought of my spending time with her soul mate that I let her talk me into it. After all, she was the President of the Republic.

  ‘I’ll just say goodbye to the others,’ she said brightly. ‘You come up whenever you like.’

  I like now, I thought but, coward that I am, I sat and watched as Isabel disappeared up the stairs and all fell still.

  I slowly went close to the sarcophagus and stared through the glass top at Evita’s mummified face. It looked like wax at first and she seemed so small, like a child. How incredible it was that this was once the magical Eva Perón. I sat on the little chair in that cold room and looked at her, wishing I had known her. I imagined I could hear the adoring crowds shouting her name: ‘Evita! Evita! Evita!’ I thought of the day her body arrived in Madrid and Perón sat and sobbed whilst Isabel washed and repaired her torn, dusty white frock, gently cleaned her face and combed her hair. It was eerie sitting there and the longer I stared at Evita’s face the more I thought she’d open her eyes. I was getting morbid.

  Thoughts of death were depressing. I wanted to get away. I laid my hand on the glass top of the sarcophagos and said farewell to the embalmed Evita, then found my way up to where the stiffs were at least warm.

  Tonio’s racing friend Gaston Perkins invited us to stay at his estancia for a week. We took the lunch-time train from Buenos Aires and arrived at nightfall in a tiny station called Perkins in the middle of nowhere. A lone, massive gaucho, dressed in typical gaucho gear – bombachas, rastra, shirt and sombrero – waited for us with a clapped-out Dodge pick-up. He introduced himself as Ramirez, the foreman at the Perkins estancia, ‘La Corona’. Steffanie and I stared at the sea of stars above, the Southern Cross that I’d dreamed of seeing since scrawny girlhood when I’d sat listening to my father describe the night skies. We seemed to drive for miles, until finally we reached the Victorian house, covered with vines, and seemingly straight from a horror film. As the car stopped, everyone came out of the house to welcome us.

  A big asado had been arranged. We sat under the stars and ate massive chunks of beef and swilled back the magnificent Mendoza wine. Gaston told us that over the next two days wild horses were to be brought in for breaking and, relaxed by the wine and company, I began to wax lyrical about Tone’s horseback skills with the result that he was invited to join the ritual. Tonio tried to chicken out, but he didn’t have a chance.

  The next morning when Tonio had to leave at daybreak I tried to feel sorry for him but I had such a headache from the wine that I couldn’t quite manage it. The men drove the wild horses to a massive corral and evaluated them to see which were suitable for breaking. Tone was still trying to excuse himself from anything to do with the hard work that was to come the next day. When I eventually surfaced and asked him why he was so reluctant, he told me he had seen the way gauchos broke horses and it hurt the breaker more than the horse. I wasn’t listening to any of that. I’d told everyone he was the greatest horseman since Genghis Khan and I wasn’t backing down.

  The next morning the locals started gathering early. Several people had flown in from other estancias and everyone was talking about El Inglés who was going to break some of the horses. I smiled brightly and acted as if it was something Tonio did every day. Tone, looking pale, was evidently still searching for a way out.

  The day started with a bit of lassoing, which differed from the lassoing one sees in cowboy films. Instead of rushing around with a lariat and dropping it over the berserk beast’s head, the gauchos sneakily throw it under the horse’s feet, snap it tight and when the horse falls, leap on it and truss it up. Around midday they got around to the breaking. Tonio watched what was going on and it didn’t make him any more relaxed. Each horse, frenzied, bucking, kicking and rearing, was led to a post in the middle of a large paddock. A bridle was put on its head and it was forced to lie down on its side with its nose clamped against the pole. A sack was put over its head and the rider carefully got into place. As soon as he felt ready for the fray he nodded, one of the gauchos pulled off the hood and let the frightened animal loose. It immediately went bananas. The gaucho hung on grimly until he was dumped or managed to get to safety on one of the other horses.

  At last it came to Tonio’s turn. He was looking decidedly peaky but I was still as brave as ever and jollied him along. Once he was in the paddock he perked up. He’d clearly decided that if he was going to die he might as well look as if he were enjoying it. Everybody was interested. After all, it’s not every day you get the chance to see a foreigner break a bone or two.

  Tone eased himself on to the horse and sat there, still trying to think of a good excuse to be somewhere else. Then he made the mistake of looking at the gaucho holding the horse’s head. He took it as a signal and let go. The beast’s first movement was vertical, its second horizontal. Tonio stayed with the vertical; he stayed with the horizontal. I was proud. Then the horse took off, humping and twisting. A couple of times it looked as if Tonio was off but an injudicious l
urch of his mount kept him on board. A couple of riders moved in to help him off but at the last moment the animal did a horizontal and a vertical move together, Tonio went up and when he came down his ride had departed. He lay on the ground for a few seconds. I thought he was hurt but he was just offering up thanks for his survival. Everyone was very complimentary and old Ramirez made a big thing of presenting Tonio with the black, red-tasselled beret of the dorminadores – the horse breakers. Tonio said they were teasing but I prefer to think he earned it.

  It was a sad day when we had to leave Perkins but we returned again and again and it became like a second home to us.

  We decided to sign with de Benedetti and Perina. Perina convinced us that El Ultimo Enemigo should be shot in Uruguay and wanted us to go there to meet the financiers and do a recce. The financiers of El Pais newspaper confirmed de Benedetti’s six films and a TV series but the recce wasn’t too successful. Though Perina insisted that the sort of mountains we wanted for our major locations existed, we were a bit put off by the opening line in the official guide book which stated categorically that ‘there are no mountains in Uruguay’.

  Back in Buenos Aires, a news conference was called at the splendidly baroque Circulo Italiano. De Benedetti laid on a feast and then we all gave our two pennyworth to the press, posed for photographs and went home. To my relief, Olivera didn’t seem at all put out. It looked as if at last I had hit that movie Klondike that producers dream about but which is always just out of reach.

  We had hardly drawn breath after the press conference when news came in that President Isabel Perón had been arrested. No sooner had our good luck kicked in, it seemed, than it was to run dry again. Luis Sojit advised us to get out of the country: Argentina was heading for a revolution. Tonio rang Juan Manuel Fangio and asked what we should do. He didn’t think we were in too much trouble but he advised us to take a vacation. We should either go back to London or skip across the Rio de la Plata into Uruguay with everyone else and see what happened. Tonio agreed that it made sense and Fangio sent a car to take us to the airport. The trip was uneventful but occasionally frightening. Everywhere there were road blocks and lorry-loads of soldiers, who pointed their rifles at us and made firing motions, which they clearly thought hilarious.

  At the airport there was a concentration of heavily armed troops, but they didn’t seem interested in what was going on. People were packed into the departure lounge like penguins on the last available iceberg. A state of emergency had been declared and for the foreseeable future no international flights were being allowed in or out. Tonio dumped Steffanie and me in a corner and went off to see what the chances were of hiring a private plane. He had his pilot’s licence with him and reasoned that there might be someone needing a pilot to get his plane out. We were too late for that, but he tried the General Aviation Flight Movements office and struck lucky. There was a Fokker just in from Brazilia and about to leave for Montevideo with a load of freight. Tonio tackled the pilot, flashed his pilot’s licence and appealed to the bloke’s sense of aviational fraternity. At last the man agreed. Tonio said he would pick up his baggage and meet him on the tarmac. He carefully avoided saying that Steffanie and I were part of it. The pilot was sitting at the controls, ready to leap across the water to the safety of Uruguay when Tonio wrenched open the door, threw in our cases, then pushed us in after them. For a moment it looked as if we were going to have an argument but I think the pilot remembered the armed men, idle and looking for something to do, and decided he was going to get away more quickly by biting the bullet. I was never happier to leave the ground.

  Twenty-Nine

  We stayed in Uruguay, eating into our reserves, for about two months. With us sitting on their doorstep, virtual refugees, our backers seemed less keen to commit themselves. Orlando de Benedetti, a staunch Perónista, had had his wings clipped by the new military government and was lying low in Venezuela. The financiers claimed that it was de Benedetti’s judgement they were backing and without him the deal was off.

  We decided that Tonio should return to London and see if he could raise some finance there, perhaps by mortgaging the house. We also decided that Steffka had to go back. She had already missed a term of school and it was unfair to keep her hanging around while we sorted ourselves out. I wept for days after they had gone and during the three desperately lonely weeks of Tone’s absence.

  Tonio ran around Britain trying to raise money and interest in our projects. There was lots of interest but no money or commitment. He put in motion the paperwork for getting a mortgage on the house but even that was going to take weeks. Things were not looking good. To take his mind off the bad news and in the hope that someone might want a representative in Uruguay he decided to go to a motor race at Brands Hatch. He was walking through the paddock when he heard his name called. It was a friend from the flying club, Robin Ellis, and they went off to the bar for a drink.

  At that time Robin was a rich young man with all a rich young man’s toys: a Ferrari Boxer, a Kawasaki motor bike and an international hobby racing model cars that cost him a packet. Tonio told him what we were doing in South America and Robin thought for a bit, then asked how much we needed. He thought some more and made a counter offer to pick up our living expenses while he sussed out whether he wanted to commit himself further. Tonio almost snatched his hand off accepting. Robin also warned him that he was negotiating a deal with a huge construction firm that might take up a lot of his time. The deal was with Bairstow Eves. That sounded good. John Bairstow had served with Tonio in the Navy as snotties and they had been friends for years. Tone had joined the Merchant Service to avoid conscription, a common ploy in those days. However, his idea of sailing the oceans of the world was strictly limited to Amyas Leigh and Westward Ho!, and he hated it. So he left the Navy and joined the RAF.

  A week later Tonio turned up with Robin in Montevideo. While he had been away I had talked on the telephone with Hector Olivera. Somehow Hector had bridged the political chasm and come out ahead. He said he was ready to start shooting a film with us. I asked him about our chances of survival and he assured me that the new government was focused on weeding out local dissidents, not international investors. So we decided to go back to BA.

  Our move back was well timed. Business, especially the entertainment industry, was beginning to pick up. The only drawback was that the military now occupied all significant positions. The film industry was given an admiral to whom scripts had to be submitted for approval. While Hector was doing that de Benedetti and Perina came back on the scene. Both companies wanted to make El Ultimo Enemigo. We massaged them along, hoping one of them would come up with the goods. With Perina, we decided to recommence the recce while waiting for our projects to be approved. Perina’s military buddies, through the governor of San Juan province, lent us a helicopter and we spent days zooming around the Andes looking for suitable locations. We saw mountain villages and incredible waterfalls, landscapes that were Martian and pockets of unbelievable fertility, but what we were looking for was a bridge like the one over the River Kwai. The governor said he knew just such a one. On the morrow he would send his car to take us there. Our party consisted of the producer, Emilio Perina, Juan Sires, the production manager, Gunter Jeanee, the director, Tonio, me and the driver. Robin had been scheduled to come with us but he had been recalled to Buenos Aires. There was some problem with his property deal and he had to see his lawyers urgently. It was a good thing, as it worked out, for Robin is six foot two and bony, and the car we were assigned was a small Renault. The driver assured us that we could all fit in and that anyway, we didn’t have far to go. Piled on top of each other we headed towards the Andes.

  The ‘not far’ turned out to be very far indeed. The desert road we bumped along ran out. Every few hundred yards we had to jump out of the vehicle and heave it out of a patch of soft sand. Tempers were getting frayed. All we could see was miles of featureless desert shimmering in the heat haze. None of us had thought to bring any water
and our bodies jammed into the car were creating a temperature that would have coddled a coconut.

  Again we hit a sandpit. I sat on the ground and gazed around, trying to imagine how I would look when some seasoned traveller stumbled across my whitening bones. The radiator was close to melting and it was clear we could not continue. Despite the fact that it was hardly likely that anyone would come along and steal the tyres, the idiotic driver insisted on staying with his machine. We decided to walk towards the mountains, where there was a railway line, in the hope that we might catch a train. Almost straight away one came along. We waved and the passengers waved back – and the train shimmered off into the heat haze.

  We stopped and looked around us. In one direction there was endless track. In the other, the same. It was a toss-up. Reasoning that the train had to have come from somewhere we decided to go north. I wanted to point out that it was also going somewhere but didn’t wish to seem unconstructive. We walked for hours. I couldn’t get the picture of my bleached bones out of my head. So far everyone had been philosophical and amazingly hopeful but the midday sun began to take its toll. Sires, a sprightly seventy-year-old, was – incredibly, in this land of leather – wearing plastic sandals and they were melting. Tonio offered to carry him on his back and Sires showed how far gone he was by letting him. After a while, however, Tonio had to put him down. He suggested Gunter took a turn but Gunter declined the invitation, arguing that we had no idea how far we had to go but however far it was we weren’t going to make it if we had to carry Sires. Tone ploughed on for another three or four hundred yards but by this time he was on the verge of collapse. With Sires’s permission, we found a cutting under the line, in the shade, and stowed him away so that we could find him later. The men suggested I stayed with him but Tonio wouldn’t allow it and I was relieved.