The Penguin Lessons

by Tom Michell

  I had left him in the bath, and on my return to the bathroom he ran up and down in the tub, flapping his wings. His little eyes were sparkling.

  You’ve been a long time! they said. I was wondering what had happened to you. What have you been doing?

  Had he been a dog, he would have been wagging his tail, and I was convinced he was pleased to see me.

  I opened the tin of sardines with the attached key and tried offering him pieces of fish. His reaction was disdainful. I tried putting little bits on his beak, but he vehemently shook them off. When I offered him more he tucked his beak down onto his chest and his multiple eyelids closed, then opened again to look at me.

  “Here, I’ve brought you some sardines for your tea,” I said.

  Yuck, yuck, yuck! Take it away! What is that filth?

  I gave up, dried him off with the paper towels, and set about making him waterproof again by rubbing butter and olive oil into his feathers until he resembled a greased-up swimmer. Once I was satisfied he was saturated with all the waterproofing materials available to me, I put the penguin in a shopping bag to hide him from the harridan thinly disguised as a concierge. Together we quietly headed back out to the sea.

  Only the coast road separated the Bellamys’ apartment from the Atlantic. The beach here was pleasantly sandy with rocky outcrops; there was no sign of the oil spill, nor of the ill-fated penguins that had blanketed the shore stretching away to the northeast of the point.

  Crossing the road rapidly, I walked down to the water’s edge, placed him on the wet sand, and stepped back to watch. I expected him to rush into the sea and swim away, happy to be free once more. But he didn’t. He walked straight back to my side. Worse still, he was looking at my face, directly into my eyes even, and appeared to be talking to me.

  Why are you trying to send me back to that deadly oily ocean so soon after we’ve met and become friends?

  “Go on,” I said, “go and find your fellow penguins. You can’t come with me!”

  But instead he just stood at my feet, looking at me pathetically.

  I can’t go back! I can’t swim now you’ve washed out my waterproofing.

  Oh, hell! This was not going according to plan, not at all! I picked him up and carried him out onto the rocks.

  “You can’t come with me,” I explained patiently. “I’m going back to Argentina tomorrow. I have to work on Monday. You just can’t come with me. You’ve got to swim off now.”

  A slight swell coming in from the Atlantic was making the water rise and fall by a couple of feet. I waited for a trough, placed him on the rocks, and skipped back onto a higher point. Within seconds the next wave came in and he disappeared from view. I waited, straining my eyes in an attempt to catch sight of him swimming off through the water. But after a few moments the sea receded again and he was gone. I must have missed him amid the reflections from the surface.

  “Goodbye, little bird,” I said. “Good luck. Henceforth may your path be untrammeled and untroubled!” But as I turned to go, there again, struggling out of the water, was a bedraggled penguin. He must have swum round in a circle and failed to find his way out into the open sea. I would just have to try again and place him further out, at the end of the rocks, where his way would be clear.

  I studied the rocks that could be seen above the water and the frequency of the waves as they came in. The rise and fall of the waves had a period of several seconds between crests. Confident I could get further out to sea, I picked the bird up and waited. Split-second timing was essential.

  It was already getting dark, and the sea was very cold. I set off across the rocks as the water fell. Counting seconds in my mind, I placed the penguin at the furthest point I thought I could reach and started back. Before I had got halfway, however, I saw I was going to get wet feet. As my stepping-stones disappeared under the foam I missed my footing and found myself stumbling up to my knees in freezing water. “Hell!” I gasped as a cold sea wave surged around me, soaking me to the waist. Struggling on, I made my way to the beach, but not before I slipped again, plunging my arm into the sea up to my shoulder in order to save myself from total immersion and skinning my palm in the process.

  “Typical! When will you learn to leave well enough alone?” I asked myself.

  I stood on the beach feeling the chill as the wind rose and caused my wet clothes to flap. I looked down at my soaking shoes, my jeans sticking to my legs. I felt the arm of my jacket cling to me as the water drained down my sleeve, streaming from the cuff, and I watched as it cascaded onto the sand below. That was when I became conscious of a pair of feet standing next to mine.

  I raised my eyes and realized I was being studied in my discomfort.

  Water’s cold, isn’t it?

  “Look! I’m soaking wet, thanks to you!” I said to the penguin, who was now standing beside me, looking me up and down.

  And your waterproofing doesn’t work, either, does it? he implied.

  I demanded that he get back to his own kind and, walking rapidly back up the beach with water squirting from my shoes, hoped sincerely that the concierge would still be away. Preventing visitors from trailing seaweed and sand through the building was exactly what she was paid to do.

  The retaining wall at the edge of the road was about three feet above the beach, and although there were no steps at that point, an outcrop of rocks provided me with a convenient exit.

  What exactly did I feel as I looked back and discovered that the bird was now running up the beach after me? I was too wet and cold and the salt water was stinging the cuts on my hand too much for me to feel pleased by the persistence of the penguin. However, the sea wall was too high for him to scale, so I was sure that once he understood he couldn’t follow me, he’d have no option but to find his own way back to the sea. I would have to force myself to adopt the impartiality of wildlife photographers and resist interfering further—there was simply nothing more I could do for him.

  Pausing only to allow a car to pass, I crossed the road and turned toward my apartment block. I glanced back. There on the opposite side was a penguin scaling the rocks and walking toward me.

  “Stop!” I yelled, at both the penguin and a speeding van as it hurtled down the road toward us, but the driver didn’t hear me or see the penguin. I dreaded a bump as it passed. None came. Once the vehicle had gone by, there was the bird, walking across the road. Without wasting another second I rushed over and picked him up. He was soaking wet and felt very cold.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I asked.

  I was reprimanded by that nagging voice in my head again: I told you seabirds can’t survive in the water if you wash them with detergent! Why did it sound so like my mother? Carefully I put him into the bag, folded the top over, and, holding him against my chest for warmth, walked through the glass doors into the building.

  “Oh! Señor, whatever has happened to you? Are you all right?” asked the concierge, who seemed genuinely concerned as she came out from behind her desk, looking at my wet clothes and the blood dripping to the floor from my hand.

  “I’m afraid I slipped by the sea and fell in. I’m fine, really, no bones broken. I just need to have a hot shower before I catch my death of cold.”

  “Did you fall from the rocks? They are slippery. Are you sure you didn’t hurt yourself badly?”

  “No, I’m fine, thank you, really! Absolutely fine. I just need to change,” I said as I maneuvered around her. My shoes squelched and left sandy puddles where I stepped. I was anxious to get away quickly before she came fussing around me and discovered the penguin. “Oh, I’m sorry about the mess! I’ll clean it all up just as soon as I’ve changed.” Without waiting for a reply, I rushed up the stairs.

  “Leave it to me, señor,” she called after me. “You go and have a hot shower!” Of course, it was a different concierge on duty. Perhaps not all the Fates were against me.

  —

  Back in the flat, I returned the penguin to the bath and dried him off on
ce again with paper towels, took a quick shower, and put my things on the radiators to dry. Then I busied myself trying to remove any shred of evidence that might betray the fact that I had allowed a penguin into the Bellamys’ bathroom, a task that took just as long as the cleaning of the bird. When all was done I checked my packing and the hydrofoil reservation, then began to think about dinner. I’d eaten everything in the fridge but the apple and the penguin’s sardines, neither of which seemed adequate for the last night of my holiday. I had planned to eat out, but that was before I had a penguin to look after. Making sure he was thoroughly dry, I returned the bird to the bath, for there was nothing more I could do for him, and decided it would be safe to go out for dinner.

  I was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I would have to try to take him back to Argentina with me. My timetable was too tight to allow me to look for a zoo in Montevideo and deposit him there, and besides, if I took him to the zoo in Buenos Aires I’d be able to see him from time to time. Relieved that I had hit upon a sensible solution to the problem, I set out with my mind at ease, a book under my arm.

  There was an atmospheric little restaurant a few hundred yards from the flat, and I decided to go there for my last meal in Uruguay. I ordered some olives to be followed by the usual steak and chips with salad, and a bottle of my favorite Argentine Malbec to wash it all down.

  It was still early, and with no other diners to talk to I finally relaxed and opened my book. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a very popular novella in the early 1970s and I had been reading the Spanish edition, Juan Salvador Gaviota. But despite my best efforts, I found I could not focus my attention on seagulls at all. I was thinking about a certain penguin in a bath. In all probability he would be dead when I got back. It was a certainty, I thought. The wretched creature must have swallowed significant quantities of oil and would soon die of poisoning. It was inevitable. It just wasn’t possible that only one penguin should be able to live through the toxins and trauma that had killed every other bird on that beach. He would be dead in the bath when I got back, I concluded, and all I had done was make his final hours more miserable. I kept looking at the book, but the words just danced on the page in front of me: Juan Salvador, Juan Salvador…

  All of a sudden I found I was hoping against hope that the penguin would survive, because, as of that instant, he had a name and his name was Juan Salvador Pingüino and with his name came a surge of hope and the beginning of a bond that would last a lifetime. That was the moment at which he became my penguin, and whatever the future held, we’d face it together.

  I ate my meal with undue haste, settled the bill, and raced back to the flat, anticipating the worst. But on opening the front door I knew all was well because I could hear him running up and down in the bath and flapping his wings in welcome. As I entered the bathroom he looked at me in his inimitable way.

  I’m so glad you’re back! You’ve been away an awfully long time, he seemed to be saying, and I found I was smiling at him, or, rather more precisely, I was grinning from ear to ear, relief flooding through me.

  “Yes, Juan Salvador, I’m back, and I’m so glad to see you looking so well!”

  “Yes, Juan Salvador, I’m back, and I’m so glad to see you looking so well!”

  I went to bed that night trying to devise a plan for getting a penguin into Argentina without being stopped. I was going to rely on my understanding of the national psyche of the country, of which I had acquired considerable knowledge, even though I had been living in Argentina for just six months. After only my first week living in Quilmes, a suburb of Buenos Aires, I’d begun to consider myself an expert on the subject, and I owed much of that knowledge to my new colleague, a history teacher by the name of Euan McCree.

  St. George’s College is a boarding school modeled on English public schools, with its original buildings constructed in a splendid colonial style, and in some ways it had got stuck in the 1920s. It had been founded in 1898 by one Canon Stevenson for the education of the children of the British who lived and worked in Argentina, principally involved in ranching or in building railways and refrigerated packing stations, and for whom the cost in both time and money to educate their children in England was prohibitive. But by the 1970s, its clientele had changed. Although many of its pupils were still of British extraction (in many cases fathers and grandfathers had attended the college), they were by then second- or third-generation Argentine and no longer considered England home. The majority, however, came from Argentine families of Hispanic descent.

  St. George’s is the only boarding school in Argentina that is a member of the Headmasters’ Conference (HMC). As such, it is extremely exclusive and expensive, and at that time it considered itself the very pinnacle of secondary education in South America, attracting pupils from most of the other countries on that continent. Most lessons were given in Spanish, the Argentine national curriculum was followed, and pupils were taught by locally qualified staff, which was appropriate for students who expected to continue their education and make their living in that country. Only some 20 percent followed an exclusively English curriculum of O and A levels, and a number of British staff were engaged to teach those subjects and maintain the standard of spoken English expected by fee-paying parents.

  I had met Euan on my journey to Argentina from England. We were the two new members of staff that year. About five years my senior, he was six foot three, with unruly dark brown hair and a beard that contrasted with his fair skin. In fact, he was the spitting image of Captain Haddock of Tintin fame, but looks were where the likeness ended. Euan possessed one of the most formidable intellects I have ever encountered. His knowledge on almost every topic was simply encyclopedic. This appeared more remarkable because he had been brought up in the very toughest part of Belfast, Northern Ireland (or Ulster, as he referred to it). His father had been a shop steward in the Harland and Wolff shipyards. His accent was the broadest imaginable, and on first meeting he was very difficult for an Englishman to understand because of his dialect.

  Euan had an astounding, preternatural memory and could quote great chunks of poetry or literature after a single reading. He was never other than intense. He wanted to discuss Nietzsche at breakfast, and if one wasn’t very vigilant in responding, it was quite possible to be wrong-footed and trapped into appearing sympathetic to some wholly abhorrent position such as compulsory euthanasia. Eventually I found it better simply to pretend to be totally absorbed in something utterly compelling in the newspapers, something that required my undivided attention, like the report of shipping movements in the Port of Buenos Aires. But all that I discovered on better acquaintance.

  So it was during our first days living in Argentina, as our confidence slowly increased, that we decided we needed to broaden our knowledge further by visiting the center of Buenos Aires to sample some of the nightlife. Accordingly, we had taken the train from Quilmes station to the city center terminal at Constitución, then the subte (the underground; an abbreviation of subterráneo) to July 9 Avenue, the widest city road in the world. Branching off that thoroughfare are streets with shops, theaters, cinemas, restaurants, and bars in untold numbers. The throb of music and life permeated the atmosphere that balmy February evening and promised all the excitement that young travelers were looking for.

  We sampled a small beer or two, in three or possibly four bars, before treating ourselves to a steak in a restaurant. After that, as the sky was getting dark, we tried yet another bar that looked popular. Its doors were open, for the evening was warm, and tango music was wafting out over the heads of the crowd that was spilling onto the street. Everywhere was the sound of good-humored people enjoying the evening. (In other words, it was indistinguishable from all the other bars in Buenos Aires.)

  We ordered Quilmes beer out of a newfound loyalty to the large local brewery. Although the place was crowded, there was some space in the dark interior, and we headed for two chairs at the corner of a table where about six young men were already installed.


  Our drinks were brought to us in the usual way. Two bottles of beer with glasses atop were delivered, together with a mixture of inexpensive nibbles—mostly pickled gherkins—in two ramekins. Our bill was folded in half and placed under one of these. It was customary for these bills to accumulate throughout the evening and to be settled immediately prior to departure.

  We studied the gathered company. All ages and levels of society seemed to be present, judging by the smart city suits and the workman’s overalls.

  We talked quietly about our success so far. We had negotiated the railways and the underground, eaten a delicious dinner, and were now comfortably mellow. Another beer or two would undoubtedly help us decide what to do next.

  Before long one of the chaps at the table turned and said, “Hello.” This friendly gesture was the welcome opening to a faltering conversation. My Spanish was decidedly limited at that stage, and Euan had none at all. Like people the world over, our new acquaintances had a smattering of English, and so we communicated haltingly.

  “Yes, it is our first time in Buenos Aires. Yes, we think it is a very beautiful city. No, we aren’t tourists; we are here to work but have only just arrived.”

  They introduced themselves, Carlos, Raúl, Andrés, and so on. We reciprocated, and so the flow of conversation continued.

  “Yes, we think there are lots of beautiful girls here. No, we haven’t seen any football yet, but will soon; there’s a good club in Quilmes, we understand. Yes, we know that Argentina will be hosting the World Cup in 1978.”

  I called the waiter over and ordered two more beers.

  “No, we are most definitely not Yankee gringos! We come from Britain.”

  “Ah, okay, I understan’…you are Eenglish, yes? You leeve in Londres, yes?” said Carlos.

  “Ach na! Ah’m n’ English! Ah’m frame Oolsta,” protested Euan.