by Jerold Last
We left the hotel at about 4 PM to get a cab and visit the artisanal market, about three miles from the hotel. The large market is set up as a collective, with shopkeepers selling the work of one or more artists or craftsmen. The quality ranges from very good items hand made individually from wood (the best of which are made from madrone, a local hardwood) or wool, to mass-produced junk for the tourist trade (where cactus wood predominates). Black pottery is made locally from red clays that are blackened by a final firing over roasted car tires. The attitude in the shops is let the buyer beware. Prices in the artisanal market are too high for Salta, and bargaining is expected. This is a market for the tourists, not the local residents.
In the next shop we came to, you could actually watch the weaver at work on a loom. The wools came from a variety of sources, with llama and alpaca products from local flocks competing with acrylics and other synthetics. For the hobbyist, you could buy alpaca yarn by the kilogram at prices a fraction of what the same wool would cost in the USA. It seemed clear that it would be impossible to determine where Robert Foster had shopped when he visited the market, so we could check this destination off of our list of places to look for clues about the murder.
Before we left the market we decided to take a look at one of the seemingly more upscale shops directly across the street. We entered the shop, which was laid out with a cash register at the front behind which sat a well-dressed man in a suit and tie, presumably the manager. A large loom occupied most of a corner in the back of the shop. The loom itself was approximately the size of a five-foot cube. A young woman was operating the loom, weaving faster than I could follow the motions. A lovely shawl was almost completed. Stocks of sweaters, jackets, tote bags, rugs, and shawls lined the walls of the shop.
On a sudden impulse I pulled out our picture of Robert Foster and asked the manager whether he recognized him as a visitor to his shop.
“Yes”, he replied. “He came in here several weeks ago to ask about what it would cost to buy alpaca wool products here for import into the United States. He also asked a very curious question, which is why I remember him so well. He asked why they couldn’t just grow their own alpaca in California. I told him that there are alpaca being grown and bred in small numbers in Northern California, but only recently on a commercial scale and only alpacas imported from Peru. The Argentine alpaca makes a softer and stronger wool fiber than their Peruvian counterpart, so our wool is worth a lot more than alpaca wool from Peru or Bolivia. Argentina forbids the export of alpaca, and views the wild and domestic animals we have as a national treasure. The United States also has import restrictions on livestock from Argentina, I believe, because of concern about contagious diseases like foot and mouth disease in cattle.”
With dinner at 9 PM or later an afternoon snack seemed like a good idea. We found a nice looking restaurant after walking a few blocks that seemed a good place for coffee and a pastry. The assortment of pastries available all included dulce de leche, so were sweet. We both had the artisanal cookies, baked in a local bakery rather than a factory but still full of dulce de leche, with our coffee. The snack stretched out for half an hour while we discussed our progress on the case thus far.
Suzanne sipped coffee and nibbled on her second artisanal cookie. “It’s kind of amazing how much money someone could make importing and selling alpaca clothing in shops on Rodeo Drive. And dad was always looking for something he could make money importing. I wonder if he did anything to follow up on what he learned at the alpaca shop.”
I skipped my second cookie and focused on the coffee. “That’s an interesting idea, and maybe worth our checking out. But in the meantime you told me you liked mystery novels. Have you ever read Sherlock Holmes?”
She pondered over the question for a few seconds. “Of course I did, but a long time ago”.
“Do you remember the clue of the dog that didn’t bark in the night?”
“Vaguely. What has that to do with us here?”
I drank the last of my coffee. “We have a dog that didn’t bark to think about. Unless I missed something obvious, and I don’t think I did, we weren’t followed this afternoon. Why not, do you think?”
Suzanne thought for a moment. “Well, logically there could be three possible explanations. Either both of the bad guys are busy doing something else or there’s a new guy following us that we don’t recognize. Neither of those choices is particularly probable. I assume you’d have spotted someone following us even if you didn’t know him or her. So that leaves us with the most logical explanation, which is they don’t care where we go anymore. And if they don’t care where we go anymore, it’s because we’ve already been to the place that matters. That had to happen this morning for them to have called off the tails for this afternoon.”
I beamed at my client. “Very good! I guess I forgot for a moment that you’re smart enough to have a Ph.D. in a rigorous discipline like biochemistry and that you think logically like a scientist. You really don’t need me for detection or deduction. I think you just nailed it. So the key clue has to be Senor Rodriguez, which leads us to Cafayate and to something we need to find out about your father and drugs. That makes our next question, what should we do with this piece of insight?”
“I assume the most likely answer is we go to Cafayate,” she replied. “But that’s too obvious, so it’s probably not the right answer. What are you thinking?”
I paused a moment to get my thoughts organized, then leaned toward Suzanne. “I assume that they don’t want to kill us unless they think they have to. If you were killed so soon after your father it would make the police notice, and pretty much force them into a full investigation. I don’t think this gang wants that to happen. So, we have to convince them that we haven’t come to the conclusion you just came to if we want to remain relatively safe. The best way to do that is for us to get to Cafayate as a couple of tourists would, not as detectives. I think we need to spend a few days of our time being tourists in the Salta area before we go to Cafayate.
“How about our stopping off at the travel agency on the way to the hotel and booking a few tours like seeing Humahuaca and Pumamarca tomorrow with Cafayate some time during the weekend. We can plan on seeing Santa Rosa de Tastil when we get back to Salta over the weekend. Even if the two guys following us don’t want you to show up as a murder victim, I think we have to be very careful that we don’t have any tragic traffic accidents while we’re driving around in the mountains. The safest thing we can do is to be on a tourist bus or van where they’d have to kill a dozen or more innocent people to get at us and attract all of the police attention they want to avoid.”
Tastil Travel Agency in the plaza, across from our hotel, worked long hours. They opened at 9 AM and didn’t close until well after 9 PM. It was a 9-10 hour workday after you factored in the 2-4 PM siesta. We got there in plenty of time to talk to a travel agent and tell her our plans. She tried to sell us rides on the well-advertised local tourist attraction, the “Train to the Clouds”, a train ride up the Andes to some of the same locations as the bus tours. The difference was that “El Tren a los Nubes” cost US $125 per person and ran only one day a week, when it ran at all; it was notoriously unreliable. We politely declined the train and booked the bus tour for Humahuaca and Pumamarca for 7 AM the next day at a much more reasonable cost of $25 each, with pickup and delivery from and to the hotel’s front door.
There were no tours available to Santa Rosa de Tastil. The agent explained that it was a difficult trip and that the tourist interest was too limited to make regular tours profitable. She suggested that we rent a car for several days and drive ourselves to both Cafayate and Santa Rosa de Tastil. She supplied us with local maps and assured us that both trips were on highways that were well marked. It was just about impossible to get lost, because there was only one paved road between Salta and Cafayate and we could stay on it for the entire trip. A side trip to the large reservoir at Cabra Corral was well marked on the maps. The dam stores water from
all of the many rivers draining the mountainous Calchaqui Valley region. The roads had good signs to guide us if we wanted to go to the reservoir. The timing for the drive from Salta to Cafayate usually worked out so Cabra Corral was a good place, and also the only place, to stop for lunch.
The travel agent handed us a card and said, “Here is the business card for a car rental agency in the plaza. I would suggest that you let us make all of your arrangements. We will arrange things so you rent your car through the front desk at the hotel. That way you will get better service, a better car, and pay less for the rental.”
“Thank you,” I replied.
The interaction we had with the travel agent, where we got good advice and a half hour of friendly conversation, even while not buying their expensive tour, was typical of Salta. We were to find in the coming days that even including the various drug dealers we met, people from Salta were usually friendly, kind, and generous. Rosa the desk clerk at the hotel and Carlos the hotel manager, the travel agent, and the police Lieutenant were typical. They spent a lot of time helping us and talking to us because they preferred to do business with friends, and to do that required that we got to know each other first. When you introduced yourself to someone new you were greeted with direct eye contact, a warm smile, and for women a cheek to cheek kiss. You could go into any shop and not buy anything; you still got smiles and greetings.
A side effect of our decision to be tourists for a few days was that our sense of being under terrific time pressure to solve the crime disappeared. We could actually enjoy Salta as real tourists for the first time. We started by taking a walk around the square from the Tastil Agency to the hotel the longer way, covering about 90% of the total plaza. We stopped to look into the ornate old church directly across the street from the cabildo, with its elegant interior and its irritatingly loud bells that struck a wake-up chord and summoned the community to early mass on Sunday at 6 AM. We passed retail stores and restaurants as we walked on the third arm of the square. There was an entrance to a peatonal that led to a two-block long street of shops of every description at the corner of the third and fourth arms of the square. The peatonal was a scaled down version of Florida Street in BA. Pedestrians were welcome and no cars were allowed.
We stopped to look more closely at the cabildo on the fourth arm. Part of the cabildo turned out to be a colonial era museum. We went in to see what it had to tell us about what old Salta was like. While the original cabildo building dated back to 1582, it had been reconstructed many times, until the current version was built in 1783. The entire building is a rectangle built of adobe brick, surfaced with stucco, with interior patios and long corridors with rooms set up to demonstrate the life style of the Spanish colonial period. After we looked at the furniture in these rooms a few conclusions were obvious: The early colonists from Spain were very short by today’s standards and life was extremely Spartan. The furniture seemed to be designed for discomfort, not for cushions. And these chairs and tables were built for the wealthy families. Art on the walls invariably had either a religious or a military theme. Other than bibles, books were few and far between.
The rooms were dark and somber. Glass would have been hard to obtain and very expensive to use for construction, as it had to be imported from Spain, so there were few windows of any kind. We weren’t in the museum very long before we felt we had seen everything worth viewing, and slowly walked the remaining half a block back to the hotel.
Suzanne was obviously thinking about what we’d just seen. As museum collections go, it wasn’t much. The food for thought was a big what if? What if I’d lived here in those days? “How do you think you’d have enjoyed living back then?” she asked.
I didn’t have to think to long about an answer. I’d found the cabildo depressing. “I’d have hated it. I’m not religious to begin with, and that was required of everyone. The Spanish Inquisition came to the Americas right behind the explorers. I couldn’t have handled the rigid social and economic stratification of that society either. My best guess is, several hundred years ago I’d have been labor, not management. And on top of all that, my Spanish isn’t good enough. How about you?”
Suzanne nodded her agreement. “My Spanish is better than yours, so I could talk to them. But that would be just about all I could handle. I don’t think I buy into their view of ‘the woman’s place is in the home’---cooking, having babies, raising kids, and being a servant to one’s spouse. I enjoy being educated and free to live life the way I want to live it too much to settle for being chattel and living the severely restricted life style women were allowed in those days.”
We had a few hours to kill before we could think about dinner, and I was ready to think about a dinner that didn’t feature the entire cow as a main dish. Suzanne commented the night before that if the goal were to get atherosclerosis at the youngest age possible, she’d rather do it with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream than with grilled cow. And there weren’t any Ben and Jerry’s outlets in Salta.
After advice from Rosa we went to dinner at The New Time Café on the square, a 1-block walk from the hotel. The menu had a lot of selections, including main dishes other than beef. Suzanne had the roast chicken, which was large, free range, grilled over the same wood fire as the beef, moist, and very good. I had the lomo de cerdo (pork loin), also roasted over the wood fire and also very good. Both dinners were unadorned roasted meat, with no added seasonings other than salt. Apparently, chimichurri only came with beef. While we ate, we talked about the kind of unimportant stuff relative strangers discuss as they look for common interests and try to get to know each other better. We talked about ourselves on a completely superficial level.
“Do we like dogs or cats better?” Both of us were dog people.
“Would we prefer living in the city or country?” Both of us liked suburban or low density urban California.
Favorite type of movie, favorite style of music, what sports teams do you root for? I found Suzanne to be a perfect dinner companion---smart, a good listener as well as a good talker, and she seemed to be as interested in my answers as in telling me hers. Time passed quickly and pleasantly as we ate dinner. She was doing very well as a travel companion; my first impression of attraction to her was being reinforced as time passed by.
We tried a different wine tonight, a cabernet sauvignon from Mendoza that was very different than a typical California cab. The Argentine wine was bottled and sold younger than in California, had a lot less aging in an oak barrel, had less of a varietal character, and just wasn’t as good to our tastes. Mendoza, a city to the south of Salta, produces 95% or more of the wine made in Argentina, mostly affordable wines of reasonable quality to be consumed as “table wines” with lunch or dinner. These wines typically sell at the supermarket for a few dollars a bottle, so are available for the mass market.
We also had bottled water with the meal, as does everyone else eating at a restaurant in South America. There are two choices: con gas and sin gas. The former is water with gas (plain carbonated water), while the latter is plain bottled water (without carbonation). Despite the mediocre wine, it was a very pleasant dinner. Perhaps it was more about the company than the food.
Chapter8.Humahuaca and Purmamarca
Tuesday's outing to Humahuaca started well before the crack of dawn, with a busload of tourists and a few local residents in the coach. Our previous shadow, the guy with the hat and the scar from the bar the first night, from the Casa de Empanadas when we visited there, and from our airplane trip was back to keep us company.
As we looked at the young men and women we passed on the large street, we saw again how different people looked in B.A. and Salta. In Salta the population is mainly of Italian, Spanish, Syrian, or Lebanese descent, but there’s been extensive mixing with Indigenous blood, so that most of the residents look more like South Americans and less like Europeans than in B.A. The people are much more laid back than portenos, and are invariably courteous in their interactions with strangers. Many of t
he young men wore tee shirts with the “Quilmes” logo on the front.
As usual, Suzanne was sitting by the window, looking out at the scenery and the people we passed in the streets. “Do you know what “Quilmes” means on their shirts?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered our guide, “it’s the name of the most popular brand of beer in Argentina. They also sponsor the most popular soccer team in the country, Boca Junior, so the team logo is what you’re seeing on the shirts.”
“What does the word Quilmes mean?”
The driver took a quick look over to Suzanne, then turned back to the busy street before answering. “Quilmes is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires. It used to be a town just east of the port area, where the Boca Junior team plays. It’s also the name of an indigenous tribe that fought the 17th Century Spanish conquistadores more fiercely than any other tribe in colonial Argentina. The Quilmes tribe lived in an old city called Quilmes just to the south of Cafayate.”
During this entire discussion our guide was more or less continuously sipping at his bombilla immersed in a mate gourd, refilling the gourd several times from a large thermos of hot water. “The Spanish were so enraged by the resistance the Quilmes tribe put up that they punished the survivors by forcing them to march without enough food to survive to the swampy area outside of Buenos Aires that is now called Quilmes, a distance of about 1500 miles. The USA repeated a similar atrocity some 200 years later when the Cherokee Indians were forced to march from Georgia to Oklahoma, what was called the ‘Trail of Tears’. Many of the Indians were allowed to starve to death during the forced marches in both the USA and Argentina. It’s interesting how history can repeat itself, even thousands of miles away in different hemispheres.”