Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  I finally contacted a translator named Andreas Polacek who spoke good English, seemed enthused about the project, and said he would call the various embassies for me.

  At two, Garry returned with the truck, introduced me to the very pleasant Sr. Capuano, and went off to lock the truck in a secure compound at Sevel. The consortium was having a convention for dealers and wanted to display the truck, take some pictures of us. Garry was happy we didn't have to park the truck in some city lot where one of us would have to sit with it twenty-four hours a day.

  Polacek called back and agreed to accompany me to the various embassies the next day. He said he would be at the hotel at 8:00 a.m. but that it could take a couple of days to secure the necessary visas.

  We went to dinner at La Cabana, a snazzy steak house featuring enormous slabs of meat. To get into the place, you walk by two stuffed

  Herefords in the lobby. It was all dark-paneled wood and waiters in tuxedos. A gran baby beef at La Cabana weighs enough to seriously injure people who might try to eat it. If dropped from a moderate height, a gran baby beef could squash a small animal, say a cat. The Argentine wine—an '83 pinot noir—was as smooth and complex as all but the most aristocratic of French or California wines. It took a couple of bottles to wash down the beef, which was exceedingly tasty although not nearly as marbled in fat as the best U.S. cuts. It was the finest steak I've ever eaten.

  A cabdriver in one of the yellow-over-black Falcons offered to take us to a nightclub where there was "a striptease." He gave us a card for the club with his name scrawled on it. The last time we had been in Buenos Aires, only a few months ago, a cabdriver had taken us to just such a place. Two lovely young women sat on our laps and told us that, as soon as we had walked in, their hearts had begun to burn for us, bearded gringo adventurers that we were. The women were cuparas, cup bearers, B-girls, and a waiter in a tuxedo put an opened bottle of champagne on the bar along with a check for what amounted to $190. This seemed extravagant for the vintage and when I said as much, the young women lost their desire for us. More men in tuxedos appeared. There were negotiations that involved a bit of pushing, a few curses in English and Spanish. It seemed that the lovely young women, standing a safe distance away, were doing most of the cursing now. They were, I thought, somewhat fickle.

  Garry and I, shouting and shoving, made our way to the door, and I believe that I gave someone a ten-dollar bill. The ten, it appeared, was not enough. More shoving. Garry found a five. Still not enough. By this time we had pushed our way close enough to the door that a quick head fake, a little juke, and a brisk stiff arm took us out into the Buenos Aires night. Our new friends stood in front of the cabaret and shouted merry good-byes. It seemed they believed we were homosexuals.

  "I think," I told Garry in the cab, "the place the guy wants to take us? That's the same place."

  Since our experience with Argentine striptease had, to date, been neither uplifting nor satisfying in any way, we chose a path of wisdom rather than valor and went back to the hotel.

  The next day, Garry telexed the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica concerning the problems involved in bringing a truck into Nicaragua. (The Canadian embassy in Costa Rica handles Nicaragua.) We had been getting conflicting reports. On the one hand, we had been told we

  would need no visa; on the other, the U.S. State Department's background notes on Nicaragua say that U.S. citizens arriving by land or sea (not air) need visas.

  Meanwhile, I met with Andreas Polacek and set off to secure those visas we still might require. Andreas was twenty-two, a slender, handsome young fellow who wore a neatly trimmed beard; he was dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks, carried a backpack that doubled as a book bag, and might have been a North American student, right on down to his ambitions for the future. He was studying marketing and publicity.

  We took cabs to the various embassies, all of which seemed to be in venerable buildings with heavy wooden doors equipped with peephole-intercom security systems.

  Panama was easy.

  Honduras was a piece of cake.

  Ecuador was simpdtico.

  More cabs. Because inflation runs at rapid and unintelligible rates, metered cabs in Buenos Aires simply cough up a number every few blocks and that number is a code. The driver hands you a sheet of paper that translates the code into money. It is easier to print a new sheet of paper every month than to recalibrate the meter.

  Guatemala was simplicity itself.

  Central Buenos Aires might be Manhattan in some places, with garment workers bustling to off-load double-parked trucks and fashionable women in furs walking past glittering shop windows. There are wide boulevards—the widest in the world, the Argentines say—and with the early-morning temperature standing at fifty degrees, it seemed anomalous to see well-dressed businessmen in overcoats hurrying to some meeting while the palms trees were being whipped about by a brisk wind.

  Buenos Aires is certainly the most European city in the Americas, a sophisticated metropolis of restaurants and shops. There are great plazas, wooded parks, lakes, sports stadia, and horse tracks, all interspersed with crenelated buildings that call up the architectural wonders of Europe. The National Congress building, for instance, carries all the options for political buildings: a dome, pillars, battlements, and cupolas.

  Buenos Aires, except for the central area, has been almost completely rebuilt since the turn of the century. It is a city of functional skyscrapers and buildings that are more experimental in nature. Novelty buildings. Certain experiments are carried too far, however. Art

  nouveau bathrooms may be momentarily amusing, but square toilet seats are neither charming nor particularly utilitarian.

  We passed the Casa Rosada, the office of the president, an imposing pink building which is the same color as the National Museum of Fine Arts. Grand hotels flank the boulevards, and a few hardy patrons were drinking strong coffee at the sidewalk cafes.

  People in Buenos Aires are nothing if not urbane. Forty percent of the population of Argentina lives in the greater Buenos Aires area, and the people are almost exclusively of European ancestry.

  They call themselves portenos. but it wasn't much of a port, not until the 1870s. In 1852, the population of Argentina was just over one million. In the next few decades, during the Industrial Revolution, with Europe booming and the population there rising exponentially, a great demand developed for inexpensive food, for wheat and cattle products. The first refrigerated cargo ships intensified the demand. In the flat, fertile grasslands south of Buenos Aires, called the pampas, cattle were bred and wheat was grown. Argentina never looked to the north, to Canada or the U.S. In point of fact, the three countries were in the business of exporting the same products. And the same process, beginning with subjugation of native peoples, took place. The cattle ranchers came next. Cowboys were called gauchos and a romance as persuasive as that of the American West grew up around them.

  The pampas were perfect for sheep. Agriculture.

  The riches of Argentina brought immigrants, mostly Italians and Spaniards, with a smattering of Germans and Jews. A significant number of the Jewish immigrants became gauchos. Between 1857 and 1930, over six million people immigrated to the country.

  Argentina still stays afloat on the returns from export agriculture. There is little trade with the north. The United States does not need wheat or beef. Argentina looks to Europe for trade and for its considerable style. Europe, in turn, borrows from Argentina.

  In the 1880s, a disreputable dance called the tango swept through the teeming lower-class districts of Buenos Aires. By 1915, the dance was a European craze. These days, the tango is a kind of mustache cup of a dance, a quaint anachronism, performed for tourists in immense clubs full of Japanese aficionados.

  To a North American, the lyrics of the tango seem familiar: it's country and western gone urban. Take any American C&W song that hints of danger—something like "(Don't Let the Sun Set on You in) Tulsa," a bit of musical advice to a man who has tre
ated another man's woman with a certain lack of respect—take this song, dress it up in a

  tight suit, slick back its hair, put patent-leather shoes on its feet, paste a thin black mustache on its lip, and you have the lyrics of a proper tango. Put a razor in its pocket for good measure: my wife ran away with the milkman and now someone bleeds. It's arrogant and stylish, dangerous and sometimes sappily melancholy.

  The form, it is said, is moribund. Yet the tango, in its sensuality and arrogance, its ardent self-pity and provocative romanticism, somehow informs the character of Argentina.

  In the cab with Andreas Polacek, I found myself noticing all the Falcons. The vehicle you most often see on the streets of Buenos Aires is the Ford Falcon. It is generally gussied up with elaborate chrome bumpers, with different arrangements for headlights or taillights, but the car is a Ford Falcon with the dowdy twenty-five-year-old side panels: instantly identifiable.

  I told Andreas that I was beginning to think of Buenos Aires as the city of Falcons. Andreas didn't much care for the vehicle himself: it wasn't that hot a car. The new car young and sporty folk wanted was the Ford Sierra, like the Mercur sold in the U.S. The Falcon, Andreas thought, was "for conservative people."

  Indeed, during the dirty war, the unmarked black Ford Falcon inspired a kind of mind-numbing fear. Men in leather jackets came into your home in the middle of the night and took your sons away and you never saw them again. They took them away in Ford Falcons, in frumpy little cars designed thirty years ago. It was the banality of evil writ large: terror as a black Ford Falcon.

  Falcons, as far as Andreas was concerned, were politically crummy cars. As for the dirty war, he believed that the generals had given the orders, certainly, but that lesser officers had carried out these plans with a brutality that extended even beyond the generals' orders.

  There were others in Argentina who felt that the generals had been punished, were being punished, and that expanding inquiries down into the ranks of lieutenants, for instance, constituted a witch hunt of sorts. The lower ranks were only following orders. It was time to sweep the dirty war into the dustbin of history, time for Argentina to look to the future rather than the past. So some people thought.

  Crowds gathered in the street to support both points of view. Andreas believed that the dirty war was a shameful episode in his nation's history. Still, something of the sort goes on at a much lesser level in the United States, yes?

  I told him that no, I knew of no systematic program of torture, murder, and disposal of corpses directed at any group in the United

  States. Andreas shrugged. He was under the impression that all governments do pretty much the same thing. He was a young man of liberal opinions and his comments were vaguely frightening. In a country where kidnapping, torture, and "disappearance" have been rampant for years, terror becomes as mundane and ordinary as an old Ford Falcon.

  After securing the necessary documentation for Colombia, Andreas and I met Garry for lunch at the Sheraton. We had only Costa Rica and Nicaragua to go. It would be a piece of cake. We could leave tomorrow for Tierra del Fuego.

  The next day, Garry called Jacques Crete, our contact at the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires. Crete said they would call the Nicara-guan embassy for us. All we would have to do was appear. They'd have our documentation ready for us.

  Andreas and I left to do some shopping. We walked down Calle Florida, a shopping street full of expensive shops, newsstands, and good bookstores. The street is reserved for pedestrians. We visited five bookstores before we found a Spanish copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, which we felt might be useful in demonstrating to border guards and others what the project was about. There was Garry's around-the-world record, right there on page 120.

  "You are a writer?" Andreas asked. "You will write a book about this trip?"

  "Yes."

  "And will you write about the politics in each country?"

  "No. I'd rather write about sewage."

  "Oh." Andreas took some time digesting this. How could you go somewhere and not write about politics? It was as if I had told him that I was going to build a house out of peanut butter. He didn't get it.

  "What does Garry do?" Andreas wanted to know.

  "You mean how does he make a living?"

  "Yes."

  "He drives."

  "Who pays him?"

  "People who make milk shakes that last nine months without refrigeration."

  "I see," Andreas said, though I don't think he did.

  Spring had been a long time coming to Buenos Aires this year. The deciduous trees, the elms in particular, were still bare, but it was a

  brilliant, sunny day and the temperature had risen to the mid-sixties. Yesterday had been Student's Day—Andreas said Argentina has a day for everything: Mother's Day, Father's Day, Children's Day, Grandmother's Day, Grandfather's Day, Student's Day—and that all were rather unfortunately commercialized. School is out on Student's Day and there is usually a minor riot. Yesterday had been so drear, with a cold wind whipping, that the riot had been something of a disappointment.

  We stopped at a camping-goods store, where I found a twelve-volt heating element and a teapot Garry and I could use to heat water in the truck for our freeze-dried food. Garry had looked all over Moncton for just such a coil. To find one in South America, and at the last minute, was something of a coup. We could eat on the record run. It had, up to this point, been a very good day.

  We went to the Costa Rican embassy for the second-to-last visa. It was located on the sixth floor of an older building on fashionable Calle Esmeralda. The door, with its security peephole and buzzer, was open. There was a man in a pinstriped suit sitting at one of two desks in the lobby, and he told us to knock on a door with the Costa Rican seal on it. We knocked lightly and waited for ten minutes. We asked the pinstriped man if we should knock a second time. Why not? We knocked and waited five more minutes. Finally the door opened, revealing a short man in a tweedy jacket with neatly combed white hair. He seemed annoyed. Why wouldn't people leave him alone to do his work, his expression seemed to say.

  He said he was the acting consul and that his name was Dr. Arnaja. It would only be another short moment he said. Ten minutes later he ushered a woman from the room, a Costa Rican in her late sixties. She wore sensible black shoes, a neat, prim, dark dress, and looked like anyone's favorite grandmother. She had a small sad smile as of someone who had seen a number of tragedies in her life. She took a chair in the lobby across from Andreas and me.

  Andreas told me that he had some trouble with the people who lived in central Buenos Aires. In the outskirts and residential sections people were more easygoing, but in the central section they were aggressive, loud. There were merchants "who would sell you a door and call it a house." There were self-important bureaucrats who would delay important documents just to demonstrate their power. There was a name for this sort of insufferable person: chanta.

  The woman sitting in the chair opposite said that the word wasn't exclusive to Argentina. There were chantas from many different countries. She nodded slightly toward the closed door.

  There was a frosted-glass window beside the door and some teacups so close to the inside sill that you could make out their colors. We heard a teapot whistle and then saw a hand remove one of the cups. There was the clicking sound of spoon against cup. We waited another half hour.

  Presently, the door opened and the good doctor handed the woman her passport with the air of a king bestowing a gift on a simple peasant He did not invite us into his office but sat in a chair in the lobby and asked what it was that we wanted. I tried to explain the project, which seemed to bore him immeasurably.

  I couldn't get a visa, he said, because I was entering Costa Rica by auto and the only way I could get a visa would be if I had, in my possession, a piece of paper from the Costa Rican embassy stating that the truck was in transit. I showed him the map and pointed out that the point of the entire project was to be in transit. Could
he himself fill out such a form? Of course, but—and this he explained in the tones of a man explaining something exceedingly simple to a pair of very young children—very few people drove their cars directly from Argentina into Costa Rica. He didn't have the form. Without the form he couldn't give me a visa. This thing we wanted, it wasn't his job.

  Abruptly, the acting consul cut the interview short. He disappeared behind the door. We considered the alternatives, Andreas and I. Finally we knocked again. Dr. Arnaja appeared, now very annoyed. Since I did not own the truck, I suggested that the doctor issue me a visa as a passenger. My partner would take care of the paperwork regarding the truck because he owned it

  Such a thing, the doctor said, was unheard of. The very idea seemed to insult him

  We left defeated, and I was depressed. There is no way to drive from Argentina to Alaska without passing through Costa Rica. And there was, apparently, no way I was going to get a visa. The whole project, it seemed to me, hung on one visa and one very disagreeable man. Garry was much more calm about this than I was. "It's a paper war," he said. "Every day a new obstacle. I think we can get them to come around."

  Garry had fought paper wars before. It was why we had come to Argentina two months ago: to make connections, to locate the strings we might need to pull in just this sort of situation.

  The Canadian embassy wanted us to meet with a man named Roberto Raffo, an Argentine who was planning to ride horses from Argentina to Alaska. We had drinks in a bar that was all dark-paneled wood and hanging ferns. There were pictures of rugby players on the wall. Raffo's projected trip would take two years, and he wanted to make a film of the long ride. Garry suggested that Raffo strike his major deal with a company that could supply film, which would be his major expense. Raffo should not give it all away: he should not sell the project to a single sponsor. The closer he got to the United States, the more people would see that his project was a winner. It would be easier to pick up big corporate sponsors and the expedition should have something to sell them by then.