The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  “¿Santiago? ¡Son mil quinientos kilómetros!” Yes, Joe’s next destination was fifteen hundred kilometers away, nine hundred miles, and he couldn’t wait to reach it. Letters from home were waiting for him at the United States Embassy in Chile’s capital, along with a check, hopefully. Joe hopped into the Buick, but before he could say “Gracias,” the driver and his female passenger began to argue; or, rather, they resumed the argument they were likely engaged in when they stopped to pick up Joe. “¡Tú!” the man yelled, and the woman replied, “¡No, tú!” and the woman reached forward, and removed the driver’s panama hat, and struck him with it, yelling, “¡Mentiroso!” until the car stopped. The woman got out, and as the driver turned the car around to head back to Arica, Joe said he would get out too; he found himself standing on the southbound side of the road hitchhiking, while the woman did the same on the other side. A northbound car appeared and took the woman away, leaving Joe alone in an otherworldly landscape of dunes and gray cliffs, baking under the resurgent sun, expecting a spacecraft from Earth to land at any moment. Just as he was contemplating walking back to town, a Jeep with three nattily dressed men pulled up and stopped.

  “Where are you going?” one of them asked in English.

  “Santiago.”

  “We are too!”

  They were all wearing sunglasses and grinning, and they smelled of alcohol, and they engaged Joe in a bilingual conversation. They were three whitish-blond Chilean brothers, headed back to Santiago after a road trip to Peru: towheaded boys that looked like Aussies, he would later write in a letter home. As the Jeep drove deeper into the desert, the two passenger brothers fell asleep in the open-air vehicle, hypnotized by the straight road and the empty desert; it was like a drive across Kansas, but with no thing living anywhere, except maybe the bacteria clinging to the beads of fog blowing in from the ocean. “Atacama!” the driver shouted. Not a single bug on the windshield, no roadkill on the asphalt. Nothing. A universe of umber sand, dead mountains. No towns or gas stations. Amusements only for the devotees of rocks. The Chilean passengers resumed their drunken carousing once they woke up, drinking red wine straight from a bottle. The driver took a swig too, and sped up, and when he did so the Jeep yawed, like an airplane being buffeted by crosswinds, the pickled torsos of his passengers swaying in unison. Bad suspension; my brother would sort it out in an hour.

  For three days he traveled with the Chileans, stopping for roadside naps and meals. When they entered cities and towns and other settlements, they caught the stares of workingman Chile; of women tending to big pots on the roadside, and men in overalls, carrying wrenches and tools. When Joe and the three brothers entered the proletarian suburbs of Santiago, they found a city filled by the smoke of winter fires, and a haze that turned the massive Andes into a stained patch of sky on the horizon, the mere suggestion of a mountain range. And they saw graffiti that hinted at the coming class war: red stars, men carrying hammers and raised-fist symbols painted on brick walls, a rebellion of the black-haired against the blond and the fair, the chiseled Indians against the tall police and their polished black boots. Battles to be fought in the brick-lined alleys, in the warrens of shacks by the river, at night, by flashlight, with fire and stones.

  Hitchhiked 1,500 kilometers with a wild bunch that somehow kept the Jeep aimed toward Santiago, Joe wrote home, when he finally reached the apartment where the Chilean brothers lived, on an entire floor of a building overlooking the national military academy. Traffic accident in the desert (smashed windshield) which cut up two of the Chileans—I came out unscathed. White wine to sterilize the wounds and my red handkerchiefs for bandages and we blasted away, drinking the balance of the wine. Drove steady except for breakfast by the sea and sidewalk steaks while a carpenter built us a new windshield. More wine the next day, enough that we kidnapped a penguin at a restaurant 200 kilometers from Santiago. Stayed overnight with the Chileans (Scottish mother, Swiss father), realizing the next day they weren’t just rich, but really repulsively rich. Got a good night’s sleep (1st horizontal sleep in 4 days) and some damn good meals the next day, then ducked invitations to stay on longer.

  No more brie, thank you. I just couldn’t. The bacon was excellent. Just like home! He slipped away to the U.S. Embassy, where a small stack of envelopes was waiting for him, including some forwarded by the embassy in Panama. Steve had sent the precious funds, his flagpole money. Writing from Arizona, his father said a fellow scientist had named a new species of riffle beetle in Milt’s honor. Xenelmis sandersoni. His mother said it was a hundred degrees in Urbana. Joe wrote back: Any chance of mailing some August dust and sweat in exchange for a little Chilean snow?

  He left Santiago, headed through crop fields and dormant vineyards, splurging with his flagpole-painting money on the relative comfort of a second-class bus. After many hours the land became darker and evergreen, and a stormy winter wind blew through the pine forests and the eucalyptus tree farms. He reached the port city of Puerto Montt. Leaving for Tierra del Fuego tomorrow a.m. by boat—a weeklong trip, he wrote home on August 30. People here tell me I “might” get treated to my first iceberg. Sounds outlandish, I know, but I guess I will be roaming fairly near Antarctica. His passenger ship sailed past an island where spirits were said to live in the trees, and around many others that were uninhabited but for seals and penguins, and he saw no icebergs but much snow falling on the waves, and on a gray and gloomy morning his ship docked at the pier in Punta Arenas. He found the cheapest lodgings in town and wrote home.

  And so, a week later, here I are—The End of the World! Cold? Jesus Gawd! What looks like ice crystals drop out of the sky even when it’s cloudless, and talk about digging under the blankets at night—you betcha! He described the journey from Puerto Montt thusly: Quiet sailing. Rode third class, including meals, for $9.30, spending nearly all my time in the 1st-class lounge and bar (of course), drinking, swapping lies with the captain, beating everyone at chess, and in general enjoying the Mississippi River boat atmosphere at a pauper’s rate.

  Hit town last night and got into a place called El Scorpion Nocturno—$1.80/day with meals. Of course, there were a few suspicious looking ladies wandering about, but I smiled innocently like a choir boy, bewildered that the thermometer has so little sway over virtue.

  He tried to see if he could do a one-day bumming trip south out of Punta Arenas, on Chile National Highway Number 9. Several drivers passed him and his outstretched thumb and gave him perplexed looks as he stood on the edge of town. Finally a taxi driver stopped and asked. “¿A dónde va?”

  “To the next town,” Joe said in Spanish.

  “There is nothing,” the taxi driver said. “This is the last town, the last place in Chile where people live.”

  “Where does this road go then?”

  “To the fort.”

  “A fort?”

  “A national monument. But no one goes there now, joven.”

  “¿Por qué?”

  “Because it is very, very cold. But I will take you.”

  They drove away from the town’s asphalt streets, and into an unpopulated, windblown and foggy pampa-scape, where there were no trees but many bushes, clinging to the soil against the winds that blew in from the South Pole. Joe explained his mission, his travels overland and by ship from the United States, and on all the roads of South America.

  “This is the end of your trip!” the driver said. “There is no more road after this.”

  The narrow road turned to gravel, and after thirty minutes they reached a sign that read FUERTE BULNES and the road became a loop and circled back on itself, and Joe realized this was, in fact, the end, the last stop in the chain of highways connected to Cartagena, on the northern shores of the continent. The bottom of the bottom. It was an old fort built by colonists who no longer lived here, and now a tourist attraction that no one visited in the winter. He saw a fence made of sticks, a palisades and a Chilean flag, its red and white stripes snapping south in the wind, in the direction o
f uninhabited, inhospitable islands and Antarctica across the ocean.

  Climbing the slope on which the fort resided, he saw the soapy blue current of the famous straits sought out by European mariners. Calm ocean water, sheltered from bigger, meaner seas. Magellan and his crew navigated through this channel, their Portuguese sails catching the wind, steel helmets rusting in the misty air, the captain and his sailors thinking: Is this the way, have we found it? Asia and spices and riches! Magellan’s eyes upon the way forward, to Japan and then Africa and home to Lisbon. And now my eyes on this same body of water, lonesome waves. From Urbana to here. If Mom and Dad could see me. Now I know what the explorers knew: how big the globe is. My world is roads, oceans, rivers, bays, deserts, jungles, bridges, gas stations, crossroads, signs, swamps, dust and ice. Big, but finite.

  There was only one thing a bum could do when he’d reached the end of the world: turn back and bum northward and eastward to the next place.

  11

  Buenos Aires. Lisbon. Paris. Tangier. Tripoli. Damascus. Jerusalem. Baghdad. Kuwait. New Delhi. Kathmandu. Kabul. Teheran. Istanbul. London

  AND NOW THE GREAT EXOTIC EXPANSE, the empty empire of sheep. Patagonia. So many sheep, as if in a dream. Endless ovine munching on tufts of tawny grass. Joe’s eyes fixed on the woolly animals, fighting off slumber as he listened to the throaty exhortations of the truck in which he was riding; deeper into Argentina’s own version of nowhere, following three other trucks, in a caravan headed all the way to Buenos Aires. Two thousand five hundred kilometers on one ride, a new Sanderson record. The trucks plowed into a gray sweep of shrouded sky and light rain and wet pebbly ground. They had set off from the Argentine town of Río Gallegos, where a small plane had deposited Joe from the island of Tierra del Fuego. With nightfall the caravan became a swarm of amber and red lights floating over the moonlit flatlands, until the first truck flashed its lights, and the next truck and the one after, and finally all three trucks began to drift to the side of the road. “Señor Joe, vamos a parar—para la cena,” the driver said, and Joe understood everything. Which was fortunate, given how hungry he was. Dinner, thank God. But where, without a town or a shack in sight?

  Joe stepped off the truck and followed his driver, and he watched as the lead driver in the caravan set loose a long-haired dog that sprinted into the night toward the faint, puffy forms of a cluster of sheep. Amid cheers and cackles from the truckers, he heard the paw thuds of the dog’s aggressive running, its bark circling the sheep, and soon three of the drivers had wrestled two ewes to the ground. They produced knives, and the black blood of the murdered sheep flowed into the sandy soil. Joe helped the men drag the carcasses back to the roadside, where another trucker had produced firewood and a set of steel bars and began to assemble a spit to roast the animals.

  Quite a breed these truckers, Joe wrote home later. We rustled two sheep. Barbecued them after midnight. Can’t say I regret the crime though. ’Twas very good meat.

  The odd raindrop exploded into steam as it struck the fire. Heavy, darkest meat, might not sit too well. The lights of another truck appeared on the horizon and the truckers slowed their chewing. The vehicle stopped and a driver stepped out, and the truckers embraced him. ¡Viejo, boludo! He was followed by a skinny young man with unkempt brown hair and the thin physique and disoriented air of a child. A Frenchman, it turned out. Patrice was bumming his way around the world and he fell into conversation with Joe. Me, hitchhiking. Moi, aussi. Patrice had set off from the French city of Lens, to Istanbul, across North Africa to Morocco, then turned south, traversing Africa from the Atlas Mountains to Table Rock at the Cape of Good Hope. “The Sahara, the Sahel, le Congo, toute l’Afrique.” He had taken a cargo ship from Cape Town to Brazil, and now he was here, in Patagonia, headed for Tierra del Fuego, and then San Francisco, California.

  The drivers and their bumming passengers retired to their trucks for a few hours of sleep. Before dawn the truckers awoke and started their engines and while those machines were warming up, Joe and Patrice stepped out and shook hands and wished each other good luck and bonne chance and they were on their way again, their bumming journeys dripping imaginary lines of ink into the roads behind them.

  * * *

  IN BUENOS AIRES, Joe got his mail from home, and a check, and began a roundabout journey across and along the muddy Río de la Plata and its tributaries. He entered Uruguay, and Brazil, riding in trucks, buses and assorted Fords and Peugeots, and made his way to Iguazu Falls and Paraguay, where a long-billed toucan buzzed over his head at the border post. Steak and eggs several times a day, 50¢ a plate! he wrote home from Asunción. Yes, they’re still taking reservations to South America and I’ll expect you folks soon. He returned to Buenos Aires and its stone buildings filling each block to geometric perfection, and the teams of waiters at the cafés, dressed in white and black. Joe’s clothes were unlaundered, his hair reached his shirt collar, and his appearance provoked derisive stares and contempt from all the cosmopolitan Argentines around him. Two months earlier there had been a military coup, and the country’s new rulers had banned miniskirts and decreed that long hair on men was henceforth illegal, and the police had taken scissors to clip the hair of the radicals at the University of Buenos Aires.1

  Joe stood before the freighters at the Buenos Aires docks, looking for a ship to take a sandy-haired hobo to another continent. But no freighter would have him. Was dealt a bad set of cards for ships to Europe so I’ve had to swallow my River Rat pride and walk the gangplank for a tourist ship, he wrote home. The R.M.S. Arlanza, of the Royal Mail Line. For gawd’s sake, don’t let the word get around or I’ll be slaughtered on the flyleaf of my 1st novel.

  Freshly showered, his clothes laundered and patched up, he fell in with a group of Brits and Britain-bound passengers. Student bums, a couple of years younger than I, and a Hungarian refugee headed to England. We spend hours among each other taking in the sun. A real ship of fools. He became close with a young woman named Helen, who he described in a letter home as the inevitable British girl returning to U.K. after a “smashing” lecture tour of Argentina. Helen of the rosy hue, with a feminine form befitting her name. Hellenesque. Hellene. As if imagined by the sculptor. She saw in Joe a rugged Americanness she associated with westerns. A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More. And she was not surprised when, a few days later, she woke up after another amorous night with Joe in his third-class berth, and squeezed past his naked body and peeked into his rucksack and saw a .22-caliber revolver, a black instrument of death. My American pistolero. What crimes have you committed? What enemies do you fear?

  The ship reached Rio, a city shrouded in fog, hiding the famous concrete Christ statue he wanted to see as they pulled into port. Joe left Helen for the day and hiked up into the districts he had been told to avoid, the favelas, and he followed winding, improvised concrete stairs poured over the jungle, and found an unexpected integration of the races, an African and European neighborliness on hillside paths perched above the beaches. Big vistas of round rocky promontories, and boys and girls flying kites. Several days later, upon reaching the European mainland, he wrote home. Just docked at Lisbon, pulling out for Vigo, Spain, this p.m. Ship stopped several hours in the Canary Islands two days ago, but we were still a little way out to sea from Africa—didn’t see any of Hemingway’s lions roaming the moonlit beaches. Them quid-chewing camels, yes, but nothing else but the tourists on this ship taking “British sunbaths” (lying in the sun on beach chairs, wrapped up in blankets, preferably after tea).

  * * *

  JOE’S THIRTEENTH LETTER, postmarked on October 17 from Lisbon, arrived at his mother’s Urbana home on Halloween. Virginia wrote the unlucky number in a circle. Not superstitious. Fourteen will be here soon enough. This one from Europe. Never been myself. Would have wanted to go. Paris, London. Clean cities. Not enough bugs there to interest my former husband. She put the letter in the shoebox with its twelve predecessors and felt the growing chill and when dusk came she looked
through the window every few minutes until the first trick-or-treaters arrived. Pirates, ghosts, store-bought Caspers and Batmen, homemade sheiks and mummies, crunching through the sidewalk carpets of brown leaves. My sons dressed as cowboys and demons back in the day. Steve probably divorced soon. Like me. Life’s surprises. Look ahead. How many more numbers and circles on this trip before Joe comes back?

  * * *

  AT THE DOCKS IN LISBON, Joe watched a small woman with black hair join the line of passengers, and kept his eyes on her until she turned up and glanced at him. She gave him a perplexed squint of her big dark eyes.2 A waif in a mint-green sundress, unmistakably Portuguese, and he immediately associated her with the romance of Lisbon’s narrow streets and vertical spaces. Later that night, he appeared at the door to her second-class berth. “We’re having a party, you should come and join us.” Mafalda was her name and she was twenty years old. She was going to London to work as a photographer’s assistant, running away from her family; she was related to the counts and dukes of the fading Portuguese nobility, and had been engaged at eighteen to a socially connected man many years her senior, but she had dumped him for a vagabond life. After she related this biography to him, Joe studied her and saw a character in a nineteenth-century European novel, a person conjured by an author’s imagination to represent some essential idea of the age in which they lived. Freedom. Impulsiveness. Vulnerability. Her English was fluent and she could also speak French and read Latin. Joe told her about his newest literary discovery: the French writer Jean Genet. Our Lady of the Flowers. And then Joe’s British girlfriend found him, introduced herself to Mafalda and pulled Joe away. My man, mine. Not yours. Go find your own American.