The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was as a dealer in second-hand machinery that Wesley Dodge came to the dying Row. A Fresno man, one-eighth Cherokee, self-educated, used from youth to working “from can till can’t,” he had already made and lost two fortunes, in fruit in the 1930s, in a private airline in the 1940s. His knowledge of the second-hand machinery business came from his own love of machines and from “watching other nationalities,” mainly Jews. “I am one of the few Gentiles in second-hand machinery.” The secret is to buy well. “Everybody in America is a salesman. I learned to be a buyer. If you buy right, selling’s no problem.” He sold Cannery Row machinery all over the world. “Apple-canning, fish-reduction, tallow plants which take chicken waste. I didn’t necessarily sell back to the fish business.” They sometimes got more from the machinery than they paid for the cannery.

  And there was Dodge’s interest in ocean property. “All my life I wanted to own ocean property. There’s no ocean in Nebraska. Does that mean anything to you? No ocean in Oklahoma. There’s an Atlantic Ocean, there’s a Pacific Ocean. In between there’s no ocean. In my commercial life anyone that’s owned ocean property had it made.”

  There was a stripped cannery to be seen, the last. We drove there in his Cadillac.

  “It’s air-conditioned,” he said, as I fumbled with the car window.

  It was almost dark in the cannery building; the corrugated-iron roof looked higher inside. Small motors with fresh grey paint on their casings covered half the concrete floor. On the other side, no longer in sequence, under polythene, were the big, complicated machines. Moving lightly, he undraped, touched, felt, explained. Here, still looking new after twenty idle years, were the “tractor-treads” into which the girls—now scattered, and always women—dropped the sardines one by one, for hours; here was the sardine gut-sucker; here were metal arms so finely balanced that only full cans would depress them to that track which led to the capping machine.

  “There’s about eighty thousand dollars here,” Dodge said. “I live this machinery. Machinery isn’t difficult if you live it.”

  It was time for a drink. Dodge himself, after many years of whisky, eighteen to twenty shots a day, now drinks only orange juice and Seven-Up. We went to the Outrigger. It was on the sea side of a converted cannery, past gift-shops whose walls dripped pink bougainvillaea. Three gas jets on tall metal poles flared at the entrance. A spotlight picked out rocks in the sea. We entered a carpeted green grotto, of Polynesian atmosphere, with a waterfall, and stepped out into openness: the old cannery pier, carpeted, re-timbered and glassed-in. We were on water, in the middle of the bay, the lights of Seaside and Monterey curving far to the right. After the desolation of the Row, the beauty of rock and water was abrupt. It was the future.

  “The square-foot value of the property will be many times greater than when Steinbeck was here,” Dodge said. He pointed to where a basket-like metal frame rose out of the sea. “The old hopper. That’s where they unloaded the fish. They were pumped in through a pipe into the cannery.”

  From the high-rise, resort future of Cannery Row Dodge has withdrawn. For two million dollars, paid in cash, he and his associates have sold out to a San Francisco millionaire. “He is seventy-five, but he has a different idea of his life than I have of mine.” Dodge feels he has had a full business life; even while on the Row he went back into fruit, where he had failed thirty years before, and “made a lot there, a lot.” Dodge, who has no children of his own, is interested now in educating the children of his relatives and friends. He would like to support a hospital or some kind of research; but he is concerned to make his money work. “You don’t get the true value of your dollar with a foundation. You are just paying the salaries of the top men.”

  Later, driving down the Row back to the centre of Monterey, he slowed down beside an empty, fenced-in lot. “Frank Raiter’s place. A real Cannery Row character. Over eighty, worth several millions. His cannery burned down two years ago. But every morning he comes here and sits in his—not a Cadillac, the one next to a Cadillac, I forget—and reads the Wall Street Journal for a couple of hours.”

  The Row bent and straightened again. It was just here that Doc Ricketts died in 1948—the scene under glass in Ring’s café. Dodge talked about Steinbeck. He never met him; he spoke to him once, on the transatlantic telephone, to get permission to use his name for the Steinbeck Theatre.

  “He hurt California terribly. I like Tortilla Flat, I like Cannery Row. I know those paisanos without knowing them, if you know what I mean. But he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve no background of being able to say this book’s better than that one, but it hurt me to read The Grapes. It wasn’t factual enough. You know what an Okie is? They moved here in hordes. Thousands. Thousands a day. I was making five to six dollars an hour, packing fruit. When they came they worked for fifteen cents, twenty cents. Fifty cents a day. Any amount a day. And I was out of a job. We had problems in 1932. They came and compounded our problems. But Steinbeck wrote The Grapes. It’s something that people look at us as, as Californians. And he sold a lot of books. You can’t assess the damage.”

  1970

  Argentina and the Ghost of

  Eva Perón, 1972—1991

  I THE CORPSE AT THE IRON GATE

  Buenos Aires, April–June 1972

  OUTLINE it like a story by Borges.

  The dictator is overthrown and more than half the people rejoice. The dictator had filled the jails and emptied the treasury. Like many dictators, he hadn’t begun badly. He had wanted to make his country great. But he wasn’t himself a great man; and perhaps the country couldn’t be made great. Seventeen years pass. The country is still without great men; the treasury is still empty; and the people are on the verge of despair. They begin to remember that the dictator had a vision of the country’s greatness, and that he was a strong man; they begin to remember that he had given much to the poor. The dictator is in exile. The people begin to agitate for his return. The dictator is now very old. But the people also remember the dictator’s wife. She loved the poor and hated the rich, and she was young and beautiful. So she has remained, because she died young, in the middle of the dictatorship. And, miraculously, her body has not decomposed.

  “That,” Borges said, “is a story I could never write.”

  But at seventy-six, and after seventeen years of proscription and exile, Juan Perón, from the Madrid suburb known as the Iron Gate, dictates peace terms to the military regime of Argentina. In 1943, as an army colonel preaching a fierce nationalism, Perón became a power in Argentina; and from 1946 to 1955, through two election victories, he ruled as dictator. His wife Eva held no official position, but she ruled with Perón until 1952. In that year she died. She was expensively embalmed, and now her corpse is with Perón at the Iron Gate.

  In 1956, just one year after his overthrow by the army, Perón wrote from Panama, “My anxiety was that some clever man would have taken over.” Now, after eight presidents, six of them military men, Argentina is in a state of crisis that no Argentine can fully explain. The mighty country, as big as India and with a population of twenty-three million, rich in cattle and grain, Patagonian oil, and all the mineral wealth of the Andes, inexplicably drifts. Everyone is disaffected. And suddenly nearly everyone is Peronist. Not only the workers, on whom in the early days Perón showered largesse, but Marxists and even the middle-class young, whose parents remember Perón as a tyrant, torturer and thief.

  The peso has gone to hell: from 5 to the dollar in 1947, to 16 in 1949, 250 in 1966, 400 in 1970, 420 in June last year, 960 in April this year, 1,100 in May. Inflation, which has been running at a steady 25 per cent since the Perón days, has now jumped to 60 per cent. The banks are offering 24 per cent interest. Inflation, when it reaches this stage of takeoff, is good only for the fire insurance business. Premiums rise and claims fall. When prices gallop away week by week, fires somehow do not often get started.

  For everyone else it is a nightmare. It is almost impossible to put together capital; and eve
n then, if you are thinking of buying a flat, a delay of a week can cost you two or three hundred U.S. dollars (many business people prefer to deal in dollars). Salaries, prices, the exchange rate: everyone talks money, everyone who can afford it buys dollars on the black market. And soon even the visitor is touched by the hysteria. In two months a hotel room rises from 7,000 pesos to 9,000, a tin of tobacco from 630 to 820. Money has to be changed in small amounts; the market has to be watched. The peso drops one day to 1,250 to the dollar. Is this a freak, or the beginning of a new decline? To hesitate that day was to lose: the peso bounced back to 1,100. “You begin to feel,” says Norman Thomas di Giovanni, the translator of Borges, who has come to the end of his three-year stint in Buenos Aires, “that you are spending the best years of your life at the money changer’s. I go there some afternoons the way other people go shopping. Just to see what’s being offered.”

  The blanket wage raises that the government decrees from time to time—15 per cent in May, and another 15 per cent promised soon—cannot keep pace with prices. “We’ve got to the stage,” the ambassador’s wife says, “when we can calculate the time between the increase in wages and the increase in prices.” People take a second job and sometimes a third. Everyone is obsessed with the need to make more money and at the same time to spend quickly. People gamble. Even in the conservative Andean town of Mendoza the casino is full; the patrons are mainly workpeople, whose average monthly wage is the equivalent of fifty dollars. The queues that form all over Buenos Aires on a Thursday are of people waiting to hand in their football-pool coupons. The announcement of the pool results is a weekly national event.

  A spectacular win of some 330 million pesos by a Paraguayan labourer dissipated a political crisis in mid-April. There had been riots in Mendoza, and the army had been put to flight. Then, in the following week, a guerrilla group in Buenos Aires killed the Fiat manager whom they had kidnapped ten days earlier. On the same day, in the nearby industrial town of Rosario, guerrillas ambushed and killed General Sánchez, commander of the Second Army Corps, who had some reputation as a torturer. Blood called for blood: there were elements in the armed forces that wanted then to break off the negotiations with Perón and scotch the elections promised next year. But the Paraguayan’s fortune lightened all conversation, revived optimism and calmed nerves. The little crisis passed.

  The guerrillas still raid and rob and blow up; they still occasionally kidnap and occasionally kill. The guerrillas are young and middle class. Some are Peronist, some are communist. After all the bank raids the various organizations are rich. In Córdoba last year, according to my information, a student who joined the Peronist Montoneros was paid the equivalent of 70 dollars a month; lawyers were retained at 350 dollars. “You could detect the young Montoneros by their motorcars, their aggressiveness, their flashiness. James Dean types. Very glamorous.” Another independent witness says of the guerrillas he has met in Buenos Aires: “They’re anti-American. But one of them held a high job in an American company. They have split personalities; some of them really don’t know who they are. They see themselves as a kind of comic-book hero. Clark Kent in the office by day, Superman at night, with a gun.”

  Once you make a decision [the thirty-year-old woman says] you feel better. Most of my friends are for the revolution and they feel much better. But sometimes they are like children who can’t see too much of the future. The other day I went with my friend to the cinema. He is about thirty-three. We went to see Sacco and Vanzetti. At the end he said, “I feel ashamed not being a guerrillero. I feel I am an accomplice of this government, this way of life.” I said, “But you lack the violence. A guerrillero must be despejado—he mustn’t have too much imagination or sensibility. You have to do as you are told. If not, nothing comes out well. It is like a religion, a dogma.” And again he said, “Don’t you feel ashamed?”

  The film-maker says:

  I think that after Marx people are very conscious of history. The decay of colonialism, the emergence of the Third World—they see themselves acting out some role in this process. This is as dangerous as having no view of history at all. It makes people very vain. They live in a kind of intellectual cocoon. Take away the jargon and the idea of revolution, and most of them would have nothing.

  The guerrillas look for their inspiration to the north. From Paris of 1968 there is the dream of students and workers uniting to defeat the enemies of “the people.” The guerrillas have simplified the problems of Argentina. Like the campus and salon revolutionaries of the north, they have identified the enemy: the police. And so the social-intellectual diversions of the north are transformed, in the less intellectually stable south, into horrible reality. Dozens of policemen have been killed. And the police reply to terror with terror. They, too, kidnap and kill; they torture, concentrating on the genitals. A prisoner of the police jumps out of a window: La Prensa gives it a couple of inches. People are arrested and then, officially, “released”; sometimes they reappear, sometimes they don’t. A burned-out van is discovered in a street one morning. Inside there are two charred corpses: men who had been hustled out of their homes two days before. “In what kind of country are we living?” one of the widows asks. But the next day she is calmer; she retracts the accusation against the police. Someone has “visited” her.

  “Friends of friends bring me these stories of atrocities,” Norman di Giovanni says, “and it makes you sick. Yet no one here seems to be amazed by what’s going on.” “My wife’s cousin was a guerrillero,” the provincial businessman says at lunch. “He killed a policeman in Rosario. Then eight months ago, he disappeared. Está muerto. He’s dead.” He has no more to say about it; and we talk of other matters.

  On some evenings the jackbooted soldiers in black leather jackets patrol the pedestrian shopping street called Florida with their Alsatians: the dogs’ tails close to their legs, their shoulders hunched, their ears thrown back. The police Chevrolets prowl the neon-lit streets unceasingly. There are policemen with machine guns everywhere. And there are the mounted police in slate grey; and the blue-helmeted anti-guerrilla motorcycle brigade; and those young men in well-cut suits who appear suddenly, plainclothesmen, jumping out of unmarked cars. Add the army’s AMX tanks and Alouette helicopters. It is an impressive apparatus, and it works.

  It is as if the energy of the state now goes into holding the state together. Law and order has become an end in itself: it is part of the Argentine sterility and waste. People are brave; they torture and are tortured; they die. But these are private events, scattered, muffled by a free but inadequate press that seems incapable of detecting a pattern in the events it reports. And perhaps the press is right. Perhaps very little of what happens in Argentina is really news, because there is no movement forward; nothing is being resolved. The nation appears to be playing a game with itself; and Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is only cyclical, and the year always ends as it begins. Even General Sánchez didn’t, by his death, provoke a crisis. He tortured in vain, he died in vain. He simply lived for fifty-three years and, high as he was, has left no trace. Events are bigger than men. Only one man seems able to impose himself, to alter history now as he altered it in the past. And he waits at the Iron Gate.

  Passion blinded our enemies [Perón wrote in 1956] and destroyed them … The revolution [that overthrew me] is without a cause, because it is only a reaction … The military people rule, but no one really obeys. Political chaos draws near. The economy, left to the management of clerks, gets worse day by day and … anarchy threatens the social order … These dictators who don’t know too much and don’t even know where they are going, who move from crisis to crisis, will end by losing their way on a road that leads nowhere.

  The return of Perón, or the triumph of Peronism, is anticipated. It has been estimated that already between six and eight thousand million dollars have been shipped out of the country by Argentines. �
��People are not involved,” the ambassador’s wife says. “And you must remember that anybody who has money is not an Argentine. Only people who don’t have money are Argentines.”

  But even at the level of wealth and security, even when escape plans have been drawn up, even, for instance, at this elegant dinner party in the Barrio Norte, passion breaks in. “I’m dying,” the lady says abruptly, clenching her fists. “I’m dying—I’m dying—I’m dying. It isn’t a life any longer. Everybody clinging on by their fingertips. This place is dead. Sometimes I just go to bed after lunch and stay there.” The elderly butler wears white gloves; all the panelling in the room was imported from France at the turn of the century. (How easy and quick this Argentine aristocracy, how brief its settled life.) “The streets are dug up, the lights are dim, the telephones don’t answer.” The marijuana (forty-five dollars for the last half-kilo) passes; the mood does not alter. “This used to be a great city and a great port. Twenty years ago. Now it’s fucked up, baby.”

  For intellectuals and artists as well, the better ones, who are not afraid of the outside world, there is this great anxiety of being imprisoned in Argentina and not being able to get out, of having one’s creative years wasted by a revolution in which one can have no stake, or by a bloody-minded dictatorship, or just by chaos. Inflation and the crash of the peso have already trapped many. Menchi Sábat, the country’s most brilliant cartoonist, says, “It is easier for us to be on the moon by TV. But we don’t know Bolivia or Chile or even Uruguay. The reason? Money. What we are seeing now is a kind of collective frenzy. Because before it was always easy here to get money. Now we are isolated. It isn’t easy for people outside to understand what this means.”