A Quiet Flame

26 BUENOS AIRES, 1950

THAT NIGHT IT RAINED HEAVILY. The river was calm. The tide and the moon were full. Somewhere on the other side of the Plate was Uruguay. I stood in the office of the CNFA, staring out of the window at the pier and the boat and the waves lapping at the jetty. I kept half an eye on the clock. With each shuddering movement of the second hand, I felt my hopes ebbing away. I wasn’t the first man to be stood up by a woman. I wouldn’t be the last. That’s how poetry gets written.

What are you supposed to do when you know you’ll be murdered if you stay behind to be with a girl you love? Meet death together, like you were both in some crummy movie? It doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to walk out of the picture, hand in hand, to the sound of some invisible choir heralding your joint arrival in paradise. When death comes, it’s usually nasty and brutish and sharp. I should know. I’d seen it often enough.

A voice came on the Tannoy loudspeaker. The last call for passengers on the twenty-one hundred to Montevideo.

She wasn’t coming.

I walked along the pier and felt it move under my feet as if I had been standing on the breathing chest of some enormous giant. Rain sprayed my face. A melancholy rain, like the tears of the night wind that stirred my hair. I stepped off Argentina and into the boat. There were other passengers, but I didn’t notice them. Instead, I remained on deck, waiting for the miracle that wasn’t going to happen. I even started to hope that the colonel might show up to see me off so that I could beg for Anna’s life. But he didn’t come, either.

The rumbling engines roared into life. They were casting off our ties. Water stirred in a maelstrom underneath the boat, and we lurched away from the pier. From Buenos Aires. From her. We retreated into darkness like some abandoned, pagan thing, cast adrift from the world of men. Overwhelmed with self-pity and confusion and struggle and flight, I almost threw myself over the side and into the sea, in the hope of swimming to the vast edges of the shore. Instead, I went below.

In the galley, a steward lit a little gas ring to boil some water for coffee. The blue flame girdling the pot tickled it quietly. And I pictured that other flame. The small, quiet flame inside me that burned with neither joy, nor peace, nor hope, nor help from lonely pain. Not for Adolf Hitler. But for her. It burned for her.