Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Montevideo

Montevideo, Uruguay … Why did I want to go there? I had never been, but there was one very good reason why I shouldn’t have planned a visit: the opening pages of my last novel are set in the place and I have found it’s a very bad idea to check out the validity of your research — your assumed knowledge—after the book has been published. I have written novels set in the Philippines, Kenya and Berlin, for example, and have still to visit these places. I had travelled there in my imagination and my imagination had enjoyed the experience — it seemed somehow unnecessary, or risky, to have to verify if it knew what it was talking about.

But I found myself, this July, in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, and was due to move on from there to Rio de Janeiro. Across the vast estuary of the Río Plata lay Uruguay and Montevideo — this strange South American city that my imagination had inhabited for some months. I knew the layout of its streets, I knew where to find the cathedral, I knew about its solitary hill with a fort on top, I knew the name of the street where the hero of my novel had been born. So close — two hours away by speedy hydrofoil — it would have been a crime not to have checked it out.

Novelists travel — or don’t travel — for all sorts of perverse reasons. And as I boarded the sleek buquebus (the hydrofoil) at Puerto Madera in Buenos Aires I started to wonder what had made me select Montevideo as the starting point for my last novel. These decisions are, more often than not, made almost unconsciously. My novel, Any Human Heart, was the story of one man’s progression through the twentieth century narrated via the medium of his intimate journals. For some reason I wanted this man, this Englishman, to be born abroad, to be somewhat deracinated, and I chose Montevideo as his birthplace and the locus of the first few years of his tumultuous life. For “some reason.” The first reason was simple: corned beef. Everyone older than me, everyone of my generation and perhaps younger, for all I know, has heard of Fray Bentos corned beef. But not many people know that Fray Bentos is not a brand name but a city in Uruguay. A city built in the late nineteenth century around beef and its processed variants. Corned beef, “bully beef,” that staple of our national diet for well over a hundred years, originated in large part from frigor’ificos—vast abattoirs and canning factories in Uruguay. Corned beef — iconic food of the British nation — came from Uruguay. Where better to start an Englishman’s life story?

But this wasn’t the complete explanation. I recently reread Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul, which is set in Paraguay. It starts like this, in a mood of classic Greenean evocativeness.

Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag … It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

I realized that when I had first read the novel on its publication (in 1973) I had conjured up from these few sentences an abiding image in my mind of South America — however factitious and romantic. Dusk, a broad river, a certain world-weariness. I knew that something that had lingered with me from Greene’s novel had, decades later, made me start my own in Montevideo.

The buquebus headed off from Puerto Madera at high speed, judging from the fountaining spume of its impressive wake. The Río Plata was ideally calm but there was no possibility of going on deck — forbidden. Crossing the huge refulgent river as the sun set was almost like being in a plane. As we travelled towards Uruguay I realized there was another personal connection that was urging me on to Montevideo. When I was very young, I was best friends at school with the son of the famous film director Michael Powell. The one film of his that we saw in those days was his (now virtually forgotten) version of the hunting and destruction of the German battle-cruiser, the Graf Spee, in 1939—The Battle of the River Plate (1956). The Graf Spee, pursued by the British fleet, made for the safety of Montevideo harbour. Uruguay was neutral and the Graf Spee was allowed only forty-eight hours in port. Rather than face the British ships waiting offshore the captain scuttled the ship in the river and committed suicide. Something of this connection — Michael Powell, this forgotten film, my early schooldays — had suggested Montevideo to me, also. Such is the strange congruence of sources that combine and cohere in the writing of a novel: corned beef, Graham Greene, an old black and white war movie. And now I was going to see the place for myself.

It was in the final fading light of sunset that we pulled into Montevideo’s harbour — light enough for me to recognize (as if it was familiar somehow) the low conic hill that signalled Montevideo to so many visitors over the centuries. It was a strange moment. I had written in my novel (some two years earlier): “Did I weep when I looked back at my beautiful city beneath its small, fort-topped conic hill as we left the yellow waters of the Río Plata behind?” Now I was arriving in this very city — and the hill was duly there, but the waters of the Río Plata were black with the oncoming darkness, reflecting the dancing lights of the custom house. Moreover, I had been writing about a Montevideo that existed in 1914—would it still be beautiful?

The short, brutal answer is “no.” But the city, as I explored it over the next two days, was no less fascinating for that. I was there, I should say, for only two days in the middle of the Uruguayan winter — nowhere looks its best in winter (unless it’s a ski resort). Montevideo was the thin sliver of corned beef in my South American sandwich: Argentina and Brazil being the thick slices of bread. I was really doing the city — let alone the country — no justice and my motives for being there were both arcane and personal. The sandwich analogy is apt in other ways, however. Uruguay’s export economy has suffered greatly in recent years: first from Brazil’s devaluation of its currency in the late nineties and second (how unlucky can you get with these two neighbours?) with the Argentinian financial crash of 2001. While Buenos Aires and Rio both show healthy signs of recovery and some evident civic pride, Montevideo is still clearly reeling from this double whammy.

Geographically, Montevideo is easily grasped. The bay forms a natural harbour and it was on the western side that the old walled city was first established. In the nineteenth century the new city was constructed, spreading further westwards and built in a style, common to most South American cities of the period, that was vaguely Parisian — broad boulevards, tree-lined avenues, important squares and so on. This move westwards continued in the twentieth century along the coast road — the various ramblas—so that modern Montevideo is amazingly attenuated and, great boon to the citizens, the beach is only ever a few blocks away. The beaches were empty while I was there but I was assured that the river and its riverine life were what made Montevideo such a nice place to live in. Strong contrast to Buenos Aires, interestingly enough, in which city one is rarely aware of the vast river at its doorstep. Montevideo, in this respect, is more like Rio but without Rio’s tropical élan. In fact it’s élan that’s most conspicuously missing as the city struggles to recover from its economic woes.

Paradoxically, if you’re not looking for a deluxe tourist-brochure time (i.e. if you happen to be a novelist), its air of decrepitude makes the city all the more atmospheric and intriguing. For reasons which have now been explained I kept thinking of Graham Greene while I wandered around Montevideo. The streets are filled with ancient, noisy and noisome buses, constantly revving their engines, changing gears, belching blue diesel fumes. I was almost coughing blood after a couple of hours and I understood the weary sallowness of the inhabitants’ faces. Signs of disrepair are all around. Outside the city’s grand hotel the doorman’s coat is worn and greasy. Litter fringes the puddles in the gutters. Shops display poor, low-grade wares. The pavements are buckled and crumbling. The public buildings have an over-ornate Soviet-style kitsch. The main square, the Plaza Independencia, is graced with possibly the ugliest 1920s skyscraper you will ever see. I kept wondering why I was thinking of Russia and I realized that the tower of the building (the Palacio Salvo) looks like a Russian space rocket and the makeshift, malfunctioning air of space-station Mir seems the right metaphor for the town. The opera house, the Teatro Solis, was closed for renovations, and no one was sure when it would reopen. The former grand boulevard of the new town, the Avenida 18 de Julio, has been ruined by unrestrained shopping malls and gimcrack developments. I found the whole place absolutely fascinating. The peculiar friable, melancholic atmosphere of Montevideo is strangely beguiling even though unsought for and no doubt deplored by its more upright citizens. You itch to write a novel set here.

There is money and moneyed folk in Montevideo, of course. They tend to live in Carrasco, in big modern houses with security guards, to the west of the city and have summer homes in Punta del Este — the St Tropez of southern South America. But a wander round the old town gives the impression of a city struggling to rise up but still resolutely on its knees. But there are surprises — fruit shops ablaze with superabundant produce, a wonderful old bar (straight from the 1920s) called the Bar Bresilia, and — the key reason why everyone should go to Montevideo at least once in their lives — the Mercado del Puerto.

This is an old covered market down by the docks opposite the defunct railway station (built by the British). It is full of bars and restaurants—parrillas (grills) — serving meat of stupendous quality grilled in front of your eyes over great pans of glowing coals, pans fed from an upright flaming cage into which logs are regularly thrown. The heat is clearly intense and the meat is cooked with amazing speed. It’s very cheap and in no sense exclusive — working men sit at the bar having their lunchtime steak or chorizos or spare ribs. Lunch for four at the classiest parrilla, El Palenque, cost £20 (with lashings of wine). The Mercado is only open at lunchtime and even in winter was packed. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life and have never eaten anywhere similar: at once utterly simple, completely functional and efficient, wholly delicious and gratifyingly democratic.

I left Montevideo in darkness, just as I had arrived, but this time predawn, to catch the early plane to Rio. In the airport people were having their luggage covered with industrial-strength sticky plastic. The day before I had stopped briefly at the naval museum on the ramblas where there was a gun on display recovered from the Graf Spee. I was told there were serious plans afoot to raise the ship from the river bed. Because the Graf Spee was scuttled it settled slowly in the water and was essentially undamaged. It would be an amazing tourist attraction: a World War Two German pocket battleship in perfect condition. I hope they do it: it would be a fine symbol of Montevideo’s eventual recovery from its current state of enforced indigence. Just as long as it doesn’t become too smart.

2004