The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

'Yes, things are very quiet at the moment,' said Mr Naveiro, pouring the wine. He said that Isabel Perón had been a disaster, but that most people regarded her as pathetic rather than malicious. General Videla, a man so corpselike in appearance he was. known as 'The Skull' or 'The Bone', was a shy, cautious man whom most people hoped would return Argentina to civilian rule.

It struck me that Argentina was bureaucratic and ungovernable in the same way that Italy was. This was a developed country which was attached geographically to the Third World, but it was underdeveloped politically, with a distrust of government and a contempt for politics. Patriotism, without a tempering faith in legality or free elections, had become muddled aggression and seedy provincialism. Politics was seen to be a cheat because it was ineffectual. With the highest literacy rate in Latin America, and one of the highest in the world (91.4%), there was really no excuse for Argentina to be a tyranny. Even the most charitable witness had to find a carelessness in the attitude that tolerated authoritarianism and said that the alternative was anarchy. Wasn't this, I suggested, rather infantile?

'I don't know,' said Mr Naveiro. 'But I will tell you what I suspect. This is a very rich country. We have resources. We have a very high standard of living - even in the north where you have been it is quite all right. And I think I am right in saying that we work hard. Some people here work very hard. But we have one great defect. Can you guess what it is?'

I said no, I couldn't.

'Everyone works well separately, but we cannot work with one another. I don't know why this is so, but we just cannot work together as a team.'

'I wouldn't have thought a self-appointed government of generals was much inspiration for people to work together,' I said. 'Why don't they hold an election?'

'We keep hoping,' said Mr Naveiro. 'I would like to change the subject, with your permission.'

'Fine.'

'I have been reading your essay on Rudyard Kipling. It is very good.'

It was a book review, but a long one, which had appeared a few weeks before on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. I was surprised that Mr Naveiro had seen it -1 had not seen it myself; but, unlike Mr Naveiro, I did not have an air-mail subscription, and anyway I had been in Peru or Bolivia when it was published.

Mr Naveiro said, 'Do you know who would be interested in your views on Kipling? Borges.'

'Really? I've always wanted to meet him.'

'We publish him,' said Mr Naveiro. 'I'm sure it can be arranged.'

I did not hear from Mr Naveiro immediately. In the meantime, his publicity director sent a reporter to my hotel to interview me. The reporter was small, thin and anxious to know what I thought about Argentina. I hardly knew where to begin. Apart from the difficulty of expressing political complexities in Spanish (how did one say 'muddled aggression and seedy provincialism'?), there was the caution I had been usually scrupulous about observing: Don't criticize them - they hate to be criticized.

The reporter took my hesitation for timidity. He prompted me.

'Argentina is cultured, eh?' he said.

'Oh, yes, very cultured.'

He wrote this on his pad.

'Civilized - true?'

'Absolutely.'

He scribbled; he was very pleased.

'Good trains - English trains?'

'You said it.'

'Pretty girls?' he said, still smiling, still writing.

'Ravishing.'

'And Buenos Aires? It's like-'

'Paris,' I said.

'Of course,' he said, and screwed the cap back onto his pen. The interview was over.

That night I went to a party with the man who had translated my books into Spanish for the Argentine editions. He had earned my admiration by finding the source of a quotation I had mischievously left unattributed in the text of one. It was two lines from Thomas Moore's Intercepted Letters. But, then, Rolando Costa Picazo had taught in Ohio and Michigan, where such things were common knowledge. He too urged me to meet Borges.

'The question is not whether I want to meet Borges, but whether Borges wants to meet me.'

'He is reading your Kipling piece at the moment. If he likes it, he will want to meet you,' said Rolando. 'Now, here is someone you must meet,' he added, easing me towards an elderly gentleman.

The man smiled and shook my hand and said in Spanish, 'Delighted to meet you.'

Rolando said, 'He has translated Ezra Pound into Spanish.'

In English - the man was a translator after all - I said, 'It must be difficult to translate Pound into Spanish.'

The man smiled. He said nothing.

'The Cantos,' I said. 'They're difficult.' And I thought: difficult, if not complete bal der dash.

The man said, 'Yes. The Cantos.''

'Which ones do you like best?'

He shrugged. He smiled at Rolando now, but he was seeking help. And it was only after the longest time that I realized that this man, who had been recommended to me as an Argentine intellectual and translator, could not speak English. But how appropriate for a translator of Ezra Pound, I thought. Surely this ignorance was a great advantage, and I had no doubt that his versions were more felicitous than the originals.

Late the next afternoon, my phone rang.

'Borges wants to see you.'

'Wonderful,'I said.'When?'

'In fifteen minutes.'

20

THE BUENOS AIRES SUBTERRANEAN

Despite its eerie name, the Buenos Aires Subterranean is an efficient five-line network of subway trains. The same size as Boston's subway, it was built five years later, in 1913 (making it older than Chicago's or Moscow's), and as in Boston it quickly put the tram cars out of business. The apartment of Jorge Luis Borges was on Maipú, around the corner from Plaza General San Martin Station, on the Retiro-Constitucionline.

I had been eager to take the Subterranean ever since I heard of its existence; and I had greatly wished to talk to Borges. He was to me what Lady Hester Stanhope had been to Alexander Kinglake: 'in all society, the standing topic of interest', an eccentric genius, perhaps more than a prophet, hidden in the depths of an unholy country. In Eothen, one of my favourite travel books (' "Eothen" is, I hope, almost the only hard word to be found in the book,' says the author, 'and signifies . . . "From the East" '), Kinglake devotes an entire chapter to his meeting with Lady Hester. I felt I could do no less with Borges. I entered the Subterranean and, after a short ride, easily found his house.

The brass plaque on the landing of the sixth floor said Borges. I rang the bell and was admitted by a child of about seven. When he saw me he sucked his finger in embarrassment. He was the maid's child. The maid was Paraguayan, a well-fleshed Indian, who invited me in, then left me in the foyer with a large white cat. There was one dim light burning in the foyer, but the rest of the apartment was dark. The darkness reminded me that Borges was blind.

Curiosity and unease led me into a small parlour. Though the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed, I could make out a candelabra, the family silver Borges mentions in one of his stories, some paintings, old photographs and books. There was little furniture - a sofa and two chairs by the window, a dining table pushed against one w^all, and a wall and a half of bookcases. Something brushed my legs. I switched on a lamp: the cat had followed me here.

There was no carpet on the floor to trip the blind man. no intrusive furniture he could barge into. The parquet floor gleamed; there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The paintings were amorphous, but the three steel engravings were precise. I recognized them as Piranesi's 'Views of Rome'. The most Borges-like one was 'The Pyramid of Ces-tius' and could have been an illustration from Borges' own Ficciones. Piranesi's biographer Bianconi called him 'the Rembrandt of the ruins'. 'I need to produce great ideas,' said Piranesi. 'I believe that were I given the planning of a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it.' It was something Borges himself might have said.

The books were a mixed lot. One corner was mostly Everyman editions, the classics in English translation - Homer, Dante, Virgil. There were shelves of poetry in no particular order - Tennyson and E.E. Cum-mings, Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Hardy. There were reference books, Harvey's English Literature, The Oxford Book of Quotations, various dictionaries - including Doctor Johnson's - and an old leatherbound encyclopaedia. They were not fine editions; the spines were worn, the cloth had faded; but they had the look of having been read. They were well-thumbed, they sprouted paper page-markers. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

There was a sound of scuffing in the corridor, and a distinct grunt. Borges emerged from the dimly-lighted foyer, feeling his way along the wall. He was dressed formally, in a dark blue suit and dark tie; his black shoes were loosely tied, and a watch chain depended from his pocket. He was taller than I had expected, and there was an English cast to his face, a pale seriousness in his jaw and forehead. His eyes were swollen, staring, and sightless. But for his faltering, and the slight tremble in his hands, he was in excellent health. He had the fussy precision of a chemist. His skin was clear - there were no age-blotches on his hands - and there was a firmness in his face. People had told me he was 'about eighty'. He was then in his seventy-ninth year, but he looked ten years younger. 'When you get to my age,' he tells his double in the story The Other', 'you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You'll still make out the colour yellow and lights and shadows. Don't worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It's like a slow summer dusk.'

'Yes,' he said, groping for my hand. Squeezing it, he guided me to a chair. 'Please sit down. There's a chair here somewhere. Please make yourself at home.'

He spoke so rapidly that I was not aware of an accent until he had finished speaking. He seemed breathless. He spoke in bursts, but without hesitation, except when starting a new subject. Then, stuttering, he raised his trembling hands and seemed to claw the subject out of the air and shake ideas from it as he went on.

'You're from New England,' he said. That's wonderful. That's the best place to be from. It all began there- Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow. They started it. If it weren't for them there would be nothing. I was there- it was beautiful.'

'I've read your poem about it,' I said. Borges' 'New England 1967' begins, 'They have changed the shapes of my dream . . . '

'Yes, yes,' he said. He moved his hands impatiently, like a man shaking dice. He would not talk about his work; he was almost dismissive. 'I was lecturing at Harvard. I hate lecturing -1 love teaching. I enjoyed the States - New England. And Texas is something special. I was there with my mother. She was old, over eighty. We went to see the Alamo.' Borges' mother had died not long before, at the great age of ninety-nine. Her room is as she left it in death. 'Do you know Austin?'

I said I had taken the train from Boston to Fort Worth and that I had not thought much of Fort Worth.

'You should have gone to Austin,' said Borges. 'The rest of it is nothing to me - the mid-West, Ohio, Chicago. Sandburg is the poet of Chicago, but what is he? He's just noisy - he got it all from Whitman. Whitman was great, Sandburg is nothing. And the rest of it,' he said, shaking his fingers at an imaginary map of North America. 'Canada? Tell me, what has Canada produced? Nothing. But the South is interesting. What a pity they lost the Civil War - don't you think it is a pity, eh?'

I said I thought defeat had been inevitable for the South. They had been backward-looking and complacent, and now they were the only people in the States who ever talked about the Civil War. People in the North never spoke of it. If the South had won, we might have been spared some of these Confederate reminiscences.

'Of course they talk about it,' said Borges. 'It was a terrible defeat for them. Yet they had to lose. They were agrarian. But I wonder - is defeat so bad? In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, doesn't he say something about "the shamefulness of victory"? The Southerners were courageous, but perhaps a man of courage does not make a good soldier. What do you think?'

Courage alone could not make you a good soldier, I said, not any more than patience alone could make you a good fisherman. Courage might make a man blind to risk, and an excess of courage, without caution, could be fatal.

'But people respect soldiers,' said Borges. 'That's why no one really thinks much of the Americans. If America were a military power instead of a commercial empire, people would look up to it. Who respects businessmen? No one. People look at America and all they see are travelling salesmen. So they laugh.'

He fluttered his hands, snatched with them, and changed the subject. 'How did you come to Argentina?'

'After Texas, I took the train to Mexico.'

'What do you think of Mexico?'

'Ramshackle, but pleasant.'

Borges said, 'I dislike Mexico and the Mexicans. They are so nationalistic. And they hate the Spanish. What can happen to them if they feel that way? And they have nothing. They are just playing -playing at being nationalistic. But what they like especially is playing at being Red Indians. They like to play. They have nothing at all. And they can't fight, eh? They are very poor soldiers - they always lose. Look what a few American soldiers could do in Mexico! No, I don't like Mexico at all.'

He paused and leaned forward. His eyes bulged. He found my knee and tapped it for emphasis.

'I don't have this complex,' he said. 'I don't hate the Spanish. Although I much prefer the English. After 1 lost my sight in 1955 I decided to do something altogether new. So I learned Anglo-Saxon. Listen-'

He recited the entire Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon.

'That was the Lord's Prayer. Now this - do you know this?'

He recited the opening lines of The Seafarer.

'The Seafarer,' he said. 'Isn't it beautiful? I am partly English. My grandmother came from Northumberland, and there are other relatives from Staffordshire. 'Saxon and Celt and Dane" - isn't that how it goes? We always spoke English at home. My father spoke to me in English. Perhaps I'm partly Norwegian - the Vikings were in Northumberland. And York - York is a beautiful city, eh? My ancestors were there, too.'

'Robinson Crusoe was from York,' I said.

'Was he?'

' "I was born in the year something-something, in the city of York, of a good family . . ."'

'Yes, yes, I had forgotten that.'

I said there were Norse names all over the north of England, and gave as an example the name Thorpe. It was a place-name and a surname.

Borges said, 'Like the German dorf?

'Or Dutch dorp.’

‘This is strange. I will tell you something. I am writing a story in which the main character's name is Thorpe.'

‘That's your Northumberland ancestry stirring.'

'Perhaps. The English are wonderful people. But timid. They didn't want an empire. It was forced upon them by the French and the Spanish. And so they had their empire. It was a great thing, eh? They left so much behind. Look what they gave India - Kipling! One of the greatest writers.'

I said that sometimes a Kipling story was only a plot, or an exercise in Irish dialect, or a howling gaffe, like the climax of 'At the End of the Passage', where a man photographs the bogeyman on a dead man's retina and then burns the pictures because they are so frightening. But how did the bogeyman get there?

'It doesn't matter - he's always good. My favourite is "The Church that was at Antioch." What a marvellous story that is. And what a great poet. I know you agree with me - I read your piece in the New York Times. What I want you to do is read me some of Kipling's poems. Come with me,' he said, getting to his feet and leading me to a bookshelf. 'On that shelf - you see all the Kipling books? Now on the left is the Collected Poems. It's a big book.'

He was conjuring with his hands as I ran my eye across the Elephant Head Edition of Kipling. I found the book and carried it back to the sofa.

Borges said, 'Read me "Harp Song of the Dane Women".'

I did as I was told.

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

' "The old grey Widow-maker," ' he said. 'That is so good. You can't say things like that in Spanish. But I'm interrupting –go on.'

I began again, but at the third stanza he stopped me. '"the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you" - how beautiful!' I went on reading this reproach to a traveller -just the reading of it made me feel homesick - and every few stanzas Borges exclaimed how perfect a particular phrase was. He was quite in awe of these English compounds. Such locutions were impossible in Spanish. A simple poetic phrase such as 'world-weary flesh' must be rendered in Spanish as 'this flesh made weary by the world'. The ambiguity and delicacy is lost in Spanish, and Borges was infuriated that he could not attempt lines like Kipling's.

Borges said, 'Now for my next favourite, "The Ballad of East and West".'

There proved to be even more interruption-fodder in this ballad than there had been in 'The Harp Song', but though it had never been one of my favourites, Borges drew my attention to the good lines, chimed in on several couplets and continued to say, 'You can't do that in Spanish.'

'Read me another one,' he said.

'How about "The Way Through the Woods"?' I said, and read it and got goose pimples.

Borges said, 'It's like Hardy. Hardy was a great poet, but I can't read his novels. He should have stuck to poetry.'

'He did, in the end. He gave up writing novels.'

'He should never have started,' said Borges. 'Want to see something interesting?' He took me back to the shelves and showed me his Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was the rare eleventh edition, not a book of facts but a work of literature. He told me to look at India and to examine the signature on the illustrated plates. It was that of Lockwood Kipling. 'Rudyard Kipling's father-you see?'

We went on a tour through his bookshelves. He was especially proud of his copy of Johnson's Dictionary ('It was sent to me from Sing-Sing Prison, by an anonymous person'), his Moby Dick, his translation by Sir Richard Burton oí The Thousand and O ne Nights. He scrabbled at the shelves and pulled out more books; he led me to his study and showed me his set of Thomas De Quincey, his Beowulf -touching it, he began to quote- his Icelandic sagas.

'This is the best collection of Anglo-Saxon books in Buenos Aires,' he said.

'If not in South America.'

'Yes, I suppose so.'

We went back to the parlour library. He had forgotten to show me his edition of Poe. I said that I had recently read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

'I was talking about Pym just last night to Bioy Casares,' said Borges. Bioy Casares had been a collaborator on a sequence of stories. 'The ending of that book is so strange - the dark and the light.'

'And the ship with the corpses on it.'

'Yes,' said Borges a bit uncertainly. 'I read it so long ago, before I lost my sight. It is Poe's greatest book.'

'I'd be glad to read it to you.'

'Come tomorrow night,' said Borges. 'Come at seven-thirty. You can read me some chapters of Pym and then we'll have dinner.'

I got my jacket from the chair. The white cat had been chewing the sleeve. The sleeve was wet, but now the cat was asleep. It slept on its back, as if it wanted its belly scratched. Its eyes were tightly shut.

It was Good Friday. All over Latin America there were sombre processions, people carrying images of Christ, lugging crosses up volcanic mountains, wearing black shrouds, flagellating themselves, saying the Stations of the Cross on their knees, parading with skulls. But in Buenos Aires there was little of this penitential activity to be seen. Devotion, in this secular city, took the form of movie-going. Julia, which had won a number of Oscars, opened on Good Friday, but the theatre was empty. Across the street, at the Electric, The Ten Commandments the Fifties Bible-epic - was showing. The box-office line was two blocks long. And there was such a crowd at Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth that theatre-goers, five hundred or more, were standing piously in the rain.

I had spent the day transcribing the notes I had made on my lap the night before. Borges' blindness had enabled me to write unselfconsciously as he spoke. Again I boarded the Buenos Aires Subterranean to keep our appointment.

This time, the lights in Borges' apartment were on. His loose shuffling shoes announced him and he appeared, as over-dressed in the humid night heat as he had the previous evening.

‘Time for Poe,' he said. 'Please take a seat.'

The Poe volume was on the seat of a nearby chair. I picked it up and found Pym, but before I could begin, Borges said, 'I've been thinking about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Every page of it is very fine, and yet it is a dull book. I wonder why.'

'He wanted to write a great book. George Bernard Shaw told him to use a lot of semi-colons. Lawrence set out to be exhaustive, believing that if it was monumentally ponderous it would be regarded as great. But it's dull, and there's no humour in it. How can a book on the Arabs not be funny?'

'Huckleberry Finn is a great book,' said Borges. 'And funny. But the ending is no good. Tom Sawyer appears and it becomes bad. And there's Nigger Jim' - Borges had begun to search the air with his hands - 'yes, we had a slave market here at Retiro. My family wasn't very wealthy. We had only five or six slaves. But some families had thirty or forty.'

I had read that a quarter of Argentina's population had once been black. There were no blacks in Argentina now. I asked Borges why this was so.

'It is a mystery. But I remember seeing many of them.' Borges looked so youthful that it was easy to forget that he was as old as the century. I could not vouch for his reliability, but he was the most articulate witness I had met on my trip. 'They were cooks, gardeners, handymen,' he said. 'I don't know what happened to them.'

'People say they died of TB.'

'Why didn't they die of TB in Montevideo? It's just over there, eh? There is another story, equally silly, that they fought the Indians, and the Indians and the Negroes killed each other. That would have been in 1850 or so, but it isn't true. In 1914, there were still many Negroes in Buenos Aires-they were very common. Perhaps I should say 1910, to be sure.' He laughed suddenly. They didn't work very hard. It was considered wonderful to have Indian blood, but black blood is not so good a thing, eh? There are some prominent families in Buenos Aires that have it - a touch of the tar-brush, eh? My uncle used to tell me, "Jorge, you're as lazy as a nigger after lunch." You see, they didn't do much work in the afternoon. I don't know why there are so few here, but in Uruguay or Brazil - in Brazil you might run into a white man now and then, eh? If you're lucky, eh? Ha!'

Borges was laughing in a pitying, self-amused way. His face lit up.

'They thought they were natives! I overheard a black woman saying to an Argentine woman, "Well, at least we didn't come here on a ship!" She meant that she considered the Spanish to be immigrants. "At least we didn't come here on a ship!" '

'When did you hear this?'

'So many years ago,' said Borges. 'But the Negroes were good soldiers. They fought in the War of Independence.'

'So they did in the United States,' I said. 'But a lot were on the British side. The British promised them their freedom for serving in the British infantry. One Southern regiment was all black - Lord Dunmore's Ethiopians, it was called. They ended up in Canada.'

'Our blacks won the Battle of Cerrito. They fought in the war against Brazil. They were very good infantrymen. The gauchos fought on horseback, the Negroes didn't ride. There was a regiment - the Sixth. They called it - not the Regiment of Mulattoes and Blacks, but in Spanish "the Regiment of Brownies and Darkies". So as not to offend them. In Martin Fierro, they are called "men of humble colour" . . .well, enough, enough. Let's read Arthur Gordon Pym.'

'Which chapter? How about the one where the ship approaches full of corpses and birds?'

'No, I want the last one. About the dark and the light.'

I read the last chapter, where the canoe drifts into the Antarctic, the water growing warmer and then very hot, the white fall of ashes, the vapour, the appearance of the white giant. Borges interrupted from time to time, saying in Spanish, 'That is enchanting,' 'That is lovely' and 'How beautiful!'

When I finished, he said, 'Read the last chapter but one.'

I read Chapter 24, Pym's escape from the island, the pursuit of the maddened savages, the vivid description of vertigo. That long terrifying passage delighted Borges, and he clapped his hands at the end.

Borges said, 'Now how about some Kipling? Shall we puzzle out "Mrs Bathurst" and try to see if it is a good story?'

I said, 'I must tell you that I don't like "Mrs Bathurst" at all.'

'Fine. It must be bad. Plain Tales from the Hills then. Read "Beyond the Pale".'

I read 'Beyond the Pale', and when I got to the part where Bisesa sings a love song to Trejago, her English lover, Borges interrupted, reciting,

Alone upon the housetops, to the North

I turn and watch the lightning in the sky, -

The glamour of thy footsteps in the North,

Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

'My father used to recite that one,' said Borges. When I had finished the story, he said, 'Now you choose one.'

I read him the opium-smoker's story, 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows'.

'How sad that is,' said Borges. 'It is terrible. The man can do nothing. But notice how Kipling repeats the same lines. It has no plot at all, but it is lovely.' He touched his suit jacket. 'What time is it?' He drew out his pocket watch and touched the hands. 'Nine-thirty - we should eat.'

As I was putting the Kipling book back into its place - Borges insisted that the books must be returned to their exact place - I said, 'Do you ever re-read your own work?'

'Never. I am not happy with my work. The critics have greatly exaggerated its importance. I would rather read' - he lunged at the bookshelves and made a gathering motion with his hands - ''real writers. Ha!' He turned to me and said, 'Do you re-read my work?'

'Yes. "Pierre Menard"-'

'That was the first story I ever wrote. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven at the time. My father said, "Read a lot, write a lot, and don't rush into print" - those were his exact words. The best story I ever wrote was "The Intruder". And "South" is also good. It's only a few pages. I'm lazy - a few pages and I'm finished. But "Pierre Menard" is a joke, not a story.'

'I used to give my Chinese students "The Wall and the Books" to read.'

'Chinese students? I suppose they thought it was full of howlers. I think it is. It is an unimportant piece, hardly worth reading. Let's eat.'

He got his stick from the sofa in the parlour and we went out, down in the narrow lift, and through the wrought-iron gates. The restaurant was around the corner -1 could not see it, but Borges knew the way. So the blind man led me. Walking down this Buenos Aires street with Borges was like being led through Alexandria by Cavafy, or through Lahore by Kipling. The city belonged to him, and he had had a hand in inventing it.

The restaurant was full this Good Friday night, and it was extremely noisy. But as soon as Borges entered, tapping his stick, feeling his way through the tables he obviously knew well, a hush fell upon the diners. Borges was recognized, and at his entrance all talking and eating ceased. It was both a reverential and curious silence, and it was maintained until Borges took his seat and gave the waiter our order.

We had hearts of palm, and fish, and grapes. I drank wine, Borges stuck to water. He cocked his head sideways to eat, trying to spear the sections of palm with his fork. He tried a spoon next, and then despairingly used his fingers.

'Do you know the big mistake that people make when they try to film Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde?’ he said. 'They use the same actor for both men. They should use two different actors. That is what Stevenson intended. Jekyll was two men. And you don't find out until the end that it is the same man. You should get that hammerstroke at the end. Another thing. Why do directors always make Hyde a womanizer? He was actually very cruel.'

I said, 'Hyde tramples on a child and Stevenson describes the sound of the bones breaking.'

'Yes, Stevenson hated cruelty, but he had nothing against physical passion.'

'Do you read modern authors?'

'I never cease to read them. Anthony Burgess is good - a very generous man, by the way. We are the same - Borges, Burgess. It's the same name.'

'Any others?'

'Robert Browning,' said Borges, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. 'Now, he should have been a short story writer. If he had, he would have been greater than Henry James, and people would still read him.' Borges had started on his grapes. 'The food is good in Buenos Aires, don't you think?'

'In most ways, it seems a civilized place.'

He looked up. 'That may be so, but there are bombs every day.'

'They don't mention them in the paper.'

'They're afraid to print the news.'

'How do you know there are bombs?'

'Easy. I hear them,' he said.

Indeed, three days later there was a fire which destroyed much of the new colour television studio which had been built for the World Cup broadcasts. This was called 'an electrical fault'. Five days later two trains were bombed in Lomas de Zamora and Bernal. A week later a government minister was murdered; his corpse was found in a Buenos Aires street, and pinned to it was a note reading, A gift from the Montoneros.

'But the government is not so bad,' said Borges. 'Videla is a well-meaning military man.' Borges smiled and said slowly, 'He is not very bright, but at least he is a gentleman.'

'What about Perón?'

'Perón was a scoundrel. My mother was in prison under Perón. My sister was in prison. My cousin. Perón was a bad leader and, also, I suspect, a coward. He looted the country. His wife was a prostitute.'

'Evita?'

'A common prostitute.'

We had coffee. Borges called the waiter and said in Spanish, 'Help me to the toilet.' He said to me, 'I have to go and shake the bishop's hand. Ha!'

Walking back through the streets, he stopped at a hotel entrance and gave the metal awning posts two whacks with his stick. Perhaps he was not as blind as he pretended, perhaps it was a familiar landmark. He had not swung timidly. He said, 'That's for luck.'

As we turned the corner into Maipú he said, 'My father used to say, "What a rubbish story the Jesus story is. That this man was dying for the sins of the world. Who could believe that?" It is nonsense, isn't it?'

I said, 'That's a timely thought for Good Friday.'

'I hadn't thought ofthat! Oh, yes!' He laughed so hard he startled two passers-by.

As he fished out his door-key, I asked him about Patagonia.

'I have been there,' he said. 'But I don't know it well. I'll tell you this, though. It's a dreary place. A very dreary place.'

'I was planning to take the train tomorrow.'

'Don't go tomorrow. Come and see me. I like your reading.'

'I suppose I can go to Patagonia next week.'

'It's dreary,' said Borges. He had got the door open, and now he shuffled to the lift and pulled open its metal gates. The gate of the hundred sorrows,' he said, and entered, chuckling.

Borges was tireless. He urged me to visit him again and again. He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell. Each morning when I woke I sat down and wrote the conversations that had taken place the night before; then I walked around the city, and at nightfall I boarded the Subterranean. Borges said that he seldom went out. 'I don't go to the embassies, I don't go to parties - I hate to stand around and drink.'

I had been warned that he could be severe or bad tempered. But what I saw was close to angelic. There was something of the charlatan in him - he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure - he laughed hard at his own jokes - his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realized that he has successfully stolen the show. ('Stolen the show!' Borges would say. 'You can't say that in Spanish. That's why Spanish literature is so dull.') His was the perfect face for a sage, and yet, working his features a certain way, he could look like a clown, but never a fool. He was the gentlest of men; there was no violence in his talk and none in his gestures.

'I don't understand revenge,' he said. 'I have never felt it. And I don't write about it.'

'What about "Emma Zunz"?'

'Yes, that's the only one. But the story was given to me and I don't even think it's very good.'

'So you don't approve of getting even - of taking revenge for something that was done to you?'

'Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant.'

'What can you do?'

'Forget,' said Borges. 'That is all you can do. When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.'

'Does that work?'

'More or less.' He showed his yellow teeth. 'Less rather than more.'

Talking about the futility of revenge, he reached and his hands trembled with a new subject, but a related one, the Second World War.

'When I was in Germany just after the war,' he said, 'I never heard a word spoken against Hitler. In Berlin, the Germans said to me' - now he spoke in German - ' "Well, what do you think of our ruins?" The Germans like to be pitied - isn't that horrible? They showed me their ruins. They wanted me to pity them. But why should I indulge them? I said' - he uttered the sentence in German - ' "I have seen London." '

We continued to talk about Europe; the conversation turned to the Scandinavian countries and, inevitably, the Nobel Prize. I did not say the obvious thing, that Borges himself had been mentioned as a possible candidate. But, quite off his own bat, he said, 'If I were offered it, I would rush up and grasp it in two hands. But which American writers have got it?'

'Steinbeck,' I said.

'No. I don't believe that.'

'It's true.'

'I can't believe that Steinbeck got it. And yet Tagore got it, and he was an atrocious writer. He wrote corny poems - moons, gardens. Kitsch poems.'

'Maybe they lose something when they're translated from Bengali into English.'

‘They could only gain by that. But they're corny.' He smiled, and his face became beatific - the more so because of his blindness. It frequently went this way: I could watch him studying a memory. He said, 'Tagore came to Buenos Aires.'

'Was this after he won the Nobel Prize?'

'It must have been. I can't imagine Vittoria Ocampo inviting him unless he had won it.' He cackled at that. 'And we quarrelled. Tagore and I.'

'What did you quarrel about?'

Borges had a mock-pompous voice. He reserved it for certain statements of freezing dismissiveness. Now he threw his head back and said in that voice, 'He uttered heresies about Kipling.'

We had met this evening to read the Kipling story, 'Dayspring Mishandled', but we never got to it. It had grown late, it was nearly dinnertime; we talked about Kipling's stories and then about horror stories ingenerai.

'"They" is a very fine story. I like Lovecraft's horror stories. His plots are very good, but his style is atrocious. I once dedicated a story to him. But it is not as good as "They" - that is very triste.'

'I think Kipling was writing about his own dead children. His daughter died in New York, his son was killed in the war. And he never went back to the States.'

'Well,' said Borges, 'he had that fight with his brother-in-law.'

I said, 'But they laughed him out of court.'

'"Laughed him out of court" - you can't say that in Spanish!' He was gleeful, then he pretended to be morose. 'You can't say anything in Spanish.'

We went out to eat. He asked me what I had been doing in South America. I said that I had given some lectures on American literature, and that twice in describing myself as a feminist to Spanish-speaking audiences I had been taken for a man confessing a kind of deviation. Borges said that I must remember that the Latin Americans were not very subtle on this point. I went on to say that I had spoken about Mark Twain, Faulkner, Poe, and Hemingway.

'What about Hemingway?' he asked.

'He had one great fault,' I said. 'I think it is a serious one. He admired bullies.'

Borges said, 'I could not agree more.'

It was a pleasant meal, and afterwards, walking back to his apartment house- again he whacked the awning posts at the hotel - he said, 'Yes, I think you and I agree on most things, don't we? Eh?'

'Maybe,' I said. 'But one of these days I have to go to Patagonia.'

'We don't say Patagonia,' said Borges. 'We say "Chubut" or "Santa Cruz". We never say Patagonia.'

'W H Hudson said Patagonia.'

'What did he know? Idle Days in Patagonia is not a bad book, but you notice there are no people in it - only birds and flowers. That's the way it is in Patugonia. There are no people there. The trouble with Hudson was that he lied all the time. That book is full of lies. But he believed his lies, and soon he couldn't tell the difference between what was true and what was false.' Borges thought a moment, then said, There is nothing in Patagonia. It's not the Sahara, but it's as close as you can get to it in Argentina. No, there is nothing in Patagonia.'

If so, I thought - if there is really nothing there - then it is the perfect place to end this book.

21

THE 'LAGOS DEL SUR'

(LAKES OF THE SOUTH) EXPRESS

Patagonia was also the way home. I had cancelled several train reservations in order to spend more time with Borges, but now I stopped procrastinating and made firm plans to head south. I had a few days in hand before I could leave Buenos Aires but, excluded from the Argentine intimacy of the long Easter holiday, I roamed the city on my own. It now depressed me. Some of the gloom the natives had temporarily dispelled entered my own soul and dampened it. It was partly the effect of La Boca, the Italian district near the harbour; there were boys swimming in the oily, evil-smelling harbour, and I saw more fakery than charm in the Sicilian-style houses and restaurants; some of the squalor was affectation, the rest was real dirt. I went to the Chacarita Cemetery - everyone seemed to be doing that. I found Peron's tomb and saw women kissing his bronze creepy face and twining carnations around the handle on the mausoleum door ('Fanatics!' said a man standing nearby. 'It is like football,' whispered his wife). One night, driving towards a suburb with Rolando, we were overtaken by a policeman on a motorcycle, who waved us to the roadside. Rolando did the talking. The policeman said that we had gone through a red light. Rolando insisted the light had been green. At last, the policeman agreed: the light had been green. 'But it is your word against mine,' said the policeman, in a voice coyly extortionate. 'Do you want to be here all night, or do you want to settle this now?' Rolando gave him about seven dollars' worth of pesos. The policeman saluted and wished us a happy Easter.

'I'm leaving,' I told Rolando.

'You don't like Buenos Aires?'

'No, I like it,' I said. 'But I want to leave before I have to change my mind.'

It took an hour for the Lakes of the South Express to disentangle itself from the city. We had left at five, on a sunny afternoon, but when we began speeding across the pampas, a cool immense pasture, it was growing dark. Then the afterglow of sunset was gone, and in the half-dark the grass was grey, the trees black; some cattle were as reposeful as boulders and in one field five white cows were as luminous as laundry.

This was the General Roca Railway. It had recently been bombed, but such a line was easy to bomb. It ran through the provinces of La Pampa and Rio Negro, through empty grassland and desert and across the Great Plateau of Patagonia. It took very little skill to blow up trains in these scarcely inhabited places. Anyone could be a terrorist here. But the sleeping car attendant said that I would have nothing to worry about. For some reason, the terrorists preferred freight trains - perhaps there was more damage to be done on freight trains; but this was entirely a passenger train. 'Relax,' he said. 'Enjoy yourself. Let us do the worrying. It is our job to worry.'

The sleeping car was an unusual shape. It was old, and wooden, and the wood panelling of the interior was dark polished mahogany. It was very long, and in the middle there was a lobby, a sort of sitting room, with upholstered chairs and card tables. There were doors here, too; this was where the passengers - most of them elderly - congregated and talked about how cold it was in Patagonia. I had been given a First-Class ticket. I kept to my compartment, wrote about Buenos Aires and Borges and regretted that I had not asked him in my Boswell role, 'Why is a fox's tail bushy, Sir?'

At dinner that first evening - wine, two salads, the statutory steak -a fellow in an army uniform was seated at my table. It was purely for the waiter's convenience - there were only six of us eating in the dining car, but we were gathered together to save the waiter running the length of the car to serve us. The soldier was young. I asked him where he was going.

'Comodoro Rivadavia,' he said. 'It is an ugly place.'

'So you're going to Patagonia, too:'

'I don't have any choice,' he said, tugging at his uniform. 'I'm in the service.'

'You have to do it?'

'Everyone does- for a year.'

'It could be worse,' I said. 'You don't have a war.'

'Not a war, but a problem - with Chile, over the Beagle Channel. It had to be this year! This is an ugly year to be in the service. I might have to fight.'

'I see. You don't want to fight the Chileans?'

'I don't want to fight anyone. I want to be in Buenos Aires. What did you think of it? Beautiful, eh? Pretty girls, eh?'

'What sort of an army does Chile have?'

'No good - not very big. But the Chilean navy is huge. They've got ships, boats, cannons, everything. I'm not worried about the army -it's the navy that scares me. Where are you going?'

'Esquel,' I said.

He snorted.'Why there?'

The train goes there.'

'The train goes to Bariloche, too. That's where you should go. Mountains, lakes, snow, pretty houses. It's like Switzerland or Austria.'

'I've been to Switzerland and Austria.'

'The snow is fantastic.'

'I came to South America to get away from snow. It was ten feet deep where I come from.'

'What I'm saying is that Esquel is only a little bit pretty, but Bariloche is fantastic.'

'Maybe I'll take your advice and go to Bariloche after Esquel.'

'Forget Esquel. Forget Patagonia. They're ugly. I'm telling you, Buenos Aires is the place to be.'

So even here, within striking distance of the little town I had circled on my map in Boston, they were trying to discourage me.

Hearing frog-croaks that night, I peered out of the window and saw fireflies. I slept badly - the wine gave me insomnia (was this the reason the Argentines always diluted it by mixing it with water?) - but, wakeful, I was comforted by a great orange disc of moon. Towards dawn I began to drowse; I slept through Bahia Bianca, a city I had wanted to see, and did not wake until we started to cross the Rio Colorado. Some people take this to be the frontier of Patagonia, and indeed there was nothing to be seen after we reached the far bank. Nothingness, I had been told, was the prevailing feature of Patagonia. But grassland intervened, and with it, cattle grazing under an empty sky. For the next few hours, this was all: grass, cattle, sky. And it was chilly. The towns were small, no more than clusters of flat-roofed farm buildings which quickly diminished to specks as the train moved on.

Just after eleven that morning we came to the town of Carmen de Patagones, on the north bank of the Rio Negro. At the other end of the bridge was Viedma. This river I took to be the true dividing line between the fertile part of Argentina and the dusty Patagonian plateau. Hudson begins his book on Patagonia with a description of this river valley, and the inaccuracy of its name was consistent with all the misnamed landscape features I had seen since Mexico. 'The river was certainly miscalled Cusar-leofu, or Black River, by the aborigines,' says Hudson, 'unless the epithet referred only to its swiftness and dangerous character; for it is not black at all in appearance . . . The water, which flows from the Andes across a continent of stone and gravel, is wonderfully pure, in colour a clear sea-green.' We remained on the north bank, at a station on the bluff. A lady in a shed was selling stacks of bright red apples, five at a time. She looked like the sort of brisk enterprising woman you see on a fall day in a country town in Vermont -her hair in a bun, rosy cheeks, a brown sweater and heavy skirt. I bought some apples and asked if they were Patagonian. Yes, she said, they were grown right here. And then, 'Isn't it a beautiful day!'

It was sunny, with a stiff breeze riffling the Lombardy poplars. We were delayed for about an hour, but I didn't mind. In fact, the longer we were delayed the better, since I was scheduled to get off the train at Jacobacci at the inconvenient hour of one-thirty in the morning. The connecting train to Esquel was not leaving until six a.m., so it hardly mattered what time I got to Jacobacci.

With 'the aid of a bright sun', said Charles Darwin, who had come to Carmen on the Beagle, the view was 'almost picturesque'. But he had found the town squalid. 'These Spanish colonies do not, like our British ones, carry within themselves the elements of growth.'

We crossed the river; it was only a few hundred yards wide, but the experience, even after so many repetitions in South America, was startling to me: on the far bank we entered a different land. The soil was sand and gravel, there was no shade, the land was brown. Over in Carmen de Patagones there were cattle grazing and poplars grew and the grass was green. But there was no grass beyond Viedma. There was scrub and dust, and at once a pair of dust-devils rose up and staggered towards the horizon.

I was in the dining car, eating my lunch. A plastics salesman, on his way to the Welsh settlement at Trelew, chucked his hand disgustedly at the window and said, There is just more and more and more of this, all the way to Jacobacci.'

You might at first mistake it for a fertile place. At the horizon there is a stripe of rich unbroken green, with the bumps of bushes showing. In the middle distance it is greeny yellow, paling to a bumpier zone with patches of brown. Up close, in the foreground, you see the deception: these sparse, small-leaved thorn bushes create the illusion of green, and it is these dry brittle things that cover the plain. The thorn bushes are rooted in dust, and the other bushes are lichen-coloured and nearly fungoid in appearance. There are not even weeds on the ground, only these bushes, and they might well be dead. The birds are too high to identify. There are no insects at all. There is no smell.

And this was only the beginning of Patagonia. We were as yet still travelling along the coast, around the Gulf of San Matías. One would hardly have known the sea to be so near, although in the middle of the afternoon what first appeared to be a lake came into view, grew fuller and bluer and proved to be the Atlantic Ocean. The land continued scrubby, the old salt water tides had made the soil more desolate by poisoning it.

We passed villages; they were named as towns on the map, but in reality no name would do. What were they? Six flat weatherbeaten buildings, of which three were latrines; four widely spaced trees, a lame dog, a few chickens, and the wind blowing so hard a pair of ladies' bloomers were flapping horizontal from a clothesline. And sometimes, in the middle of the desert, there were solitary houses, made out of mud blocks or dusty bricks. These were a riddle; they had the starkness of cartoons. The picket fence of branches and sticks- what were they enclosing? what were they shutting out? - was no aid to fathoming the purpose of such huts.

We came to San Antonio Oeste, a small town on the blue waters of the Gulf of San Matias, with the look of an oasis. About forty people got off the train here, since they could catch buses at the local depot to the towns farther down the coast of Patagonia, Comodoro and Puerto Madryn. Seeing that we were stalled, I got off and hiked up and down in the wind.

The waiter leaned out of the window of the dining car.

'Where are you going?'

'Esquel.'

'No!'

'Via Jacobacci.'

'No! That train is only this big!' He measured a small distance with his fingers.

In the United States and Mexico I had avoided telling people where I was going: I had not thought their credulity could take it. Then, in South America, I had mentioned Patagonia: the news was received politely. But here, the closer I got to Esquel, the more distant it was made to seem, and now it could have been farther away than ever. I got the message: no one ended a journey in such a place; Esquel was where journeys began. But I had known all along that I had no intention of writing about being in a place - that took the skill of a miniaturist. I was more interested in the going and the getting there, in the poetry of departures. And I had got here by boarding a subway train filled with Boston commuters, who had left me and the train and had gone to work. I had stayed on and now I was in San Antonio Oeste in the Pata-gonian province of Rio Negro. The travel had been a satisfaction; being in this station was a bore.

We continued south-west, making for the province of Chubut. The landscape was no longer green, even in that illusory way. It was halftones of brown and grey and the low ugly thorn bushes were sparser, with fewer leaves. There were small suffer plants beneath them, as hard and fan-like as coral. The soil was not pulverized enough to make mud-blocks. At great intervals there were houses, but these were made of logs; and it was surprising to see logs in a place where there were no trees. Hudson and other Patagonian travellers mention the bird-life - Hudson goes on for pages about the birdsong in the desert - but I saw nothing but oversize swallows and one hawk all afternoon. There were supposed to be rheas, flamingoes and egrets here, but when I grumbled to myself about not seeing them I was reminded of Thorn-berry in Costa Rica ('Where are the parrots and monkeys?') and stopped looking for them. It was astonishing how empty a place it was. Borges had called it dreary. It was not dreary. It was hardly anything. There was not enough substance in it for it to have a mood. A desert is an empty canvas; it is you who give it features and a mood, who work at creating the mirage and making it live. But I was incurious; the desert was deserted, as empty as I felt.

Fine dust poured through the windows and billowed in the corridor and settled in the little lobby at the centre of the sleeping car. There were men in the lobby, but those near the wall of the car were almost obscured by it. They were seven feet from me. I had never minded dust very much, but I found this hard to take. It had a way of trickling through the door-jambs and the cracks in the window frames and swelling in the car.

There were some surprises. I had given up all hope of seeing something growing in Patagonia when, at the town of Valcheta, I saw poplars fencing in a field of grapevines-a vineyard herein the desolate land; and an apple orchard. The small river at Valcheta explained it - it flowed from the south, from the volcanic tableland of the plateau. But Valcheta was a village, and it was clear from the villages farther east that they were there because of this northbound river. They had been founded where wells could be dug.

I had been getting out of the train at each stop, simply so that I could draw a breath. But as the day wore on it grew chillier, and now it was almost cold. The passengers remarked on the cold; they were used to the heavy air of Buenos Aires. They remained wrapped up in the dusty lobby, some with handkerchiefs over their mouths, making small-talk.

'How is the weather in Bariloche?'

'Rainy - very rainy.'

'Oh, sir, you are not telling the truth ! You are being very cruel !'

'All right, the weather is lovely.'

'I know it is. Bariloche is so pretty. And we'll be there Tuesday morning!'

They had cameras. I almost laughed out loud at the thought of anyone bringing a camera here with the intention of taking snapshots of the sights. The very idea! You see an unusual feature of the landscape and you realize it is a mud puddle, given ribs by a breeze. The sun near seven was bright and low, and for a few minutes the foul stunted thorn bushes were beautifully lit and cast long shadows across the desert. There were scoops and eruptions far off, and the landscape became familiar. It was the brown eroded landscape you see in the illustrations on the back pages of a school Bible. 'Palestine,' says the caption, or 'The Holy Land', and you look: dust, withered bushes, blue sky, kitty litter.

At dinner that night I was joined by a young couple who had recently been to Brazil. They hailed from Buenos Aires, and I guessed they were on their honeymoon. It was sunset, the sky bright blue, bright yellow, the landscape black; and we had just arrived at the windblown station of Ministero Ramos Mexia. It was not on the map. The woman was talking: they ate hearty breakfasts in Brazil; there were a lot of black people there; everything was expensive. And outside the window, on the platform of Ministero, boys were selling walnuts and grapes.

Then the sun was gone. It was immediately cold and very dark, and the people near the train walked to the overbright lights which were hung on the station posts. They moved out of the darkness and settled near the light like moths.

Our dusty dining car seemed luxurious in comparison with this remote station. The young couple - a moment before they had been talking about the poverty in Brazil - became self-conscious.

Outside, a boy sang, 'Grapes! Grapes! Grapes!' He hoisted his basket to the window.

'They are so poor here,' said the lady. The waiter had just served us with steaks, but none of us had begun to eat.

'They are forgotten,' said her husband.

The people on the station platform were laughing and pointing. For a moment, I thought we might be cheated out of our guilt - the people in Ministero seemed fairly jolly. The train moved on, and then we attacked our steaks.

When this couple left and went back to their compartment, the conductor asked if he could sit down. 'By all means,' I said, and poured him a glass of wine.

'I have been meaning to ask you,' he said. 'Where did you get your free pass?'

I said, 'From a certain general.'

He did not pursue the subject. 'Argentina's expensive, eh? Guess how much I earn.'

A man in Buenos Aires had told me the average wage in Argentina was about £50 a month. It seemed rather low, but here I had a chance to verify it. I translated £50 into pesos and said that I guessed he earned this much a month.

'Less,' said the conductor. 'Much less.' He said he earned about £40 a month. 'How much do they earn in the States?'

I did not have the heart to tell him the truth. I decided to soften the blow and said that a conductor earned about £50 a week.

'I thought so,' he said. 'You see? Much more than we do.'

'But food is expensive in the States,' I said. 'It is cheap here.'

'A little bit cheap. But everything else is expensive. You want clothes? You want shoes? They're expensive. And yet you might think it is just Argentina that is this way. No, it is the whole of South America. There are countries that are much worse off than we are.'

He poured himself another glass of my wine, splashed some soda into it and muttered, 'When the people come to see the World Cup in July they will be very surprised. Like you, eh? "What a wonderful civilized city this is!" That is what they'll say. Then they'll see how expensive it is. They will want to go home!'

'Are you interested in football?' I asked.

'No,' he snapped. Then he reflected a moment and said very slowly, 'No. I hate football. I don't know why exactly. In this respect, I am a very unusual person. Most people are crazy about it. But want to know my real objection?'

'Yes, go ahead.'

'It is too dirty. It is unfair. Watch a football game - you will see. They are always kicking each other in the ankles. The referees don't care at all. Kick, kick - punch, punch. It is stupid. It is unfair. People love the game for its roughness. They like to see fights, bleeding ankles.' He swigged the wine. 'Me? I like to see skill. Now tennis is a nice clean and safe sport, and basketball is very good. No fights, no kicking. The referee writes down the fouls - three infractions and out yougo.'

We went on talking. He told me he had been working on the railway for thirty-two years.

'Have you been to Patagonia?' I asked.

'This is Patagonia.' He tapped on the window. It was dark outside, but the dust was pouring through the crack between the sill and the frame. He might have been gesturing at that dust.

'I take it you worked for the British then.'

'Ah, the British! I liked them, even though I am a German.'

'You are a German?'

'Sure.'

But he was speaking as Americans do. We're English, say some citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, referring to the fact that their ancestors abandoned soot-grimed mining towns in Yorkshire and made enough money raising pigs to set up as gentry and keep Jews out of the local hunt clubs. At my high school, a boy who was good at algebra explained that it was because he was Albanian.

Some of this raw uncertainty, this fumbling with pedigrees was evident in Argentina. The Argentine conductor told me his surname. It was German. 'Listen,' he said, 'my first name is Otto!' He did not of course speak German. Mr DiAngelo and his chunky-faced mates in the dining car did not speak Italian. Mr Kovacs the ticket-puncher did not speak Hungarian. The one immigrant in Argentina I met who had yet to become deracinated was an Armenian -1 thought of him as Mr Totalitarian: he was a believer in dictators, and Totalitarian had an appropriately Armenian ring to it. He dressed in a smock and a little blue cap and every day he read his Armenian newspaper, which was published in Buenos Aires. He had left Armenia sixty years before.

The conductor - Otto - said, 'You are getting out at Jacobacci?'

'Yes. What time do we arrive?'

'About two, tomorrow morning.'

'What do I do at Jacobacci?'

'Wait,' he said. 'The train to Esquel does not leave until five-thirty.'

'You've taken that one, have you?'

Otto's expression said, You must be joking! But he had a tender conscience and the presence of mind to say, 'No, there is no sleeping car on that train.' He thought a moment, sipping wine. There is not very much on that train, you know. It is small.' He used the Spanish double-diminutive: 'It is teeny-weeny. It takes hours and hours. But go to bed, sir. I will wake you up when we get there.'

He drank the last of his wine and soda water. Then he rattled the ice cubes in his glass and tossed them into his mouth. Then he stood up and looked out of the black window at black Patagonia and the yellow moon which, being misshapen, was a perfect example of a gibbous moon. He chewed the ice, crunch-crunch on his molars. When I could not stand the sound any longer I went to bed. There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice-cubes.

22

THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS

It was not necessary for Otto to wake me up; the dust did that. It filled my compartment, and as the Lakes of the South Express hurried across the plateau where it seldom rains (what good were leakproof shoes here?), the dust was raised, and our speed forced it through the rattling windows and the jiggling door. I woke feeling suffocated and made a face mask of my bed sheet in order to breathe. When I opened the door a cloud of dust blew against me. It was no ordinary dust storm, more like a disaster in a mine shaft: the noise of the train, the darkness, the dust, the cold. There was no danger of my sleeping through Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was fully awake just after midnight. I gritted my teeth and sand grains crunched in my molars.

I put my suitcase in order, stuffed my pockets with the apples I had bought in Carmen de Patagones and went to the vestibule to wait for Otto's signal. There I sat. The dust whirled out of the corridor and gusted around the light-bulbs and covered the mirrors and windows with hamster fur. I held a handkerchief against my face. It was no use washing; there was no soap, and the water was ice cold.

Otto appeared sometime later. He had put on his railwayman's uniform over his pyjamas and looked haggard. He tapped his wristwatch and in a groggy voice said, 'Jacobacci, twenty minutes.'

I wanted to go back to bed. The last thing I wanted was to leave the safety of this train for the uncertainty outside. The train was only dusty, and I had a nest here; out there was emptiness, and nothing was certain. Every person I had met had warned me against taking the train to Esquel. But what could I do? I had to go to Esquel to go home.

I had expected that I would be the only person to get out at Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was wrong. There was a pair of old men carrying large oil drums as part of their luggage, a woman with one child around her neck and another tagging along behind her, a couple whose suitcase was bound with string and belts, and others who were shadows. The station was small - there was just about room for all of us on the platform. The faces of the people in the second class coaches, who had been woken by the jolt of the stop, the station lights, were fatigued and bloodless. For half an hour the train hissed at the platform, and then it drew out very slowly. It left dust and dim light and silence. It seemed to take the world with it.

That express train - and how I yearned to be back on it - had blurred distance and altitude. The statistics were given at Jacobacci. We were over a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, and since Carmen de Patagones, which was at sea-level, we had climbed to over 3,000 feet, on a plateau that did not descend again until the Straits of Magellan. In this wind, at this altitude, at this time of night - two in the morning - it was very cold in Jacobacci. No one stops at Jacobacci, people had said. I could disprove that. Passengers had got off the train. I assumed that, like me, they would be waiting for the train to Esquel. I looked around for them. They were gone.

Where? Into that wind, that darkness, those huts in the desert. They were not changing trains - they lived in Jacobacci. Later I judged it to be a naive thought, but at the time I reflected on how strange it was that there were people - immigrants and the children of immigrants -who had chosen to live here, of all places. There was no water, no shade, the roads were terrible, and little paid employment was possible. However tough the people, they did not have the stamina and ingenuity of the Indians who, in any case, had never lived in this part of Patagonia. To the north-east were the fertile grasslands of Bahia Blanca, to the west the lakes - the Tyrolean paradise of Bariloche. For the sake of a few sheep and cattle, and a baffling stubbornness, people lived in this tiny Patagonian town, where the rail line divided, a railway junction in the desert. But it was a naive thought. Some people required space much more than they required grass or trees, and for them cities and forests were stews of confusion. You can be yourself here, a Welshman told me in Patagonia. Well, that much was true.

I left my suitcase on the platform, paced for a while and smoked my pipe. There would not be a train to Buenos Aires for three days. A Unesco poster nailed to the station wall told me about malnutrition in Latin America. As in Guatemala, a sign said Use The Train - It Is Cheaper! And another said, The Train Is Your Friend- Be A Friend of The Train! Hanging from a platform post was a bronze bell, like an old school bell. The station master had rung it just before the Lakes of the South Express had pulled out, but no one had boarded.

The train had gone in one direction, the Jacobacci passengers in another. So only I was left, like Ishmael: 'And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.' It was cold in this dismal place, but I had no choice but to wait four hours for the teeny-weeny steam train to Esquel. But I also thought: It's perfect. If one of the objects of travel was to give yourself the explorer's thrill that you were alone, that after fifteen or twenty thousand miles you had outrun everyone else and were embarked on a solitary mission of discovery in a remote place, then I had accomplished the traveller's dream. The train travels a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, stops in the middle of the desert and you get out. You look around; you're alone. It is like arriving. In itself it is like discovery - it has that singularity. The sky was full of stars in unfamiliar constellations, and even the moon was distorted, like an antipodean version of the one I was used to. This was all new. In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. The conceit of this, the idea of being able to report it - for I had deliberately set out to write a book, hadn't I? - made up for the discomfort. Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition.

A voice, a frog-croak, said, 'Tea?'

It was the station master. He wore a winter coat and a scarf and cracked boots and had a silver General Roca Railways badge on his coat collar. The tiny gas stove in his office afforded some heat, and a small dented tea kettle rocked on an improvised wire grill.

I thought I had better explain. I said, 'I am waiting for the train to Esquel.'

' Esquel is a very nice place.'

This was the view from Jacobacci. He was the first person I had met to praise Esquel. But having seen a bit of Jacobacci I could understand why. People in Belchertown, Massachusetts, always have a good word for Holyoke.

He had packed maté leaves (they are from an evergreen tree, the Ilex) into a small cup and inserted a silver straw. The cup was bone, a cow's horn with crude ornamental writing on it.

He said, 'There is lots to do in Esquel. Hotels, restaurants. There are big farms. Go about fifty kilometres and you will find a lovely park - trees, grass, everything. Yes, Esquel is a nice place.'

He poured boiling water over the leaves and handed me the tea.

'You like it?'

'Very good. I like maté.' He had put too much sugar in it. It tasted disgusting.

'I mean, the cup.'

I looked at the cup.

'A cow's horn,' he said. 'It is from Paraguay.'

The scratches on the horn said as much. I told him I admired it.

'You have been to Paraguay?'

He shrugged. 'My wife. Her brother is there. She went there last year.' Hegrinned.'Inaplane.'

He was nodding, making another cup of tea. I asked him questions about Jacobacci, and the train, and Patagonia. His replies were not interesting. He wanted to talk about money. How much had my suitcase cost? How much was a house in the United States? What did I earn?

How much did a new car cost? By way of reply I told him how much a pound of steak cost in Massachusetts. That took his breath away. He stopped complaining and began to boast about the price of sirloin.

If only he had said, Want to hear something strange? He was old enough to know a good story. But he was half asleep, and it was cold, and nearly three in the morning. So I left him alone and went outside. I walked up the tracks, away from the lights of the station. The wind in the thorn bushes rasped like sand in a chute. The air smelled of dust. The moon on the bushes shone blue across the bumpy monotony of Patagonia.

I heard a growl. There was a low black hut about thirty yards away, andi suppose my footsteps on the gravel of the railway line had woken the dog. He began to bark. His bark woke one nearby and this nearer one yapped loudly. I have never managed to overcome my childhood fear of being bitten by a dog, and large barking dogs petrify me. There are Irish wolfhounds slavering in my worst nightmares. The most aggressive dogs are owned by old people and lovely women and ugly midget men and childless couples. He won't hurt you, say these people, enjoying my terror, and I want to say, Maybe not, but I might hurt him, In South America - the fact is well-known - many of the dogs are rabid. They are not the cowering pariahs I had seen in Ceylon and Burma, but sleeker, fangy, wolf-like creatures which were encouraged by the natives. There were always dogs in the Indian villages in Peru and Bolivia, looking much more alert than the Indians themselves. The silly things had chased the train. I was afraid of getting rabies. The cure is as bad as the disease.' It was not an irrational fear: I had seen notices warning people of the dangers of mad dogs.

One dog, smaller than his bark suggested - about the size of a satchel - pushed through the thorn bushes and hurried onto the track. He crouched and snarled, summoning the other one. I put my hands into tny pockets and started walking backwards. I glanced back at the lighted station -1 was stupid to have strayed so far. The dogs were now together on the tracks and approaching me, but warily, rushing forward and barking loudly and keeping themselves low. I looked for a stick to beat them with (would a beating madden them and make them killers, or would it drive them away?), but this was the desert. Apart from the few poplars at the station there was not a tree for hundreds of miles. I wanted to run, but I knew they would understand this as a sign of cowardice and pounce on me. I continued to walk backwards, keeping my eye on them and fearing them too much to hate them. Nearer the station I was given hope by the poplars - at least I could climb one and be safe. But there was light here, too; the light seemed to worry the dogs. They kept in the shadows, darting between the railway cars, and when they saw I was safe on the platform they chased each other. They were small, stupid, pathetic and crippled; and from my position of safety I hated them.

The station master had heard the commotion. He said, 'Don't go out there very far. There are a lot of dogs around.'

I dragged my suitcase to a wooden bench. I had discarded every book but Boswell, and this I started to re-read. My hands were cold. I tucked the book away and put on another sweater, and with my hands in my pockets I lay on the bench, under the sign The Train Is Your Friend. I stared at the light-bulb and gave thanks for not having been bitten by a rabid dog.

Rational or not, it was my fear. There are many satisfactions in solitary travel, but there are just as many fears. The worst is the most constant: it is the fear of death. It is impossible to spend months travelling alone and arrive in Patagonia and not feel as if one has done something very foolish. In the cold hours before dawn in such a desolate place, the whole idea seems foolhardy, an unnecessary risk, and thoroughly pointless. I had arrived alone and had nearly reached my destination, but what was the point? I had intended to enjoy myself; I had no point to prove. And yet every day I know this fear. Passing a car crash, reading of a train wreck, seeing a hearse or a graveyard; in the back of a swerving bus or noticing a firedoor that was locked (the firedoors in most hotels I stayed in were kept padlocked at night to prevent thieves from entering), or scribbling a post card and seeing the ambiguity in my sentence This is my last trip - all of it started a solemn death-knell at the back of my brain.

I had left a safe place and had journeyed to a dangerous one. The risk was death and it seemed even more imminent because, so far, no bad thing had befallen me. It seemed that to travel here, in this way, was asking for trouble. Landslides, plane crashes, food poisoning, riots, blow-outs, sharks, cholera, floods, mad dogs: they were everyday events in this neck of the woods - you needed a charmed life to avoid them. And, lying there on the bench, I did not congratulate myself on how far I had come, that I was within an ace of my destination. Rather, I understood the people who had sniggered when I had told them where I was headed. They were right to mock; in their simple way, they had seen the futility of it. Mr Thornberry, in the Costa Rican jungle, had said, 'I know what I want to see. Parrots and monkeys! Where are they?' There were guanacos in Patagonia ('Guanacos spit at you!'). Bui really, was it worth risking your life to see a guanaco? Or, to put it another way, was it worth even one night half-frozen on a wooden bench in a Patagonian railway station, to hear the trill of the celebrated Flute-bird? I did not think so then. Later, it seemed such a diverting story I forgot my fear. But I was lucky. Usually, throughout this trip, I had looked out of a train window and thought: What a terrible place to die in.

I was also worried about losing my passport, my ticket home, or being robbed of all my money; of catching hepatitis and spending two months in a hospital in a desperate place like Guayaquil or Villazón. These were informed fears. 'We risk our lives every day, just crossing the street,' friendly people say, to reassure us. But there are greater risks in the Andes and in primitive countries, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

And yet, on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people and dogs and electric lights, it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which is also an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to make me want to go forward.

I dozed, but when I did I woke up cold. I tried to stay awake and warm. I went for three more walks, giving the dogs a wide berth. There were cockcrows, but no signs of dawn; and the only sound was the wind, pushing against the station.

I had arrived at Ingeniero Jacobacci in darkness. It was still dark when I boarded the train. The station master gave me more tea and said I could get into the coach. It was as small as I had been warned it would be, and it was filled with dust that had blown through the windows. But at least I had a seat. At five, people started to gather. Incredibly, at this hour, they were seeing friends and family off. I had noticed this custom all over Bolivia and Argentina, this send-off, lots of kisses^ hugs, and waves, and at the larger stations weeping men parting from their wives and children. I found it touching, and at odds with their ridiculously masculine self-appraisal.

There was a whistle, a steam-whistle - a shrill fluting pipe. The station bell was rung. Well-wishers scrambled from the train, passengers boarded; and, just before six, we were off.

The moon was bright in a blue sky. There was no sun, and the land around Jacobacci was blue-grey and pale brown. We were out of town before the eastern sky began to glow. I was gladdened by the hills. In the darkness of our arrival I had assumed it would be as flat as the land I had seen at twilight, that wasteland around the village of Ministero Ramos Mexia, where grape-selling boys hopped and chirped in the dust. But this was different, and there were no clouds in the sky, so I had some assurance that it would be a warm day. I ate an apple and took out Boswell, and when the sun came up I went quietly to sleep.

It was an old train, and although by this time I ought to have been inured to the strangeness of South American railways, I still found it strange. There was a boy across the aisle, watching me yawn.

'Does this train have a name?' I asked.

'I don't understand.'

'The train I took to Buenos Aires was called "The North Star", and the Bariloche express is called "The Lake's of the South". The one to Mendoza is called "The Liberator". That sort of name.'

He laughed. 'This train is too insignificant to have a name. The government is talking about getting rid of it.'

'Isn't it called "The Esquel Arrow" or something like that?'

He shook his head.

'Or "The Patagonian Express"?'

‘The Old Patagonian Express,' he said. 'But express trains are supposed to go very fast.'

They never do,' I said. 'I was on an express to Tucumán that arrived a day late. It took us six hours to leave one station, up in Humahuaca.'

'Floods,'said the boy.'Rain. It doesn't rain here, but it is still a slow train. It's these hills. See, we're going around and around.'

We were. The hills and dales of Patagonia which I had welcomed for their variation and their undeniable beauty were the cause of our slow progress. On a straight track this trip would not have taken more than three hours, but we were not due to arrive in Esquel until 8.30 - nearly a fourteen-hour ride. The hills were not so much hills as they were failed soufflés.

It was a steam train, and for the first time since leaving home I wished I had brought a camera, to take its picture. It was a kind of demented samovar on wheels, with iron patches on its boiler and leaking pipes on its underside and dribbling valves and metal elbows that shot jets of vapour sideways. It was fuelled by oil, so it did not belch black smoke, but it had bronchial trouble, respirating in chokes and gasps on grades and wheezing oddly down the slopes when it seemed out of control. It was narrow gauge, the small carnages were wooden. First was no cleaner than Second, though First had higher back-rests on the seats. The whole contraption creaked, and when it was travelling fast, which was seldom, it made such a racket of bumping couplings and rattling windows and groaning wood that I had the impression it was on the verge of bursting apart - just blowing into splinters and dropping there in one of the dry ravines.

The landscape had a prehistoric look, the sort that forms a painted backdrop for a dinosaur skeleton in a museum: simple terrible hills and gullies; thorn bushes and rocks; and everything smoothed by the wind and looking as if a great flood had denuded it, washed it of all its particular features. Still the wind worked on it, kept the trees from growing, blew the soil west, uncovered more rock and even uprooted those ugly bushes.

The people in the train did not look out of the window, except at the stations, and only then to buy grapes or bread. One of the virtues of train travel is that you know where you are by looking out of the window. No sign-boards are necessary. A hill, a river, a meadow - the landmarks tell you how far you have come. But this place had no landmarks, or rather, it was all landmarks, one indistinguishable from the other - thousands of hills and dry riverbeds, and a billion bushes, all the same. I dozed and woke; hours passed; the scenery at the window did not alter. And the stations were interchangeable - a shed, a concrete platform, staring men, boys with baskets, the dogs, the battered pick-up trucks.

I looked for guanacos. I had nothing better to do. There were no guanacos. But there were other creatures - birds of all sorts, small twittering ones, swifts and sparrows, and dark falcons and hawks. Patagonia is, if nothing else, a bird sanctuary. There were owls here, too, and nearer the Andes great eagles; and, in the far south, albatrosses of enormous size. The ugliness of the landscape continued without let-up, and I had no wish to stir from this train. 'Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. 'So lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.'

The fellow across the aisle was sleeping. I looked at him and the others, and I was struck by their resemblance to me. I had decided quite early in my trip that I was an implausible traveller - no credit cards, no rucksack. I was not well-dressed enough to be a tourist on a ten-day jaunt through ruins and cathedrals; nor was I dirty or frazzled enough to be a wanderer. People asked me what I did, and when I said \I was a geography teacher ('Easter vacation!') they doubted me. I mentioned my wife and children: but why was I here and they there? I had no ready answer to that one. Tourists regarded me as a backslider, wanderers seemed to think I was an intruder, and natives did not understand me. It was hard to convince anyone that I did not have an ulterior motive, that I wasn't on the run, a con-artist, a man with a scheme. I had a scheme - that was the worst of it - but I did not wish to disclose it. If I had told Thornberry, or Wolfgang, or the lady in Veracruz, or Bert and Elvera Howie, that I was a writer they would have either bolted or, as Bert Howie phrased it, 'put a couple of layers of shit in my ear'.

But on this train, the Old Patagonian Express, I looked like everyone else; slightly unshaven, fairly presentable, with a battered suitcase, vaguely European, moustache drooping, scuffed leakproof shoes. It was a relief. I was, at last, anonymous. But what a strange place to be anonymous in! I blended with the foreground. But what a background! Amazing: I belonged on this train.

The boy woke.

'How far to Norquinco?' he asked.

'I don't know,' I said. They all look the same to me.'

The man behind me said, 'About two hours.'

He did not gesture out of the window. He looked at his watch. The landscape was no help in determining where we were.

The boy's name was Renaldo. His surname was Davies - he was Welsh. This part of Patagonia was full of Joneses, Williamses, Powells and Pritchards, Welsh families who had migrated across the plateau from Rawson and Trelew and Puerto Madryn with the intention of founding a new Welsh colony. They are tough, independent and undemonstrative people, not the singers and dreamers one associates with Wales, but a different breed altogether, church-goers, sheep farmers, tenaciously Protestant, with a great sentiment for a homeland they have never seen and for a language few speak. (A classic of Welsh literature is called Dringo'r Andes - 'Climbing the Andes' - by the Welsh woman Eluned Morgan, who was born in the Bay of Biscay during the great migration.) Renaldo wanted to speak English, but his English was unintelligible to me, and so we spoke Spanish.

'I learned English on a cargo ship,' he said. 'That is not a good place to learn English.'

He had been on a ship for two years, and now he was on his way home.

'If you were on a ship,' I said, 'you must have been to Boston.'

'No,' he said. 'But I was all over America. The whole continent.'

'New York?'

'No.'

'New Orleans?'

'No.' And now he looked puzzled. 'America - not the United States.'

'South America?'

'That's right - all over it. All over America,' he said. 'And Asia -Singapore, Hong Kong. And Bombay. And Africa - Durban, Capetown, Port Elizabeth. I have been everywhere.'

The ship he had sailed in was Peruvian, but the crew was mainly Chinese and Indian - 'the other Indians, different from ours. I liked them, more or less. They talked, we played cards. But the Chinese! I hated them! They look at you - they don't say anything. If they want something, they just' - he snatched with his hand. 'Grab, grab, that's all they do.'

I asked him what his impression had been of South Africa. His reply surprised me.

'South Africa is a very bad place,' he said. 'Very pretty, but the society there is cruel. You won't believe me, but they have signs here and there that say "Only for Whites". Taxis, buses, shops - "Only for Whites". The white people go here, the black people go there. Strange, isn't it? And most of the people are black!' He reported this more in wonderment than in outrage, but he added that he did not approve.

Why not? I asked.

'It's no good. "Only for Whites", "Only for Blacks",' he said. 'It's a stupid system. It shows they've got big problems.'

I was encouraged that a Patagonian with no education could show such discernment. I said, 'I agree.'

He said, 'I'd rather spend my life in Barranquilla than Durban. And Barranquilla is really awful.'

That's true,' I said. 'I was in Barranquilla. I hated it.'

'Isn't it a pig-pen? A really ugly place.'

They were having an election when I was there.'

They have elections? Ha!' he said. There is nothing there at all!'

He was chortling, thinking of Barranquilla. I looked past him, out of the window at the dune-like hills and the low bushes, the blinding sun, the puffs of dust thrown up by the train. There was a condor -condors didn't flap their wings - circling in the distance. The Patagonian's disgust with Barranquilla was a hatred of slow decay, of mildew and insects. Here nothing rotted. A dead thing was quickly a dry carcass - it shrivelled and was bones. There was no humidity, nothing stagnant. It was desert cleanliness, the rapid destruction by sun and arid air, a dehydrated wilderness, a fossil on the planet's flank. Few live things had survived here, but those that had were practically indestructible.

'So you have seen the world,' I said. 'But why are you going home?'

'Because I have seen the world,' he said. There is nowhere like this. I am going to get a job, maybe building houses or fixing engines. In Norquinco or Esquel.'

'I am going to Esquel,' I said.

'It is quicker to take the bus from Bariloche.'

'I wanted to take the Patagonian Express,' I said.

The old one!'

When we arrived at Norquinco and he pulled his suitcase to the door, he said, The Queen of England - you know who I mean?'

'Queen Elizabeth? What about her?'

'She owns a ranch just outside Esquel. Lots of cattle - very nice.'

I spent the afternoon on that train as I had spent afternoons on trains all the way through the Americas. I remembered people who had been cruel to me; I rehearsed cutting remarks that I should have uttered; I recalled embarrassments in my life; I re-ran small victories and large defeats; I imagined being married to someone else, having children, getting divorced; I elected myself president of a banana republic and tried to cope with a noisy Opposition; I went to medical school and set up in practice and carried out tricky operations; I told a long humorous story to a large gathering, but in the end the prize went to someone else. I died, and people talked very loudly about me. It was a fairly typical afternoon of travelling.

I had been using the hamlet of Leleque on my map as a landmark. But Leleque was still hours away. The train toiled, seldom running straight, occasionally stopping - a shout, the bell, the whistle, the bark, and then we were off again. I realized that my trip was ending, but I was not sad when I remembered that, in a few hours, at nightfall perhaps, the train would bring me to my destination and there would be nothing more. My mind raced ahead to the station at Esquel, the plane to Buenos Aires, to my arrival home. Yes, I would take a taxi at the airport - hang the expense. My destination was near; I was impatient.

But this landscape taught patience, caution, tenacity. It needed to be studied to be seen. A glimpse of it told nothing. Down the narrowness of the tracks beside the desert the labouring engine chugged, always seeming on the verge of spewing its guts out, exploding in a shower of metal and vapor, or else seizing up in a succession of glugs and stopping on a slope, rolling backwards into the dip, and going no more. It seemed a marvel that an old engine like this could keep going, and I came to see the gasps of the locomotive as energetic rather than feeble.

But there was not enough in the engine or the landscape to hold the attention. I concentrated on Boswell and ate grapes and dozed. The sun had dropped; the hills were higher to the west and the sun slid towards them. The wind was colder. I saw that there was no chance of our arriving at Esquel before dark. When darkness fell it did so in that sudden Patagonian way, as swiftly as a dropped curtain, filling the night with chill. In the desert silence was the sound of wind, and the fretting train. The train stopped at the smaller stations near Esquel; the locomotive trembled in the darkness, and beyond it the sky was an immense sieve of blue stars.

It was after eight o'clock when I saw the lights. I looked for more. There were no more. There was nothing to these places, I thought, until you were on top of them. I did not know at that moment that we were on top of Esquel. I had expected more - an oasis, perhaps taller poplars, the sight of a few friendly bars, a crowded restaurant, a floodlit church, anything to signify my arrival. Or less: like one of the tiny stations along the line; like Jacobacci, a few sheds, a few dogs, a bell. The train emptied quickly.

I found a man with an official-looking cap, and a railway badge pinned to his shirt. Was there a hotel nearby?

'Esquel is full of hotels,' he said. 'Some of them are good, too.'

I asked him to name one. He did. I took myself to it and had - but not out of choice- a cold bath. And then to the restaurant.

'What will you drink? Red wine?'

'Yes,'I said.

'And what will you eat? Steak?'

'Yes.'

The usual. But the atmosphere was different here, a kind of Wild West saloon feeling, people in town for the weekend, leathery faces, wearing their leather jackets indoors here, one man with his book propped on a chair-seat. Waiters hurried by with trays. I saw a clock, a calendar, a photograph of what was probably a local football team, a saint's portrait.

I had been planning to go for a walk, to look for a bar. My muscles ached from the ride and I wanted to stretch. But there, in that chair, I started to doze. I shook myself awake and called for the bill.

The sand and grit between the pages of Boswell tumbled onto my chest as I lay in bed. I read a sentence, watched the sand slide out and in the act of brushing it away fell asleep.

It had been my intention to arrive in Esquel on Holy Saturday and to wake on Easter Sunday and watch the sunrise. But Easter had passed. This was no special date, and I had overslept. I got up and went outside. It was a sunny breezy day - the sort of weather that occurs every day of the year in that part of Patagonia.

I walked to the station. The engine that had taken me to Esquel looked derelict on the siding, as if it would never run again. But it had a hundred more years in it, I was sure. I walked beyond it, past the one-story houses to the one-roomed huts, to where the road turned into a dusty track. There was a rocky slope, some sheep, the rest bushes and weeds. If you looked closely you could see small pink and yellow flowers on these bushes. The wind stirred them. I went closer. They shook. But they were pretty. Behind my head was a great desert.

The Patagonian paradox was this: to be here, it helped to be a miniaturist, or else interested in enormous empty spaces. There was no intermediate zone of study. Either the enormity of the desert space, or the sight of a tiny flower. You had to choose between the tiny or the vast.

The paradox diverted me. My arrival did not matter. It was the journey that counted. And I would follow Johnson's advice. Early in his career he had translated the book of a Portuguese traveller in Abyssinia. In his Preface, Johnson wrote, 'He has amused the reader with no romantick absurdity, or incredible fictions; whatever he relates, 'whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him.'

The sheep saw me. The younger ones kicked their heels. When I looked again, they were gone, and I was an ant on a foreign anthill. It was impossible to verify the size of anything in this space. There was no path through the bushes, but I could look over them, over this ocean of thorns which looked so mild at a distance, so cruel nearby, so like misshapen nosegays close-up. It was perfectly quiet and odourless.

I knew I was nowhere, but the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world after all this time, on a dot at the lower part of the map. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery -the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.

Down there the Patagonian valley deepened to grey rock, wearing its eons' stripes and split by floods. Ahead, there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent. The sky was clear blue. A puff of cloud, white as a quinceflower, carried a small shadow from town, or from the South Pole. I saw it approach. It rippled across the bushes and passed over me, a brief chill, and then went rucking east. There were no voices here. There was this, what I saw; and, though beyond it were mountains and glaciers and albatrosses and Indians, there was nothing here to speak of, nothing to delay me further. Only the Patagonian paradox: the vast space, the very tiny blossoms of the sage-brush's cousin. The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveller, was an ending for me. I had arrived in Patagonia, and I laughed when I remembered I had come here from Boston, on the subway train that people took to work.