The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

19 LA ESTRELLA DEL NORTE ('THE NORTH STAR') TO BUENOS AIRES

Necessity kissed me with luck. There was no better way to leave the high plains — that world of kitty litter — than to slip across Argentina's simple frontier at night, make the acquaintance of its empty quarter the next day and, the following morning, arrive at a large provincial capital and to walk its streets while the city slept. It was only seven-thirty; not even the coffee shops were open. The royal palms and the dark green araucarias dripped in the mist. The day was mine; if nothing in the city of Tucuman persuaded me to stay, I could board the North Star that evening on a sleeper and wake up in Buenos Aires. There was a risk on this route. In my notebook, I had a clipping which I had cut out of a Bogotá newspaper. Railway Catastrophe in Argentina: 50 Dead, ran the Spanish headline. 'The train "The North Star", said the police, was leaving the province of Tucuman when it charged a heavy truck at a level crossing.' The incident, which was reported with all the enthusiasm Latin Americans have for disasters, had happened only a month before. 'You will have no difficulty getting a berth on that train,' a station porter told me in Tucuman. 'Ever since it crashed, people have been frightened to take it.'

Tucuman was older, flatter, cleaner and a great deal duller than I had expected. It was the ultimate provincial town, self-contained and remote, and being an Argentine town it was thoroughly European in a rather old-fashioned way, from the pin-striped suits and black moustaches of the old men idling in the cafés or having their shoes shined in the plaza, to the baggy, shapeless school uniforms of the girls stopping on their way to the convent school to squeeze — it was an expression of piety — the knee of Christ on the cathedral crucifix. Old Europe was evident in the façades of the houses in the centre of the city, in all the paperwork at the bank (every transaction recorded in triplicate), in the contrived glamour of the women shopping and in the vain posturing and hair-combing of the young men. The houses were French, the official buildings Italian baroque, the monuments and statues pure South American — they seemed to get more outlandish as one moved south, the goddesses and sprites got nakeder, the heroes sterner and more truculently posed.

After the barrel-chested Indians living among wind-haunted rocks in the high plains, and the farmers in the tumbledown villages near the border, and the yawning cracked-open river valleys of the north, I was prepared for anything but Tucuman. It was gloomy, but gloom was part of the Argentine temper; it was not a dramatic blackness, but rather a dampness of soul, the hang-dog melancholy immigrants feel on rainy afternoons far from home. There was no desolation, and if there were barbarities they remained dark secrets and were enacted in the torture chambers of the police stations or in the cramped workers' quarters of the sugar plantations. It was four in the afternoon before I found a bar — Tucuman was that proper.

I spent the day walking. It was cloudy and humid, and the light was so poor, the box-camera man in the Plaza Independencia (Argentina's independence was declared in Tucuman in 1816) could not get a likeness of me until he had made two tries. And what was it- perhaps the sombre tones of a Bunuel movie? — that made me think of Tucuman as the sort of place a sad innocent child would be sent to spend a terrifying week with his maiden aunt, among her dusty heirlooms. I imagined pretty, persecuted servant girls in the narrow houses, and the steady tick of ormolu clocks in high-ceilinged parlours. But this was fantasy, a stroller's embroidery. I found a tourist office. The lady gave me three brochures, each urging me to leave Tucuman: to go to the mountains, to the woods outside town, or — and this amused me — to visit Jujuy. One of the attractions of Tucuman, it appeared, was that it was a day's drive from Jujuy.

The curios in Tucuman were versions of gaucho kitsch — sets of bolas, toy horse-whips, overpriced daggers; and there were also salt shakers, aprons, calendars and little boxes made out of cactus fibre, all stamped Tucuman. The bookshelves were vastly more impressive than any I had seen on this trip, or was this a stubborn bias I had formed after seeing three of my own titles on display in Spanish translation? I made a note of the publisher's address in Buenos Aires: I would look him up when I arrived.

I did little else in Tucuman but buy a pizza — a thick Neapolitan-style pizza, garnished with anchovies. This reminded me of a sad remark I had heard in Peru. Times are so bad in Peru,' a man said, 'even the anchovy has left our waters and swum away.' As the day wore on I became firmer in my resolve to leave Tucuman on the North Star. I ran into Wolfgang later in the day and we walked together to the railway station. He was happy. In twenty-four hours the dollar had risen five pesos, 'and tomorrow it will be more.' He was delighted with the way things were going, and I saw him in Buenos Aires, waking each morning to examine the rise in the inflation rate. For Wolfgang, inflation was a great dividend.

The North Star was waiting at the platform.

Wolfgang sighed. 'After this,' he said, 'I take no more trains.'

'Want something to read?' I took out the Dürrenmatt novel and handed it to him.

'I have read it before, in German,' he said, after examining it. But he kept it all the same: 'I can practise my English language.'

Oswaldo, who had the lower berth in my compartment on the North Star, was a jumpy, fast-talking salesman on his way to Rosario to sell some meat. He had wanted to take a plane, but his company said it was too expensive. 'This same train crashed about a month ago. Lots of people got killed — the coaches were burning, it was terrible.' He looked out of the window, jerking the curtains apart. 'I hope it doesn't happen to us. I don't want to be in a train crash. But I have a very bad feeling about this train.'

His conversation was so depressing that I took myself to the dining car and sat at a table with the Tucuman newspaper and a bottle of beer. There was a gloating report in the paper about the right-wing parties having won in the French elections and about kidnappings in Italy. ('Our terrorists have all gone to Europe,' an Argentine man said to me in Buenos Aires. There was something vindictive in his commiseration. 'Now you will have a taste of what we've been through.') The press in Argentina made political capital out of reporting other countries' news.

'With your permission,' said Oswaldo, seating himself at my table. He carried a comic book. It was a Spanish one, about an inch thick, and its title was D 'A rtagnan — the name of the goonish swashbuckler in the cover story. It seemed fairly unambitious reading, even for a meat salesman.

I ignored him and looked out of the window. We left Tucuman, the city, then the province, and entered the adjacent province of Santiago de Estero. In the misty dusk, the cane fields and orange groves were richly green, like Ireland at twilight. There were fires in some of the farmyards, and enough light for me to make out the cane-cutters' brick sheds in a terrace row, and far-off the roofs and pillars of the owner's mansion, and the beautiful horses standing by the fence. Then night fell on the cane fields and the only sign of life was the yellow headlamps of cars wobbling down the country roads.

'This is where it happened,' said Oswaldo. He had put down his comicbook. 'Thecrash.'

He braced himself against the table, as if he expected to be thrown off his chair. But the train continued to rock through Argentina and a man was singing in the kitchen.

Dinner was served at ten o'clock — four courses, including a fat steak, for two dollars. It was the sort of dining car where the waiters and stewards were dressed more formally than the people eating. All the tables were full, a well-fed noisy crowd of mock-Europeans. Two men had joined Oswaldo and me, and after a decent pause and some wine, one of them began talking about his reason for going to Buenos Aires: his father had just had a heart attack.

He spoke in slushy Argentine Spanish, turning every double-L into a Russian zha sound. 'My father's eighty-five years old,' said the man, stuffing his mouth with bread. 'Never got sick a day in his life. He smokes all the time, practically eats cigarettes. He's very strong and healthy. I was surprised when they called me up and told me he'd had a heart attack. I said, "That man's never been sick a day in his life." '

'My father was the same,' said the second man. 'Very tough, a real old-timer. He didn't die of a heart attack. With him it was his liver.'

Oswaldo said, 'Well, my father-'

The first man was smoking and eating compulsively; smoke trickled out of his nostrils as he chewed bread. Every so often he'd call out, 'Boss!'

'Boss!' he yelled. 'Bring me an ashtray. I need an ashtray when I eat.'

He ate all the bread in the basket.

'Boss! More bread — I'm hungry. And, while you're at it, another beer-I'm thirsty.'

They had a lot of swagger, these men; they were full of talk and rather deficient in humour. They were not idle; in fact, they struck me as being hard-working. But, of all the people I met in South America, the Argentines were the least interested in the outside world or in any subject that did not directly concern Argentina. They shared this quality with white South Africans; they seemed to imply that they were stuck at the bottom of the world and surrounded by savages. They had a bluff bullying tone, even when they spoke to one another, and they were philistines to the core. This was my assessment on the North Star. It was not until after I arrived in Buenos Aires that I met sweeter-natured people, and even intellectuals, and had to revise my opinion.

For the next half-hour Oswaldo and the other two talked about football. Argentina had just beaten Peru, and they were confident about Argentina's chances in the World Cup in July.

'Do you speak Spanish?' It was the first man, whose father had had the heart attack. He held a segment of bread near his mouth.

'Yes,' I said. 'I think it's adequate.'

'You don't say very much. That's why I'm asking.'

'I'm not interested in football.'

He smirked at the others. 'I mean, you don't join the conversation.'

'What conversation?'

'This one,' he said, growing impatient.

'About football.'

'No, about everything. We talk — you don't. You just sit there.'

'So what?' I said.

'Maybe something is wrong.'

So that was it: suspicion, fear, the sense that my silence meant disapproval; the old South American insecurity.

I said, 'Nothing is wrong. I am very happy to be here. Argentina is a wonderful country.'

'He is happy,' said the man. He still held the segment of bread in his hand. He moved his wine glass closer and said, 'Want to know what they do in Spain? Watch. This is what they do. Ready? They dunk their piece of bread in like this.' He dunked his piece of bread in the wine. Then they eat it. Like this.' He ate the soggy bread and, still chewing, he said, 'See? They put bread into wine. In Spain.'

I said, 'If you think that's strange, listen to this.'

They smiled: I had joined the conversation.

'The Italians put fruit into wine,' I went on. They chop up pears, peaches, bananas, and put them into a wine glass. They stir it, eat the fruit, and then drink the wine. Imagine doing that to a glass of wine!'

This did not go down well. They stared at me.

Finally, Oswaldo said, 'We do that, too.'

The meal ended with coffee and creme caramel, and then the second man launched into a boring description of what bread was called in different parts of Argentina. 'Now this, in Tucuman, we call a bun. But if you go to Cordoba they'll call it a roll. Over in Salta they call it a cake. But loaf- that's what they call it in — '

He went on and on, and the others chipped in with their regional differences. I felt I could add nothing to this. I said good night and walked through the speeding train and went to bed.

A dream claimed me. I was with a lovely sly woman in an Edwardian house. The house shook, the floor dipped and bobbed like a raft, and cracks made their way up the walls. The woman pleaded with me to explain this shaking. I looked out of the shattered front window, and then walked into the yard. There was such a wobble in the yard I could barely stand up; but it had to be felt — it could not be seen. The woman was at the window, and all the bricks around her were split.

'You are over a magnetic field,' I said. There is a wire down there loaded with electricity.' I was balancing unsteadily as I spoke. This magnetism is causing the house to shake — '

I woke up. The train was shaking like the yard in my dream, and I no longer remembered the woman's name.

It was a sunny day, and moments later we stopped at San Lorenzo on the Parana River. Across the river was the province of Entre Rios, and beyond that Uruguay. The land was flat, the fences entwined with morning glories, and horses cropped grass in the open pastures.

Oswaldo was packing. Those fellows we were having dinner with last night,' he said. 'They got interesting after you left. You should not have gone to bed so soon.'

'1 didn't have anything to say.'

'You could have listened,' said Oswaldo. 'It was interesting. One of them is in the meat business. He knew me! Well, not personally, but he had heard of me.'

Oswaldo was very pleased with this. He finished packing. His comic book still lay on the seat.

'Want my book?'

I picked it up and glanced through it. D'Artagnan was a Spanish comic, luridly illustrated. Super Album, it said. Ten Complete Stories in Full Colour. I looked at the stories: 'Goodbye California,' 'We, The Legion,' 'Or-Grund, Viking Killer.' It was cowboys, detectives, cave men, soldiers, and ads for learning how to fix televisions in your spare time.

'I've got a book,' I said.

T'm offering it to you for nothing,' said Oswaldo.

'I don't read comics.'

'This one is beautiful.'

Comics are for kids and illiterates, I wanted to say, but one was not supposed to criticize these people.

Thank you,' I said. 'Do you ever read Argentine authors?'

This,' he said, tapping the comic book in my hand, 'is an Argentine book. It is from Buenos Aires.'

'I was thinking of the other kind of books. Without pictures.'

'Stories?'

'Yes. Borges, for example.'

'Which Borges?'

'Jorge Luis.'

'I don't know him.'

He was bored by this and rather annoyed that I hadn't enthused when he had given me his comic book. He said goodbye a bit curtly and got off the train when we drew into Rosario. Rosario was industrial, suburban, and also on the Parana. These smells were mingled: factory smoke, flowering trees, the hot river. It was in one of these solid middle-class villas, in 1928, that Che Guevara was born. But it was not Rosario that made him a revolutionary, it was his experience in Guatemala — when the C.I.A. gave Arbenz the push in 1954 — that provoked in him the conviction that South America was badly in need of another liberator. My peregrinations through these countries had led me to the same conclusions. In a way, Guevara's fate was worse than Bolivar's. Guevara's collapse was complete; his intentions were forgotten, but his style was taken up by boutique owners (one of the fanciest clothes boutiques in London is called Che Guevara). There is no faster way of destroying a man, or mocking his ideas, than making him fashionable. That Guevara succeeded in influencing dress-designers was part of his tragedy.

There was a look of September in the fields beyond Rosario, the depleted furrows, the litter of corn husks, the harvesters fuddling with hay bales. Farther on, the farming ceased and the grazing land took over, cattle stilled on green grass, windbreaks of gum trees. It could not have looked quieter or more orderly.

Here was an army camp, a suburb, a factory. Elsewhere in South America army camps could look as menacing as prisons, but this one was unfortified, and the soldiers on manoeuvres — they were attacking a tank in a field near the tracks — looked like boy scouts. The suburb did not look stifling, nor was the factory a blot on the landscape. It was easy to be fooled by appearances, but after what I had seen I needed the reassurance of this order, the lightness of this air, the glimpse of this hawk steadying itself in the sky.

There were many small stations here on the line, but the North Star did not stop at them. The land grew swampier — rivers, tributaries of the Parana, were brimming their banks and flooding the dirt roads. The flooding showed in the greenery it had produced: very tall blue-gums and thick woods. The ranch houses had elegance and space, but there were small square bungalows, too, each on its own fenced-in plot, the tiny house, tiny garden, tiny swimming pool.

Then the houses began to pile up — sheds at the marsh's edge, bigger houses and buildings farther on, water towers and church steeples. It was lunch time. Schoolgirls in white uniforms skipped on the pavements, and at the station called J.L. Suarez there were suburbanites waiting for the local train, and beyond them, beyond the graffiti (Give Perón the Power), were stern little houses in tight streets, and hedges, and, purely for decoration, banana trees. The cooks and waiters from the dining car got off at San Martin, where nearly all the houses were one-story affairs; and, at Miguelete, more people got off and walked past the golf club — here a player waited for the train to pull out before making his putt.

The city itself, I knew, could not be far away. The houses became more splendid and with this splendour was a haunted look, like the ghostly houses in Borges' stories. They were built in the French style and had gothic grille-work and balconies and bolted shutters. They were the colour of a cob-web and just as fragile-seeming and half hidden by trees. The next open space was a park in a burst of sunlight, then a boulevard, and a glimpse of Europe and the hurry and fine clothes of people on a busy pavement. It was as if I had been travelling in a tunnel for months and had just popped out of the other end, at the far side of the earth, in a place that was maddeningly familiar, as venerable as Boston but much bigger.

Retiro Station was English-made and built to an English design, with a high, curved roof supported by girders forged in a Liverpool ironworks, and marble pillars and floors, ornately carved canopies, shafts of sunlight emphasizing its height and, indeed, everything of a cathedral but altars and pews. The stations and railways in Argentina are British in appearance for a very good reason: most of them were built and run by the British until, in 1947, in what was surely one of the worst business deals ever, Juan Perón bought them. If he had waited a few years, the British railway companies — which were losing money — would have given them to him for nothing. The Argentine Railways have been losing money ever since. But the equipment remains, and it was a relief to me, after such a long trip, to arrive at this station, in the heart of a complex and beautiful city. It reminded me that I had travelled a great distance, and this kind of arrival mattered more than the unearthly sights of the Andes and the high plains. It was not enough for me to know that I was in uninhabited altitudes; I needed to be reassured that I had reached a hospitable culture that was explainable and worth the trouble.

Buenos Aires is at first glance, and for days afterwards, a most civilized ant-hill. It has all the elegance of the old world in its buildings and streets, and in its people all the vulgarity and frank good health of the new world. All the news-stands and bookshops — what a literate place, one thinks; what wealth, what good looks. The women in Buenos Aires were well-dressed, studiously chic, in a way that has been abandoned in Europe. I had expected a fairly prosperous place, cattle and gauchos, and a merciless dictatorship; I had not counted on its being charming, on the seductions of its architecture, or the vigour of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and walking I decided it would be a pleasant city to live in. I had been prepared for Panama and Cuzco, but Buenos Aires was not what I had expected. In the story 'Eveline' in James Joyce's Dubliners, the eponymous heroine reflects on her tedious life and her chance to leave Dublin with Frank: 'He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday.' Frank is an adventurer in the new world and is full of stories ('he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians'); soon, he proposes marriage, and he urges her to make her escape from Dublin. She is determined to leave, but at the last moment — 'All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart' — her nerve fails her. Frank boards the boat-train and she remains in Dublin, 'like a helpless animal'.

The stories in Dubliners are sad — there are few sadder in literature — but 'Eveline' did not seem to me such a chronicle of thwarted opportunity until I saw the city she missed. There had seemed to me to be no great tragedy in failing to get to Buenos Aires; I assumed that Joyce used the city for its name, to leave the stinks of Dublin for the 'good airs' of South America. But the first girl I met in Buenos Aires was Irish, a rancher, and she spoke Spanish with a brogue. She had come in from Mendoza to compete in the World Hockey Championships and she asked me — though I would have thought the answer obvious — whether I too was a hockey player. In America, the Irish became priests, politicians, policemen — they looked for conventional status and took jobs that would guarantee them a degree of respect. In Argentina, the Irish became farmers and left the Italians to direct traffic. Clearly, Eveline had missed the boat.

In the immigrant free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which a full third of Argentina's population lives, I looked in vain for what I considered to be seizable South American characteristics. I had become used to the burial-ground features of ruined cities, the beggars' culture, the hacienda economy, the complacent and well-heeled families squatting on Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colours of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard to betome exercised about press censorship in Argentina, which was ambiguous and arguable and mainly an idea. I had been dealing with enlarged visual simplicities; I found theory rarified and, here, in a city that seemed to work, was less certain of my ground. And yet, taking the measure of it by walking its streets, restoring my circulation -1 had not really walked much since I had left Cuzco — it did not seem so very strange to me that this place had produced a dozen world-class concert violinists, and Fanny Foxe, the stripper; Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolf Eichmann had all felt equally at home here.

There was a hint of this cultural overlay in the composition of the city. The pink-flowered 'drunken branch' trees of the pampas grew in the parks, but the parks were English and Italian, and this told in their names, Britannia Park, Palermo Park. The downtown section was architecturally French, the industrial parts German, the harbour Italian. Only the scale of the city was American; its dimensions, its sense of space, gave it a familiarity. It was a clean city. No one slept in its doorways or parks — this, in a South American context, is almost shocking to behold. I found the city safe to walk in at all hours, and at three o'clock in the morning there were still crowds in the streets. Because of the day-time humidity, groups of boys played football in the floodlit parks until well after midnight. It was a city without a significant Indian population — few, it seemed, — strayed south of Tucuman, and what Indians existed came from Paraguay, or just across the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay. They worked as domestics, they lived in outlying slums, they were given little encouragement to stay.

It was a divided culture, but it was also a divided country. The Argentines I met said it was two countries — the uplands of the north, full of folklore and mountains and semi-barbarous settlers; and the 'humid pampas' of the south, with its cattle ranches and its emptiness, a great deal of it still virgin territory (pampas derives from an Aymara word meaning space). You have to travel a thousand miles for this division to be apparent, and Argentines — in spite of what they claim is their adventurous spirit- only travel along selected routes. They know Chile. Some know Brazil. They spend weekends in the fleshpots of Montevideo. The richer ones own second homes in the Patagonian oasis of Bariloche. But they do not travel much in the north of Argentina, and they don't know, or even care, very much about the rest of South America. Mention Quito and they will tell you it is hellish, small, poor and primitive. A trip to Bolivia is unthinkable. Their connections tend to be with Europe. They fancy themselves Frenchified and have been told so often that their capital is like Paris they feel no need to verify it with a visit to France. They prefer to maintain their ancestral links with Europe; many go to Spain, but almost a quarter of a million visit Italy every year. The more enterprising are Anglophile. They are unsure of the United States, and their uncertainty makes them scorn it.

'But what do you know about Argentina?' they asked me, and by way of forestalling their lectures — they seemed deeply embarrassed about their political record — I said things like, 'Well, when I was in Jujuy — ' or 'Now, Humahuaca's awfully nice — ' or 'What struck me about La Quiaca — .' No one I met had been to La Quiaca or taken the train across the border. The person in Buenos Aires who wishes to speak of the squalor of the distant provinces tells you about the size of the cockroaches in nearby Rosario.

I had arrived in Buenos Aires exhausted at the beginning of a heatwave which people said was the Argentine autumn. Five days and nights on the train from La Paz had left me limp. I had a bad cold, my wounded hand throbbed, and for several days I did nothing but convalesce; I read, I drank wine, and I played billiards until I was completely myself again.

At last, I felt well enough to see my Argentine publisher. But I had no luck with the telephone. The receiver honked and buzzed, but no human voice could be heard on it. I decided to see the hall porter at my hotel aboutit.

'I am having difficulty calling this number,' I said.'

'Buenos Aires?'

'Yes. A company on Carlos Pellegrini.'

'But Carlos Pellegrini is only four blocks from here!'

'I wanted to call them.'

He said, 'You will find it much quicker to walk.'

I walked to the office and introduced myself as the author of the three titles I had seen in the bookstores in Tucuman.

'We were expecting someone much older,' said Mr Naveiro, the managing director of the firm.

'After what I've been through, I feel eighty years old,' I said.

Hearing that I had arrived, a lady entered Mr Naveiro's office and said, 'There is a certain general in the government who has read your books. He is Minister of Transportation, and he would like you to take the train to Salta.'

I said that I had already been to Salta, or at least a few miles away.

'He would like you to take the train from Salta to Antafagosta in Chile.'

I said that I would prefer not to.

'The general was also wondering where else you would like to go.'

I said south, to Patagonia.

'He will give you tickets. When do you wish to go?'

Like that, the arrangements were made.

'We hope you will enjoy your stay in Argentina,' said Mr Naveiro. 'We have passed through terrible times, but things are better now.'

It seemed so. There had not been a political kidnapping for two years. My friend Bruce Chatwin, who had recently returned from Patagonia, said that the urban guerillas were on holiday in Uruguay or skiing in Switzerland. Isabel Perón had been overthrown; disarmed, she lived under house arrest in a remote valley with her pet canaries and her maid. I was more sceptical about the official reports of political prisoners. There are no political prisoners in all of the Argentine Republic,' said Colonel Dotti, Director of the National Prison System. They are subversive delinquents, not political prisoners,! Shortly after I arrived, sixty 'subversive delinquents' died in a prison riot in Buenos Aires; some had been shot, others had been asphyxiated.

I could not draw Mr Naveiro on this issue, and it seemed rude to insist. He was anxious to please. Did I want to send anyone a telex? Did I wish to dictate some letters to his lovely secretary? Was my hotel comfortable? Was there anyone in Argentina I wished to meet? Did I want someone to fly to Patagonia to make arrangements for me there?

'My idea,' he said, 'is to get someone to take a plane to Patagonia. You take the train. When you get there, you will have someone on hand, if any problem arises. All you have to do is say yes and it will be done.'

I explained that this might have been helpful in the mountains of Colombia, but that I did not anticipate any difficulties in Patagonia.

'Well, then,' he said, 'I suppose you know that this is the country of meat. You must have a big piece of meat to celebrate your arrival in Buenos Aires.'

It was the biggest steak I had ever seen, the shape of a size twelve football boot and tender as a boiled turnip. In this particular restaurant it was necessary to specify the cut as well as the steer. You said rump, then long-horn; or tenderloin and short-horn.

'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.'