The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

99 Fair Winds 1948

The ship touched land on a bright sunny day, and once the paperwork had been completed, we were finally ashore. Owing to the crowds, there was no way of hailing a cab or a carriage, so we walked into town with our belongings in two cases, a timid and insecure father and daughter from a faraway land. I had realised that this historic day in our lives was a Tuesday, which in Iceland is a portent of problems, and I had bad premonitions.

My worries, though, were overshadowed by new feelings: We were stepping into a new world; a new continent welcomed us. Even though the stone slabs and lanterns were European in style, there was no denying that the earth and air exuded an exotic scent. Even through the asphalt, one could smell that the soil gave off a scent that was different from the one we knew. I still remember the first American tree I saw; it cracked through the pavement like a thick-barked primordial dinosaur. For some inexplicable reason these trees were much wilder than their European colleagues, if not completely crazy. But nevertheless, some prim little gentlemen had travelled here by ship and train and tried to reorganise their little prim lives by raising their fancy stone palaces, full of law books and ceramics, after chopping down the jungle with a ruler and wiping out an entire civilisation with an eraser. On my first day, Latin America appeared to me as an anaconda in a bow tie.

The heat mounted with every step. It was summer, even though Advent was around the corner. And bit by bit the bustle of life also increased on the streets. It wasn’t just summer in the winter here; pavements were turned into living rooms. Women sat peeling potatoes and men read newspapers, one drank coffee while another stuffed his pipe, children played barefoot football and beat a three-legged dog, while cars, buses and trams drove all around them, crammed with people who had been born or had originated in other countries but called themselves Argentinians now. Two horses were lining up at a bus stop, and up a side street someone was milking a cow. Buenos Aires was a city machine operating at full steam. No bombs had ever fallen from the sky here, and people streamed up from the harbour today as always: weary of Europe, bored with Europe, away from wars and strife, bearing dreams of peace and a piece of land in the South American country that resembled Europe the most. Buenos Aires had been home to a million people at the turn of the century, and that figure had now grown to three million. A city bursting with life: a poet once wrote that if you yawned on the streets of Baires, you risked swallowing a motorbike.

We found a room in a cheap guesthouse run by a moustachioed Italian mother and daughter as if it were on the Bay of Naples: Pensione Vesuvio. ‘Buongiorno, signore.’ Inside its walls, there was another country. They didn’t even know who Perón was, and daily bowed to their leader Il Duce, who lived on in a photograph above the breakfast table.

Dad knew fourteen words of Spanish and scanned the papers every morning in search of work. The plan was to revive the old trade of importing clothespins from Germany. But on our first morning the city had greeted us with seventeen thousand clothespins: you could barely see the walls here from the laundry hanging on the lines, and for some reason it was all white sheets. In my simple mind I assumed Tuesday had to be laundry day in Argentina. But two weeks later the lines were still loaded with bedclothes. I connected this to the lovemaking sounds I sometimes heard through the window at night or even at lunchtime. All of that love in all that heat and humidity obviously called for constant washing. I liked this country.

For safety, Dad had brought along the phone number of a man we had met in Paris on our way over, a Swiss Jew. He was a brash man with a twitching moustache who was starting to market an exciting new gadget: the meat thermometer. Argentina was the meatiest country in the world, he claimed, an untapped gold mine for a device of this kind. Monsieur Björnsson could become his man in South America, and he asked my father to contact him as soon as he had a business card.

In those years, Argentina was probably the most popular country in the world. Everyone wanted to go to the Land of Silver, even though Argentina was the only South American country that had no silver. And because of the huge inflow of immigrants, accommodation wasn’t easy to come by in Fair Winds, as my father called the city in our early days there, after he’d heard that its original name was Santa María del Buen Aire (Holy Virgin Mary of the Fair Winds). Two months later we were still in the pensione run by the Neapolitan mother and daughter. Dad hadn’t found a job but had learned an extra twenty words of Spanish. I wasn’t doing too badly with the lingo either, since I’d found a gaucho, Alberto, a country lad with dark eyebrows who danced with me through the whole city and then dragged me up a long staircase at the end of the night. His landlady hung the sheets up to dry on the line. He was proud to belong to the ‘shirtless ones,’ los descamisados, as the supporters of the president were called. They came from the sweaty classes and had ushered Perón into power four years previously after massive demonstrations. My black-eyed country boy had Evita Perón on the brain. I wasn’t amused when he called out her name in the middle of our act. On the other hand, I felt a change in his attitude towards me when I gave in to his wish for me to put my hair up like the First Lady’s. After that, all doors were opened to me in Fair Winds.

Every week, Dad phoned the Swiss Jew in Paris, but the line was either engaged or there was no answer. The embassy had also lost trace of the strange man. Perhaps this was delayed Jewish revenge? The Icelandic ‘Ans Enrique,’ as my father’s name was pronounced, didn’t allow this to put him off, however, and contacted a German company that had recently started to manufacture meat thermometers. He had some samples sent to the guesthouse and sent me around the restaurants of the city with my Evita hair and red lipstick.

‘Hola, ¿podría introducir la innovación tecnológica más útil para cocinar la carne? Un termómetro que muestra la temperatura en el músculo.’ (Hello, may I introduce you to the most useful tool for cooking meat? A thermometer that measures the temperature in the muscle.)

Amazing I can still remember it…

But offering a meat thermometer to an Argentinian grill master was like offering a compass to a search dog.

When all our money ran out, my cowboy pulled a few strings and got us both jobs on a ranch out on the Pampas. I rewarded him for his efforts by calling him a cab.

That took us away from the city and the waiting. Dad was to be the caretaker and I was to serve an old man who virtually lived in a world of his own. Even though the wages were low, our accommodation and keep were free. This was a marvellous way for us to start in our new world.