To the Ends of the Earth (19 page)

Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.

“What time are we going?”

“I do not know,” he said.

I wanted to go home.

But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.

I left the sleeping car and walked toward a low lighted building, which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.

A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.

“What train is that?”

“It is the train to La Quiaca.”

“Shit!” I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.

Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.

“The tracks up to Tucumán are in bad shape,” he said. “You might not get there for days.”

Damn this trip, I thought.

We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we
were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead center of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.

So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentina frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pajamas and went to bed.

B
UENOS
A
IRES IS AT FIRST GLANCE, AND FOR DAYS AFTERWARD
, a most civilized anthill. 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 newsstands and bookstores—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 vigor of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and while 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 Aires, 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, and complacent and well-heeled families disenfranchising Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colors of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and had spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard
to become 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 rarefied 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—I 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 harbor 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 daytime 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 Tucumán, 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 semibarbarous 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 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 that 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 Anglophiles. 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.

T
HE 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 parlor. 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 wall, 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 Cestius
and could have been an illustration from Borges’s 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. cummings, 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 encyclopedia. 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 of 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 color 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’s “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—I 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’s 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 Midwest, 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?”