Neither he nor anyone else aboard that ship ever learned that the mysterious blue cablegram delivered to the bewhiskered deck boy with the gold-rimmed glasses had read:
DON’T FORGET TO REMEMBER—I'LL BE WAITING.
SIGNED YOURS.
18. Eight Thousand Miles for Stravinski
PROMPTNESS IS ONE OF MY VIRTUES — in fact, I'm usually so prompt for an appointment, applying for a job or a date with a dame, I always show up an hour or two before the time set and wait around so worried and so perspired that I'm completely wilted come the hour, the minute, or the instant I should look my best. And I've smoked so many cigarettes standing around in corridors or on street corners, I usually have a sore throat and a ripping headache and have forgotten completely the sparkling bon mot I'd planned as a lead-off.
My date with a couple of million Buenos Aireans was no exception, though I tried to approach my first encounter with the Paris of America del Sud with a dignified restraint. Neither Mush nor I had a watch, and since it was winter down there and the day dawned late, how was I to know what time it was when I was dressed and ready to be off long before the man on watch struck three bells, which if it was the First Mate's watch should have made it 5:30. I hoped it was not the Third Mate's watch, for that would be 1:30 on that cold morning. Even then, 5:30 was rather early, and as I sat around in the cold darkness of our cabin I contemplated getting back into bed.
I gave the daylight one more chance and smoked a cigarette out the porthole, waiting—no dawn by the end of that smoke and I'd go back to bed. I burned up three or four cigarettes in quick succession.
Slowly, the livid streaks of the new day dragged across the horizon. Homer has it "when rosy-fingered dawn topped the distant hilltops" or something. If he wants it that way he can have it, though it seemed to me every new day in the Odyssey began the same way. Didn't it ever rain down in the Mediterranean? There was no mention of dreary cold mornings such as this. And how come those rosy fingers always found a few round hilltops to tip? What, no plains?
There was no sense getting angry with old man Homer. The old guy was said to have gone blind. Perhaps those rosy-fingered dawns, etc., were the last he saw before the light faded, and die thought always suggested something else to me anyway.
I didn't expect to have anything to do with the girls up in Buenos Aires. Not many of the crew knew that city and those that did said there was no sense going there—the houses down in Rio Santiago were better and cheaper. And the city was full of clip joints anyway.
None of them knew much about the real Buenos Aires. They knew only the outer salty crust of that port and found all they wanted in the area along the waterfront. Somebody remembered the name of the fancy Main Street: "Avenida del Mayo— how ya like that? May Avenue. Dopey, huh?"
But don't worry, kid, you'll get around," Birdneck assured me. "There's lots of Limeys around, and even some of the city Spiks speak American—not good—but they speak it."
Captain Brandt had doled out twenty-five pesos with a heavy-lidded, sidelong glance, his ragged eyebrows raised with the unspoken question how did I spend that last ten dollars' worth of Argentine tissuepaper. I didn't try to explain, but I did say I had bought a new hat and I expected there might be some longdistance telephoning I'd have to pay for in the city, etc., etc.
Twenty-five single pesos made a sizable lump of money in my pocket and I felt rather affluent, figuring the rate of exchange. Two pesos can buy as much as two bucks or even five along the New York waterfront. If everything else were proportionately priced, I ought to go far on twenty-five.
I'd hung my jacket on an improvised wire hanger for the past few days and slept with my trousers spread under my mattress for a number of nights. My suit didn't look too bad, though the legs of the pants had a curious waffle effect from their contact with the springs of my bunk. My good shoes had been rained on a few times and had a curl to them. The polish I'd dabbed on them couldn't hide the bluish water marks that showed through. The clean pressed shirt I'd kept tucked away for just such an occasion had been scorched in that last laundering. Well, I did have a fine new hat and clean underwear. In the dim gray light that had begun to come into the cabin I tried to get a curl to my mustache, but there wasn't enough of it to grab hold of yet.
Suddenly, the day was with us. There was a stir on deck, and Mush was up. I saw big Joe ambling along the deck on his way to breakfast and I talked him into lending me the dollar watch he always carried. And I gobbled down my breakfast quick, put on my hat, and was off. I didn't run through the town—I walked quickly. The breeze kept lifting my stiff-brimmed hat.
The long narrow platform of the railroad station was completely deserted. In a flat straight ribbon the tracks shot off into the horizon—no sign of a train to break its unerring aim. I picked up a timetable in the little station. It was easy to figure out—that spur of track began at Buenos Aires and went through forty or fifty assorted names of saints, ports, and villas, and came to a dead end in Rio Santiago. There would be no train until about noon. The only other morning train had pulled out about the time I tried to curl my mustache at sunup.
A typical suburban train schedule—if you want to get away from any of the festering little colonies outside of any metropolis you usually have to get up at some ungodly hour in order to make the city at some reasonable time, or else you must wait until the housewives have sent all the children off to school, rushed through the dishes, finished with their household chores, and travel with them around noon in a train which gets into town in time for them to grab a marshmallow sundae and dash off to a matinee or do some shopping. That noon train seemed to be that sort of setup, even though housewives in Rio Santiago were as rare as marshmallow sundaes and the city was only about twenty miles away.
After I'd marched a few miles up and down that narrow station platform, I sat in the sun on some damp railroad ties at the station end nearest Buenos Aires and wished I'd planned the day better.
The morning limped along. About an hour before the train was due a few people had begun to gather along the platform. A few women among them might have been from the houses, but I couldn't tell. They wore dark, sedate clothes and so many of those women had looked like any others I'd seen, there was no way of telling their profession without their kimonos or bathrobes.
Then along came two little old men I knew. I'd seen them around in some of the barrooms and had spoken to them and occasionally bought them a drink. They were a couple of American beachcombers, nice old guys who looked and dressed so much alike I couldn't tell them apart. One was a little shorter than the other, but if you didn't see them together that didn't help, since they both were so frail and small, you needed the two of them around to scale each other.
They wore massive short white beards that jutted (mustache and all) out and away from their pinched regular features. Cloth boys' caps, pulled forward, shaded their eyes so you couldn't see them. They talked through their beards like department-store Santa Clauses, with their mustaches hiding their mouths. I noticed when they crooked their thin necks back and swallowed their drinks they seemed to pour the liquor into the bush of their whiskers. You never knew where they wore their mouths—but they did.
I was glad to see them. The littler one told me they were going up to Buenos Aires, and when I asked if they knew the address of the American Consul they said sure. That's where they were going. Stick with them and they'd show me the way. Now that was lucky meeting them there.