My wife said that she would never stoop to open someone else's parcel.
Meanwhile the boat had docked and the owner of the parcel had vanished into the crowd of passengers. We could leave the parcel on the boat, throw it overboard or carry it through customs. My wife was never particularly strong, but she refused to let me carry the parcel because I didn't trust its contents. She heaved it on to her shoulder and, bending under its weight, walked down the gangplank.
We entered an enormous hall where there was a crowd of people, some in uniform and some not. It became clear that the most thorough customs inspection I had ever witnessed was taking place. We approached a long counter where, under the customs officers' gaze, people were being asked to empty their suitcases, hand luggage and purses. I watched with astonishment the transformation this wrought in my wife. She straightened up so that the heavy roll on her shoulders seemed almost to float, and then with an expression of confidence and certainty that only the utter absence of guilt can produce, she stepped up to the counter. When she was asked what was in the parcel on her shoulder, she replied that it was a carpet for an acquaintance.
They waved us through the barrier.
We will never know what it was we were actually carrying, but I understood then what sort of face a good smuggler should put on. I also knew that given my anxieties, I would never make the grade.
Angela came to the gate, greeted the woman with the dog and held her mouth up to be kissed.
On a bench in the hall inside their flat were three bags, crammed full. 'These are for you,' she said. 'Would you like tea?'
It would have been impolite to pick up the bags and scoot out of the door with them, as I had hoped to do. I could see Angela wanted me to sit and talk with her for a while. She must have been bored, spending all those hours alone in a strange flat on the edge of a strange city in the middle of a strange land and among people whose language she did not understand. I peered into one of the bags and saw the flash of shiny covers, but I overcame the desire to kneel down beside the bag and begin rummaging inside. This time I had been bold enough to give Nicholas a list of some books I particularly wanted to read. Had he managed to get them? I pulled the zip shut and went to wait for the tea.
Angela came in with a silver tray holding a teapot. She poured me a cup of mate.
Angela is Argentinian, and whenever I find myself near her, I'm always subliminally aware of the distance she has travelled to appear before me. Between us lay jungles and wide rivers, the pampas; a landscape I will almost certainly never behold.
She sat down opposite me, poured herself a glass of wine, tossed back her long black hair so that it fell over her left shoulder down to her waist, removed her glasses and looked at me intently. The colour and shape of her eyes revealed some of her ancestors to be Indians. Angela should have married a poet, not a businessman. Had she done so, either she would have been happy or she would have discovered that poets are people just as businessmen are, and that you can be as happy or as miserable with them as you can with anyone else.
I knew that her journey away from her country — and thus to Nicholas — had not been easy.
Borders, or rather their guardians, present barriers not only to smugglers and fleeing criminals. Of course, the more ruthless the guardians, the more inventive and daring those who feel themselves imprisoned by the border guards become. They dig tunnels under the walls or barbed wire, they sew together hot-air balloons from bed-sheets, they construct trolleys to run along high-tension wires, and they fling themselves against the barbed wire, knowing that they will most likely be shot. They undergo all this in order to carry themselves across the invisible borderline, over the prison wall. For a moment, a man transforms himself into a thing, turns himself into a piece of contraband, in the hope that he may never again be an object of arbitrary power.
Angela said that her escape from her country had been less dramatic. Her friends got her a false passport. But she still occasionally dreamed about a moment when an armed guard at the border takes her passport, looks at the photograph, then at her face, and nods to someone invisible. From a concealed place, some monster with foam dripping from his fangs comes roaring out, grabs her and drags her off. Sometimes she is taken to the very border, which runs along a narrow path on a ridge of mountain peaks. On each side an abyss drops away, and she knows that they will fling her down on one side or the other.
She poured me more tea, more wine for herself, and began to talk about her life before she left her country.
Her father was a colonel in the army. Their household had servants, but it was loveless. Her father behaved in a military fashion: he was courtly and selfless to others, but arrogant and unyielding towards his own. He expected Angela's mother to ensure that everything was done to his satisfaction. When she became seriously ill, he took it as a
personal affront. He ignored his wife's suffering, refused to change his ways or even to give up drinking with his companions. He was drunk when she died. After she was gone, he began to miss her, or at least to miss the care she took of him. He drank more, hung around the casinos, and eventually squandered his house and his reputation. He moved into a tiny, ramshackle structure on the fringes of Rosario. They let the maid go. Angela was only twelve at the time, but she devoted herself to her father, making sure he always found everything in order, that he always had his evening meal. She wanted to recreate a feeling of home— but he scarcely took any notice. Except once, when he came back from the casino in a particularly elated mood. He pulled a fistful of banknotes from his pocket, probably money he had won at baccarat or poker, and forced her to accept them, saying she deserved it. He didn't understand her at all.
I had no idea why Angela was telling this to me today, but I listened to her attentively, and would have listened with more compassion had my mental clock not reminded me of the danger of staying too long. A professional smuggler, I felt, wouldn't linger knowing his mortal enemies could be approaching.
The poverty they found themselves in, Angela continued, had a profound effect on her brother. He studied law, but then left school and began to work in the unions. Several times she went to see him address meetings. He captivated his audience like the lead actor in a drama. But this wasn't theatre. One day her brother didn't come home. She never heard from him again. For a long time, she consoled herself with the thought that he was in hiding somewhere, but then one by one his companions began to disappear, most
of them without a trace. They only ever found one of them. His mutilated body was washed up by the Paraná River. The corpse had its eyes poked out and there were patches of burned skin on its chest. From that day on, waking or sleeping, Angela could not get out of her mind an image of her brother with his arms and legs bound together, and strange men beating and torturing him. She saw the iron rod being driven into his eyes.
I could see her pain and suffering. And instead of taking advantage of the falling darkness and creeping away with the bags of books, I reached out my hand to stroke her long hair, forgetting that in ancient myths, long hair was a harbinger of danger.
It seems to me that there is a raging demon, a monstrous cloud of our own creation, wandering the earth. Its shadow falls on different parts of the world, sometimes darkening whole continents. The cloud had been suspended above Angela's country. God knows where it would stop next.