'Are you interested in football?' I asked.
'No,' he snapped. Then he reflected a moment and said very slowly, 'No. I hate football. I don't know why exactly. In this respect, I am a very unusual person. Most people are crazy about it. But want to know my real objection?'
'Yes, go ahead.'
'It is too dirty. It is unfair. Watch a football game — you will see. They are always kicking each other in the ankles. The referees don't care at all. Kick, kick — punch, punch. It is stupid. It is unfair. People love the game for its roughness. They like to see fights, bleeding ankles.' He swigged the wine. 'Me? I like to see skill. Now tennis is a nice clean and safe sport, and basketball is very good. No fights, no kicking. The referee writes down the fouls — three infractions and out yougo.'
We went on talking. He told me he had been working on the railway for thirty-two years.
'Have you been to Patagonia?' I asked.
'This is Patagonia.' He tapped on the window. It was dark outside, but the dust was pouring through the crack between the sill and the frame. He might have been gesturing at that dust.
'I take it you worked for the British then.'
'Ah, the British! I liked them, even though I am a German.'
'You are a German?'
'Sure.'
But he was speaking as Americans do. We're English, say some citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, referring to the fact that their ancestors abandoned soot-grimed mining towns in Yorkshire and made enough money raising pigs to set up as gentry and keep Jews out of the local hunt clubs. At my high school, a boy who was good at algebra explained that it was because he was Albanian.
Some of this raw uncertainty, this fumbling with pedigrees was evident in Argentina. The Argentine conductor told me his surname. It was German. 'Listen,' he said, 'my first name is Otto!' He did not of course speak German. Mr DiAngelo and his chunky-faced mates in the dining car did not speak Italian. Mr Kovacs the ticket-puncher did not speak Hungarian. The one immigrant in Argentina I met who had yet to become deracinated was an Armenian -1 thought of him as Mr Totalitarian: he was a believer in dictators, and Totalitarian had an appropriately Armenian ring to it. He dressed in a smock and a little blue cap and every day he read his Armenian newspaper, which was published in Buenos Aires. He had left Armenia sixty years before.
The conductor — Otto — said, 'You are getting out at Jacobacci?'
'Yes. What time do we arrive?'
'About two, tomorrow morning.'
'What do I do at Jacobacci?'
'Wait,' he said. 'The train to Esquel does not leave until five-thirty.'
'You've taken that one, have you?'
Otto's expression said, You must be joking! But he had a tender conscience and the presence of mind to say, 'No, there is no sleeping car on that train.' He thought a moment, sipping wine. There is not very much on that train, you know. It is small.' He used the Spanish double-diminutive: 'It is teeny-weeny. It takes hours and hours. But go to bed, sir. I will wake you up when we get there.'
He drank the last of his wine and soda water. Then he rattled the ice cubes in his glass and tossed them into his mouth. Then he stood up and looked out of the black window at black Patagonia and the yellow moon which, being misshapen, was a perfect example of a gibbous moon. He chewed the ice, crunch-crunch on his molars. When I could not stand the sound any longer I went to bed. There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice-cubes.
22 THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS
It was not necessary for Otto to wake me up; the dust did that. It filled my compartment, and as the Lakes of the South Express hurried across the plateau where it seldom rains (what good were leakproof shoes here?), the dust was raised, and our speed forced it through the rattling windows and the jiggling door. I woke feeling suffocated and made a face mask of my bed sheet in order to breathe. When I opened the door a cloud of dust blew against me. It was no ordinary dust storm, more like a disaster in a mine shaft: the noise of the train, the darkness, the dust, the cold. There was no danger of my sleeping through Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was fully awake just after midnight. I gritted my teeth and sand grains crunched in my molars.
I put my suitcase in order, stuffed my pockets with the apples I had bought in Carmen de Patagones and went to the vestibule to wait for Otto's signal. There I sat. The dust whirled out of the corridor and gusted around the light-bulbs and covered the mirrors and windows with hamster fur. I held a handkerchief against my face. It was no use washing; there was no soap, and the water was ice cold.
Otto appeared sometime later. He had put on his railwayman's uniform over his pyjamas and looked haggard. He tapped his wristwatch and in a groggy voice said, 'Jacobacci, twenty minutes.'
I wanted to go back to bed. The last thing I wanted was to leave the safety of this train for the uncertainty outside. The train was only dusty, and I had a nest here; out there was emptiness, and nothing was certain. Every person I had met had warned me against taking the train to Esquel. But what could I do? I had to go to Esquel to go home.
I had expected that I would be the only person to get out at Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was wrong. There was a pair of old men carrying large oil drums as part of their luggage, a woman with one child around her neck and another tagging along behind her, a couple whose suitcase was bound with string and belts, and others who were shadows. The station was small — there was just about room for all of us on the platform. The faces of the people in the second class coaches, who had been woken by the jolt of the stop, the station lights, were fatigued and bloodless. For half an hour the train hissed at the platform, and then it drew out very slowly. It left dust and dim light and silence. It seemed to take the world with it.
That express train — and how I yearned to be back on it — had blurred distance and altitude. The statistics were given at Jacobacci. We were over a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, and since Carmen de Patagones, which was at sea-level, we had climbed to over 3,000 feet, on a plateau that did not descend again until the Straits of Magellan. In this wind, at this altitude, at this time of night — two in the morning — it was very cold in Jacobacci. No one stops at Jacobacci, people had said. I could disprove that. Passengers had got off the train. I assumed that, like me, they would be waiting for the train to Esquel. I looked around for them. They were gone.
Where? Into that wind, that darkness, those huts in the desert. They were not changing trains — they lived in Jacobacci. Later I judged it to be a naive thought, but at the time I reflected on how strange it was that there were people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — who had chosen to live here, of all places. There was no water, no shade, the roads were terrible, and little paid employment was possible. However tough the people, they did not have the stamina and ingenuity of the Indians who, in any case, had never lived in this part of Patagonia. To the north-east were the fertile grasslands of Bahia Blanca, to the west the lakes — the Tyrolean paradise of Bariloche. For the sake of a few sheep and cattle, and a baffling stubbornness, people lived in this tiny Patagonian town, where the rail line divided, a railway junction in the desert. But it was a naive thought. Some people required space much more than they required grass or trees, and for them cities and forests were stews of confusion. You can be yourself here, a Welshman told me in Patagonia. Well, that much was true.
I left my suitcase on the platform, paced for a while and smoked my pipe. There would not be a train to Buenos Aires for three days. A Unesco poster nailed to the station wall told me about malnutrition in Latin America. As in Guatemala, a sign said Use The Train — It Is Cheaper! And another said, The Train Is Your Friend- Be A Friend of The Train! Hanging from a platform post was a bronze bell, like an old school bell. The station master had rung it just before the Lakes of the South Express had pulled out, but no one had boarded.