19 LA ESTRELLA DEL NORTE ('THE NORTH STAR') TO BUENOS AIRES
Necessity kissed me with luck. There was no better way to leave the high plains — that world of kitty litter — than to slip across Argentina's simple frontier at night, make the acquaintance of its empty quarter the next day and, the following morning, arrive at a large provincial capital and to walk its streets while the city slept. It was only seven-thirty; not even the coffee shops were open. The royal palms and the dark green araucarias dripped in the mist. The day was mine; if nothing in the city of Tucuman persuaded me to stay, I could board the North Star that evening on a sleeper and wake up in Buenos Aires. There was a risk on this route. In my notebook, I had a clipping which I had cut out of a Bogotá newspaper. Railway Catastrophe in Argentina: 50 Dead, ran the Spanish headline. 'The train "The North Star", said the police, was leaving the province of Tucuman when it charged a heavy truck at a level crossing.' The incident, which was reported with all the enthusiasm Latin Americans have for disasters, had happened only a month before. 'You will have no difficulty getting a berth on that train,' a station porter told me in Tucuman. 'Ever since it crashed, people have been frightened to take it.'
Tucuman was older, flatter, cleaner and a great deal duller than I had expected. It was the ultimate provincial town, self-contained and remote, and being an Argentine town it was thoroughly European in a rather old-fashioned way, from the pin-striped suits and black moustaches of the old men idling in the cafés or having their shoes shined in the plaza, to the baggy, shapeless school uniforms of the girls stopping on their way to the convent school to squeeze — it was an expression of piety — the knee of Christ on the cathedral crucifix. Old Europe was evident in the façades of the houses in the centre of the city, in all the paperwork at the bank (every transaction recorded in triplicate), in the contrived glamour of the women shopping and in the vain posturing and hair-combing of the young men. The houses were French, the official buildings Italian baroque, the monuments and statues pure South American — they seemed to get more outlandish as one moved south, the goddesses and sprites got nakeder, the heroes sterner and more truculently posed.
After the barrel-chested Indians living among wind-haunted rocks in the high plains, and the farmers in the tumbledown villages near the border, and the yawning cracked-open river valleys of the north, I was prepared for anything but Tucuman. It was gloomy, but gloom was part of the Argentine temper; it was not a dramatic blackness, but rather a dampness of soul, the hang-dog melancholy immigrants feel on rainy afternoons far from home. There was no desolation, and if there were barbarities they remained dark secrets and were enacted in the torture chambers of the police stations or in the cramped workers' quarters of the sugar plantations. It was four in the afternoon before I found a bar — Tucuman was that proper.
I spent the day walking. It was cloudy and humid, and the light was so poor, the box-camera man in the Plaza Independencia (Argentina's independence was declared in Tucuman in 1816) could not get a likeness of me until he had made two tries. And what was it- perhaps the sombre tones of a Bunuel movie? — that made me think of Tucuman as the sort of place a sad innocent child would be sent to spend a terrifying week with his maiden aunt, among her dusty heirlooms. I imagined pretty, persecuted servant girls in the narrow houses, and the steady tick of ormolu clocks in high-ceilinged parlours. But this was fantasy, a stroller's embroidery. I found a tourist office. The lady gave me three brochures, each urging me to leave Tucuman: to go to the mountains, to the woods outside town, or — and this amused me — to visit Jujuy. One of the attractions of Tucuman, it appeared, was that it was a day's drive from Jujuy.
The curios in Tucuman were versions of gaucho kitsch — sets of bolas, toy horse-whips, overpriced daggers; and there were also salt shakers, aprons, calendars and little boxes made out of cactus fibre, all stamped Tucuman. The bookshelves were vastly more impressive than any I had seen on this trip, or was this a stubborn bias I had formed after seeing three of my own titles on display in Spanish translation? I made a note of the publisher's address in Buenos Aires: I would look him up when I arrived.
I did little else in Tucuman but buy a pizza — a thick Neapolitan-style pizza, garnished with anchovies. This reminded me of a sad remark I had heard in Peru. Times are so bad in Peru,' a man said, 'even the anchovy has left our waters and swum away.' As the day wore on I became firmer in my resolve to leave Tucuman on the North Star. I ran into Wolfgang later in the day and we walked together to the railway station. He was happy. In twenty-four hours the dollar had risen five pesos, 'and tomorrow it will be more.' He was delighted with the way things were going, and I saw him in Buenos Aires, waking each morning to examine the rise in the inflation rate. For Wolfgang, inflation was a great dividend.
The North Star was waiting at the platform.
Wolfgang sighed. 'After this,' he said, 'I take no more trains.'
'Want something to read?' I took out the Dürrenmatt novel and handed it to him.
'I have read it before, in German,' he said, after examining it. But he kept it all the same: 'I can practise my English language.'
Oswaldo, who had the lower berth in my compartment on the North Star, was a jumpy, fast-talking salesman on his way to Rosario to sell some meat. He had wanted to take a plane, but his company said it was too expensive. 'This same train crashed about a month ago. Lots of people got killed — the coaches were burning, it was terrible.' He looked out of the window, jerking the curtains apart. 'I hope it doesn't happen to us. I don't want to be in a train crash. But I have a very bad feeling about this train.'
His conversation was so depressing that I took myself to the dining car and sat at a table with the Tucuman newspaper and a bottle of beer. There was a gloating report in the paper about the right-wing parties having won in the French elections and about kidnappings in Italy. ('Our terrorists have all gone to Europe,' an Argentine man said to me in Buenos Aires. There was something vindictive in his commiseration. 'Now you will have a taste of what we've been through.') The press in Argentina made political capital out of reporting other countries' news.
'With your permission,' said Oswaldo, seating himself at my table. He carried a comic book. It was a Spanish one, about an inch thick, and its title was D 'A rtagnan — the name of the goonish swashbuckler in the cover story. It seemed fairly unambitious reading, even for a meat salesman.
I ignored him and looked out of the window. We left Tucuman, the city, then the province, and entered the adjacent province of Santiago de Estero. In the misty dusk, the cane fields and orange groves were richly green, like Ireland at twilight. There were fires in some of the farmyards, and enough light for me to make out the cane-cutters' brick sheds in a terrace row, and far-off the roofs and pillars of the owner's mansion, and the beautiful horses standing by the fence. Then night fell on the cane fields and the only sign of life was the yellow headlamps of cars wobbling down the country roads.
'This is where it happened,' said Oswaldo. He had put down his comicbook. 'Thecrash.'
He braced himself against the table, as if he expected to be thrown off his chair. But the train continued to rock through Argentina and a man was singing in the kitchen.
Dinner was served at ten o'clock — four courses, including a fat steak, for two dollars. It was the sort of dining car where the waiters and stewards were dressed more formally than the people eating. All the tables were full, a well-fed noisy crowd of mock-Europeans. Two men had joined Oswaldo and me, and after a decent pause and some wine, one of them began talking about his reason for going to Buenos Aires: his father had just had a heart attack.