There was a look of September in the fields beyond Rosario, the depleted furrows, the litter of corn husks, the harvesters fuddling with hay bales. Farther on, the farming ceased and the grazing land took over, cattle stilled on green grass, windbreaks of gum trees. It could not have looked quieter or more orderly.
Here was an army camp, a suburb, a factory. Elsewhere in South America army camps could look as menacing as prisons, but this one was unfortified, and the soldiers on manoeuvres — they were attacking a tank in a field near the tracks — looked like boy scouts. The suburb did not look stifling, nor was the factory a blot on the landscape. It was easy to be fooled by appearances, but after what I had seen I needed the reassurance of this order, the lightness of this air, the glimpse of this hawk steadying itself in the sky.
There were many small stations here on the line, but the North Star did not stop at them. The land grew swampier — rivers, tributaries of the Parana, were brimming their banks and flooding the dirt roads. The flooding showed in the greenery it had produced: very tall blue-gums and thick woods. The ranch houses had elegance and space, but there were small square bungalows, too, each on its own fenced-in plot, the tiny house, tiny garden, tiny swimming pool.
Then the houses began to pile up — sheds at the marsh's edge, bigger houses and buildings farther on, water towers and church steeples. It was lunch time. Schoolgirls in white uniforms skipped on the pavements, and at the station called J.L. Suarez there were suburbanites waiting for the local train, and beyond them, beyond the graffiti (Give Perón the Power), were stern little houses in tight streets, and hedges, and, purely for decoration, banana trees. The cooks and waiters from the dining car got off at San Martin, where nearly all the houses were one-story affairs; and, at Miguelete, more people got off and walked past the golf club — here a player waited for the train to pull out before making his putt.
The city itself, I knew, could not be far away. The houses became more splendid and with this splendour was a haunted look, like the ghostly houses in Borges' stories. They were built in the French style and had gothic grille-work and balconies and bolted shutters. They were the colour of a cob-web and just as fragile-seeming and half hidden by trees. The next open space was a park in a burst of sunlight, then a boulevard, and a glimpse of Europe and the hurry and fine clothes of people on a busy pavement. It was as if I had been travelling in a tunnel for months and had just popped out of the other end, at the far side of the earth, in a place that was maddeningly familiar, as venerable as Boston but much bigger.
Retiro Station was English-made and built to an English design, with a high, curved roof supported by girders forged in a Liverpool ironworks, and marble pillars and floors, ornately carved canopies, shafts of sunlight emphasizing its height and, indeed, everything of a cathedral but altars and pews. The stations and railways in Argentina are British in appearance for a very good reason: most of them were built and run by the British until, in 1947, in what was surely one of the worst business deals ever, Juan Perón bought them. If he had waited a few years, the British railway companies — which were losing money — would have given them to him for nothing. The Argentine Railways have been losing money ever since. But the equipment remains, and it was a relief to me, after such a long trip, to arrive at this station, in the heart of a complex and beautiful city. It reminded me that I had travelled a great distance, and this kind of arrival mattered more than the unearthly sights of the Andes and the high plains. It was not enough for me to know that I was in uninhabited altitudes; I needed to be reassured that I had reached a hospitable culture that was explainable and worth the trouble.
Buenos Aires is at first glance, and for days afterwards, a most civilized ant-hill. 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 news-stands and bookshops — 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 vigour of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and 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 Ayres, 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, the complacent and well-heeled families squatting on Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colours of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard to betome 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 rarified 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 -1 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 harbour 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 day-time 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 Tucuman, 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.