Author's note: The following excerpt is drawn from my manuscript Journeys and Digressions: An Epistolary Memoir With Soliloquy (a different episode appeared in the July-September 2006 issue of NWR). The pretended recipient of my literary letters is one Lucio Victorio Mansilla, 19th-century Argentine author of another epistolary work called Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (A Visit to the Ranquel Indians, University of Nebraska Press, 1997). The particular moment of this correspondence is late June of 2005.

 

Friday's plan was roughly (with a couple of slight deviations I won't trouble you with) to walk to Scalabrini Ortiz and Corrientes to cash my remaining traveler's cheques at the branch of the Banco Piano that I'd seen there on one of my strolls; to catch line "B" to Pellegrini and then "C" to Retiro to buy a bus ticket to Córdoba; from there to walk to the Plaza San Martín and perhaps have a look at the famous Teatro Colón from the outside; and then to get to the Cabildo to see about that museum tour—if the plaza and the theater didn't work out, so be it!

As it turns out, there were a number of problems with this plan. First, that particular branch of Banco Piano wasn't equipped to handle traveler's cheques. Due to bad planning on my part I only had about enough cash for a newspaper and two subway fares. Another thing: I wouldn't be anywhere near Retiro this weekend but in Castelar, so it was fortunate that I simply forgot that part of the plan. The money situation remained a problem, though. My bank of second resort was just around the corner but it also proved a dead end; the one next to that I didn't even try. If anything was going to come out of this day it appeared to be further practice at the mystical art of tranquility. I sat down on a bench, put my head in my hands for a moment, then studied my map again. I decided with some uncertainty to head for Pellegrini, anyway, and then double back by the "D" line to Callao and Cabildo where I'd had success the last time.

The subway that day was rich in melancholy images of what we now call the "Third World"— an imperfect designation to the extent that it tends to evoke the massive poverty and misfortune of which there remain pockets even in the world's richest and most powerful nation. First, anyway, I was holding onto the handrail to keep my balance when a young woman approached—morocha, long black hair, face totally scarred (apparently burned)—she was a grotesque apparition: monstrous! hideous! inspiring that uncomfortable mixture of horror, fascination, and pity that has attended many a circus freak show; her eyes were dull, her expression flat; she appeared to be going from car to car and deliberately bumping into people with (presumably) the intention of picking some pockets. Then, almost no sooner than she'd disappeared into the next car (my passport and other documents well guarded as far as I could tell: I touched my left-front pocket to be sure), there was another girl, this one unscarred but visibly blind and making her way with a stick, eyes rolled back in her head and completely white.

The first vision in particular haunted me. I was conscious of a feeling of déjà vu, as if her history were already familiar to me. The source of that impression would eventually come to me: a story told in British-Afghani author Tahir Shah's Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru. He tells of his encounter—in the jungle town of Iquitos, in search of a guide to take him further on his quest for those proverbial birdmen—with a disfigured woman selling fruit at the river's edge. The man who is with him at the time recounts, afterward, the story of how she became so disfigured:

"'She used to be the most beautiful girl in Iquitos,' he said. 'Every schoolboy dreamed of having her. Then, when she was about fifteen, a maestro said he had seen a vision, in which Rosa was raped by five men. The dream was a premonition.'

"'But what happened to her face?'

"'Rosas's mother didn't want the dream to come true ... The maestro said there was only one thing to do—to turn her beauty into ugliness. So one night Rosas's parents dipped her face in acid.'"

On another occasion the author has a chance to talk with the woman herself, to make conversation.

"... She smiled shyly when she saw me, covering her cheek with her hand. I bought a peeled guaje from her and sunk my teeth into its yellow flesh....

"I asked about the maestro, the one who'd had the premonition.

"'He was not a good man,' she said tenderly. 'He seduced young women. He often made them pregnant and said the Devil was the father. He would try to get me to sleep with him. He was disgusting. So I scorned him. But my parents believed in his magic.'

"'The maestro's dream?'

"'Si ... my mother threw acid on my face when I was sleeping. He told her to do it.'"

I wondered about the secret history of this other girl. I wondered if I could imagine it out of obscurity as I'd done with Dorotea's bittersweet saga [in my novella of Indian captivity A Bride Called Freedom].

When I got to Pellegrini, where the "B" and "D" met, I wondered if the branch of Banco Piano near Callao and Cabildo would even be open when I arrived; I remembered their closing for the siesta shortly after I'd visited the last time. In any case I found myself at that intersection of Corrientes and Pellegrini, at a further intersection with the famous Avenida 9 de Julio which runs parallel with Pellegrini for a moment before Pellegrini veers off in another direction more or less parallel with Corrientes, if I'm not mistaken. Events began to take over plans.

As long as I was there I figured I might as well take advantage of the happy accident and snap some pictures of that "widest avenue in the world" and at its center the giant obelisk featured on so many postcard photos of this austral Big Apple. Size doesn't necessarily equate with aesthetic qualities but there it was, and my students would like to see the pictures. Then afterwards I thought to ask some police officers who were gathered at the local McDonald's if they knew of a Banco Piano in the area. No luck. So I walked into a branch of the Banco Francia. And while at that location they wouldn't have the money until later in the afternoon, they assured me that across the mighty Avenue, at the main branch right there on the corner with Corrientes, they were guaranteed to already have it. To make a long story short: they did! Vive la France!

I rewarded myself by turning the corner, walking a few paces, and entering at random the first restaurant I saw: Restaurante Arturito, which on its door had the sign indicating its acceptance of MasterCard—that miraculous little piece of plastic currency that allowed me to charge money to my bank account and thus save my dwindling cash. As long as I kept my records straight, being careful to keep receipts and make conservative estimates of the exchange rate I'd get on each transaction, I should be okay. Most importantly I'd always been conditioned to think carrying around a large supply of essentially unredeemable cash to be risky business: the traveler's cheques if lost or stolen could always be replaced, if not without some inconvenience.

From that menu with its specialization in Spanish cuisine I ordered chicken and rice á la valenciana: Valencian style. It was wonderful but much more than one person could reasonably eat in one setting; I took half of it out in a bag. But first I sat there for a while with my notebook, jotting down some impressions not only of the day but of the little bit of reading that I'd done in Álvaro Abós's literary guidebook.

I'm fascinated by his opening story of José Hernández who as a political exile under [Domingo F.] Sarmiento has somehow—under the very nose of the government—returned to Buenos Aires and taken up residence on the corner of Rivadavia and 25 de Mayo in the now defunct Hotel Argentino, directly across from where would later stand (within a figurative "stone's throw" of the Casa Rosada) the imposing Bank of the Argentine Nation. There, scarcely showing his face for the next several months, he writes the first volume of El Gaucho Martín Fierro which the poet Leopoldo Lugones will declare Argentina's national poem. Do Sarmiento and his government know he's there? "Perhaps so and they didn't want to attack him, perhaps there were negotiations," Abós writes. "We don't know nor will we ever know. Hernández was not a man to physically pass unnoticed: he was tall and so fat that the sharp prose of Lucio V. Mansilla said of him that his 'balloonlike obesity daily takes on alarming proportions.'"

He has left out the best part of your wit, Mansilla! In Eva Gillies's able translation it goes like this: "... whose balloonlike obesity daily takes on proportions alarming to those of us who love him, for there is always the risk of his floating up into the ethereal regions or bursting like a Paraguayan torpedo, without harming anyone." I wonder what your amiable wit would have to say about me since I've grown so much wider than when as a young man I returned to the United States scarcely thicker than a bean pole? At five feet eleven inches in height, hovering at between two hundred forty and two hundred fifty pounds (no longer the two-seventy of my most extreme growth) perhaps my slightly more modest obesity—so harmful to hips, knees, and feet—wouldn't give you quite as much fright.

When I was still that skinny young [Mormon] missionary, wandering the streets of Santa Fe, there was a man—poor mischievous laborer—who grinning through roguish mustaches would recite to me the same verse from Martín Fierro's counsels to his sons (from late in the second book): " Ave de pico encorvado / Le tiene al robo afición; / Pero el hombre de razón / No roba jamás un cobre, / Pues no es vergüenza ser pobre / Y es vergüenza ser ladrón." In Walter Owens's translation, which I like for its careful attention to the original rhythms, it goes like this: "Of all the birds that live by prey, / The hook-beaked bird is chief; / But the man that would keep a straight backbone / Never takes a copper that's not his own, / You may be poor—that's no shame for sure—But it's shameful to be a thief."

The poem in its totality (as Russ Salmon elaborated during my first reading of it in his course at Indiana University) stands as a rebuke to the "civilizing" presidency of Sarmiento who despite his righteous emphasis on education and order and progress didn't know any better than his successors—who finished the task of wiping out your Ranquel Indians—how to deal with the rough and rowdy inhabitants of the pampas. It stands as a rebuke to these modernizing administrations which, in establishing their land of immigrants and innovation, merely pushed the gauchos and other malcontents to the side—putting fences around their open pampas and selling the land to the highest bidders, driving the gauchos into forced military service or into the camps of the Indians whom their government was helping to annihilate. This polemical aspect of an otherwise superlatively literary and well-crafted work is driven home in a number of the famous counsels such as, for example, these: "The only schooling I ever had, / Was a life of suffering; / Don't be surprised if at the game, / I've made mistakes; that's not my shame / It's mighty little a man can know, / If he's never learnt anything. // There's heads with books stuffed chock-a-block, / Every breed and brand and style, / Though I'm not expert in such mysteries, / I've picked up enough to teach me this: / That better than learning no-end of things / Is to know a few things worth while."

This problem of education accompanied by massive marginalization and poverty is one that continues to be unmet in Argentina despite the very real inroads made by Sarmiento's common schools. Alicia Dujovne Ortiz alludes to the problem in the opening paragraph of her biography of Eva Perón by conjuring the white guardapolvos (dust-guards) that children in the public schools still wear over their clothes, the white pinafores that Sarmiento described as "the color of a dove," thinking they would abolish all inequities between social classes and eliminate all signs of a former barbarity. "But the worn-out espadrilles of the poorer children could never deny the reality of their barbarity," Dujovne writes. "For in his lyrical flight of fancy, Sarmiento had forgotten that rich children wear leather shoes while poor children wear espadrilles." Into this environment, rich in resentment, was born Eva Duarte.

Of course as I've already suggested, this isn't just a problem in poor and marginalized nations. In my own schoolroom in the prosperous United States of America there is no shortage of semi-illiterate and unruly pupils who wear their ignorance proudly—like a badge.

At the subway after my meal there was an Indian woman with three small children huddled together at the bottom of the stairs. She spoke to me and asked if I could help. I gave her the rest of my feast, hoping that she and the children would profit from it.

At the ticket window, beset by another child asking for coins, I let her have my thirty centavitos change. Then, down a further set of steps to the platform, at the landing where the stairs veered left, a man was set up playing a classical guitar with remarkable beauty. His case was open for donations. The bill I had handy, a five or a ten peso note, I thought better of giving up just then, considering that were I to get too much in the habit I'd end up again with scarcely a subway fare in my pocket. Yet for his act of artistry—the gift of sublime and soothing music in the midst of such bustle and noise—the man deserved every pittance he received. At the same time as I was calculating my own self-interest I reproved myself for not giving—however recklessly.

On the train back to Palermo I somehow managed to get a seat. I opened the copy of La Nación that I'd bought that morning. The Spurs had won their final: " Ginóbili, otra vez en la gloria: campeón de la NBA ." At a glance there was another headline stating that the United States had a worse image than Communist China, all the sympathy of 11 September 2001 having dissipated: "La invasión de Irak es un factor decisivo." In another first-page headline there was also the news (and this does interest me!) that "getting dirty is healthy for children: according to specialists, it strengthens the immune system." I thought of my grandson Nicholas who likes to sample the sand in his sandbox—much to his mother's and grandmother's horror and to my amusement.

Back in Palermo, after picking up my laundry that I'd been unable to pay for that morning (though it only cost me "siete pesos con cuarenta," or somewhere between two and three dollars), I headed for the Boutique del Libro to give Lucas the promised book before he was to get off work at five. I didn't linger but doubled back to the Plaza Palermo Viejo where I sat down to read the paper more closely in the moderate coolness of this warmer than usual evening on a bench beside the fountain with its towering plume of water.

The front-page headline about the United States's declining international image was fairly represented by the evidence garnered mostly on page two where the text was accompanied by bright attractive graphics, the most prominent of which showed that on the question of my country's image in the world the unfavorable / favorable ratio (according to the Pew Research Center's survey of the populations of sixteen countries) was

 

14 / 83 in the U.S.; 17 / 71 in India; 23 / 62 in Poland; 37 / 59 in Canada; 38 / 55 in Great Britain; 40 / 52 in Russia; 54 / 45 in Holland; 50 / 41 in Spain; 53 / 42 in China; 54 / 41 in Germany; 57 / 43 in France; 58 / 42 in Lebanon; 57 / 38 in Indonesia; 60 / 23 in Pakistan; 67 / 23 in Turkey; and 80 / 21 in Jordan.

 

Another chart showed the U. S.'s positive image versus China's ( U.S. / China):

 

in the U.S., 83 / 43; in Canada, 59 / 58; in Great Britain, 55 / 65; in France, 43 / 59; in Germany, 41 / 48; in Spain, 41 / 57; in Russia, 52 / 60; in Pakistan, 23 / 79; in Indonesia, 38 / 73; in India, 71 / 56; in China, 42 / 88.

 

As for the influence of George W. Bush's re-election, of the nine countries shown on the chart not one garnered as many claims of a positive as opposed to a negative impact on their assessment, most notably among "friends"—Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Holland—where the negative impact ranged from 60 to 77 percent. Crucial to establishing the point over time was a fourth chart, smallest of the lot, reflecting a general decline in the U. S.'s image in Great Britain, France, and Germany between 2001 and 2005: the positive perspective dipped from 83 to 55 in Great Britain, from 78 to 43 in France, and from 62 to 41 in Germany.

A glance at the first and most complete chart might suggest that things aren't so bad: six of the countries surveyed, including India, surpassed 50 percent in their approval ratings, though only half of those topped 60 percent and only India, a would-be nuclear power who arguably has much to gain from its association with the world's greatest superpower, surpassed 70 percent. Meanwhile, though we might wish to overlook the poor figures of "all the usual suspects" in the Middle East, we might be concerned at the results in Holland, Spain, Germany, and France in particular, all between 41 and 45 percent in their favorable ratings. Equally if not more disturbing— as the headline did well in emphasizing—is that Canada's positive rating of the U.S. was only one percentage point higher than Canadians' rating of China, while in all of the other instances cited, China rated higher than we did in the world's most powerful democracy.

Of course this could all mean nothing at all, mere blather of a lot of uninformed and squeamish foreigners. Indeed there are few more popular sports in my country than French-bashing, since we tend to accuse them of ingratitude and arrogance after we saved them from what we consider their own cowardice against the Nazis in World War II. Perhaps some of the criticism fits; Parisians are especially noted for their rudeness to anyone who speaks an inferior French than they. Though I'm not sure their combined arrogance is any worse than some of my countrymen's abroad—who expect always to be spoken to in English and, what's more, expect the rest of the world to bow (by the democratic will, of course) to the paternalistic expression of our economic and political interests.

Bolstering the Bush administration's view was an opinion piece written for La Nación by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Her strongest point, though I'm afraid not borne out by this present administration's reckless international policy, was this: "In my country, progress toward democracy has been long and difficult. And, keeping in mind our history, the United States has no right to feel falsely proud and every reason to feel humble."

I was particularly eager to read the opinion piece by Salmon Rushdie, British writer of Indian birth and heritage who was once sentenced to death by an Islamic extremist in Iran—for his novel The Satanic Verses which was considered blasphemy against Islam and its ancient prophet. His novel I thought was very good, blasphemous only if read literalistically, though certainly Rushdie isn't a religious fellow. I'm told that his novel Midnight's Children, about the post-World War II partition of India and Pakistan, is his greatest; I've still not gotten around to reading it. I was drawn to him quite by accident—at my brother Kirk's recommendation—by his novella for children called Haroun and the Sea of Stories which was published while he remained in hiding, and which I took as an exceedingly clever allegory of the plight of the artist in the face of extremist religious and / or political power. Beyond all of this I respect his views for having read his wonderful journalistic account of revolutionary Nicaragua during the years of another U.S. President's international crusading: The Jaguar's Smile is one of two great books that I've read on the subject written by outsiders to the struggle itself; the other, Nicaraguan Sketches (or Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce: Nicaragua So Violently Sweet) was Argentine expatriate Julio Cortázar's.

In his essay for La Nación Rushdie complains about the increasingly well documented abuses by the U.S. military of those detained in the "war on terror"—at the military's prison camp in Guantánamo Cuba and in other locations around the world. But his is not an anti-American diatribe like the rant of malcontents who want to seize power for themselves. He admits, after having first made the case that the abuses are occurring, that even so it isn't easy to sympathize with people who given their freedom might destroy the lives of countless other innocents. "It's hard to defend the human rights of those who disdain them," he writes. "Nevertheless, the growing proofs of repulsive conduct on the part of North American soldiers are extremely disturbing, not because they've harmed those detained but because they harm us. They offend our identity as free people who live according to law, our sense of who we are and what we're defending. That identity is, or should be, something that conservatives and liberals alike should be determined to defend."

Then Rushdie quotes the Cuban poet and journalist José Martí, who died defending Cuban independence in the Spanish-American war and "whose verses inspired the beautiful song 'Guantanamera,' associated with the bay of Guantánamo" long before the U.S. prison camp was built. Most significantly he quotes this statement of Martí's: "Whoever tries to overthrow the freedom of our adversaries is worthy of censure, much moreso if he does it in the name of liberty. There is no forgiveness for hateful actions. Daggers thrust in the name of freedom are thrust into the heart of freedom."

 

---

 

I turned in search of an evening's cultural entertainment to the section entitled "Espectáculos." One item that caught my eye was a theatrical production called Magaldi Tango, whose brief announcement on section four page seven I circled in black ink. Glancing through the section once more as almost a month later I write these words, other listings emerge which in that evening's declining light, seated on that bench under a street light, I apparently missed. In any case my flagging energy bespoke something closer to home. So I strolled along Scalabrini Ortiz toward the 1300 block, the nightclub Parakultural which according to a listing in the Carlos Gardel issue of the magazine Ñ was supposed to feature milongas—close kissing cousins, as far as I understand the distinction, of the internationally famous tangos.

As I limped along on my knobby wooden cane, let's suppose I was still mulling over Rushdie's piece in La Nación, still troubled by my nation's falling moral clout in the world. Thinking of these things I remembered an equally powerful political piece in that same issue of Ñ. It was an interview with Riszard Kapuscinski, East European journalist whose work I'd read before in the great British literary journal Granta: in particular "The Soccer War," his lengthy report on an actual armed conflict between El Salvador and Honduras which (while actually concerned with land and population pressures in tiny El Salvador) was fought on the pretense of Honduras's disingenuously contested victory in a very important soccer match.

In the interview Kapuscinski says: "I believe that there is a false interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of objectivity, because that notion was created from another root which said that the so-called 'fourth power' had to be objective in the face of the activities of other powers (judicial, executive, etc.). But it was never thought of in terms of objectivity in the face of injustice, in the face of the evils that encircle our humanity and make our lives hard. One cannot be objective in the face of torture and dictatorship, that's inhuman. And the word 'objectivity' doesn't apply in these situations." In this context he offers his judgment of the U.S. occupation of Iraq but also of the initial journalistic acquiescence in the face of government propaganda under the pretense of a mistaken understanding of our legitimate constitutional need for checks and balances.

He adds this particular insight regarding the nature of his profession: "First of all, I think of my work as that of a translator, but not as that of a literary translator but as a translator of one culture toward another, who constructs an atmosphere of understanding because understanding is the first condition of tolerance. There can be no tolerance without first there being mutual understanding. It's necessary to awaken other traditions, other manners of life, other manners of thought. And to understand that we live in a multicultural, multiracial world and that our duty as human beings is to try to find mutual ways of dialoguing between us. Not of fighting, but of dialoguing."

What he expresses there, it seems to me, is an aspect of the labor of any of us who are willing to engage in it. That, Mansilla, is exactly what you were engaged in as you wrote the Excursión. It's what I hope to be involved in as I write this narrative or any other, and as I bring the literary creations of Sebastián and Alejandro Bekes and María Rosa Lojo to another parallel existence in the English language.

When after first passing it I finally located the nightclub Parakultural, I wandered in to make inquiries. I encountered an empty room: dance floor at center; surrounded by tables but not a person in sight besides the bartender. I asked him if it was true they had a milonga show there every evening and he answered that, well, there was milonga music but it was piped in, that whoever wanted to get up and dance could do so but the action didn't start until almost midnight. It was neither exactly what I was looking for nor on a schedule I could tolerate. So I went on walking. At a nearby corner I encountered the enticing sign of an ice cream shop, so I stopped in and ordered a fairly good-sized cup (perhaps a kilo) of dulce de leche ice cream. Nothing is more pleasing than an Argentine ice cream—at least not in my limited experience of the world! I sat outside the store at one of the two or three tables provided and ate the whole thing. The day's modest warming trend assured that I wouldn't catch a cold because of it.

For a bite of something more substantial (though I wasn't overly hungry after that Valencian-style chicken and rice at Arturito's) I stopped at a Basque restaurant two or three blocks from home, climbed up to the non-smoking area on the second level where I was the first customer, and from its wall-length picture window enjoyed a view of the cobblestone street below. I ate a fish soup and afterwards a fruit salad. It was a pleasant enough dining experience, though as I left I was finding the fishy smell that pervaded the whole place a bit overpowering.

Back at the boarding house Román was there with a Yanqui friend named Jeff. Jeff's Spanish was a bit clunkier than Román's. He hadn't yet mastered the use of the familiar vos instead of tú, vos tenés (you have) instead of tú tienes. But he was communicating reasonably well for having only had some high-school Spanish and a brief time in the country. I discovered that, coincidentally, Jeff hails from Cary North Carolina (essentially a suburb of the metropolis Raleigh) where I'd spent a year of my painfully awkward adolescence. Of course some thirty years had passed since then, and he was scarcely twenty, so there was only the remotest chance that either of our families should have heard of the other.

I didn't dislike these two kids, but a few moments spent with them reminded me of one of the reasons I'm glad I skipped the young-adult rite-of-passage of spending a few years rooming with other young adults in university dormitories. Their conversations were all about drinking beer and finding girls to drink it with. Román was complaining that one ungrateful young woman had been ignoring his phone calls; then, after calling her up and finding her "under the weather" as we say in my country, he imitated her raspy voice and made a bit of what I took for mean-spirited fun of her. I thought: Poor hapless boys! They're neither mature nor profound....