“Adam Cook. Cookie,” Cook said. He indicated an empty seat on the couch nearest us, and Mr. Maldonado took it. He told us that his business was forest preservation, and he was just returning from Finland, where he had been studying their methods.
Cook asked, with interest, “Vespugia is concerned about forestation?”
“We have a well-established program,” Jorge Maldonado said, “started many years ago by El Zarco. General Guedder is keeping it up and constantly looking into new and improved methods.” His English was very good, with only a trace of accent.
Cook said, “Sam White tells us that you are also a rancher.”
“In a modest way. I used to breed cattle, but with the world grown smaller and hungrier, I am trying to shift to crops that are kinder to the land.” He added, wryly, “And, of course, that make a reasonable profit. But now—I am on vacation. I will see my wife and children tomorrow; the children are away at school for much of the year, but they are still on their long break. You, Miss Vicky Austin, are not in school?”
“Yes, but this trip is a sort of educational vacation.”
“Educational, indeed. It will be delightful for all of us to have you aboard the Argosy. But there will probably be no other young people for you.”
“Well, I am hoping to see a friend when we get to LeNoir Station; he’s working there.”
“LeNoir. One of our most interesting stops, on Eddington Point. It is a long, fascinating trip,” Jorge Maldonado said pleasantly. “But before we get to Antarctica, I hope you will enjoy my small country, which is very dear to me.” He rose and bowed slightly toward us. “Time to stretch the legs. I will be staying with you overnight in San Sebastián. My ranch is not far from the pyramids.”
Our flight was called then and along with everybody else we gathered up our hand luggage, got out our boarding passes, and headed for the plane.
The flight was late, and it was after eleven before we took off. Cook gave me the window seat again, though there was nothing to see except our reflections in the glass. The Vespugian flight attendants had long, black braids down their backs, and didn’t speak fluent English, but Cook spoke to them in Spanish and they beamed at him gratefully.
We were given a really good meal, much better than the lunch we’d had on the way to Miami. The flight attendants served from large, rolling trays full of dishes of vegetables and platters of fillets of beef, nicely rare, which they carved for us. It was past midnight, but I was hungry, and I enjoyed the meal and the solicitous service. After we’d eaten, we were given blankets, and we leaned our seats back, put up our leg rests, and tried to sleep. It was certainly not like sleeping in a bed, but I did sleep, and even dreamed a little, and I was still dozing when breakfast was brought around and people began opening their shades. We saw some cone-shaped mountains, so I figured they were the volcanoes Adam II had written about. Jorge Maldonado paused at our seats on the way back from the lavatory, and told us that some of them were still active, and that there was one on the Antarctic peninsula that was sending up smoke and occasional spurts of flame, so we weren’t going to land anywhere near, in case it decided to erupt.
When we reached San Sebastián, the airport was steamily hot. I’d brought a cotton top and skirt, and was ready to get out of my winter clothes. Sweat trickled down my back as I stood in the passport line.
A man from the Argosy was waiting for our group, and he told us to get into the two buses which were outside, and our bags would be collected and delivered to our rooms in the hotel.
Cook and I got on the second bus. The last person to climb in carried a big something wrapped in a canvas case, and she was very careful with it, trying not to bump it.
“Say, Siri, what’s that?” Sam asked. He seemed to be on a first-name basis with everybody.
“My harp.” She found a seat across the aisle from me and held the harp carefully, as though it were a baby.
“You’re taking a harp to Antarctica?” someone asked.
She laughed, a nice, bubbling kind of laugh. “I’m hoping to play it for the penguins and seals.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Not at all.”
“How about playing for us?” Jorge Maldonado asked.
“Be glad to.”
Someone else asked, “Is it a Venezuelan harp?”
“No, a Celtic lap harp. They’re not dissimilar.”
Suddenly we realized that the guide was trying to get our attention, introducing himself and the driver, and telling us a little about where we were going. San Sebastián was a mixture of old and new, and had been founded by someone with the unlikely name of Modesto Pugh. Jorge Maldonado, whose English was lots better than the guide’s, told us that many people from the British Isles had helped free the South American continent from the domination of Spain.
The guide, who obviously didn’t want anyone else to take over his job, announced loudly that the water in San Sebastián came from the Andes and was very pure, but had minerals we weren’t used to, so we’d better drink bottled water.
When we got to the hotel, we were herded into a room where we were offered orange juice and a delicious kind of empanada filled with seasoned meat or cheese. Then our passports were collected and we were given room assignments and keys. Several people were handed letters; there was an envelope and a couple of postcards for me. The first postcard was from Adam. No salutation. No signature. But it was his writing. This is miching mallecho; it means mischief.
Cook saw me reading it, and asked, “What’s that?”
I handed it to him, and he read it, laughed, then sobered. “Hamlet, I think.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was kind of intrigued by that ‘miching mallecho’ when we did Hamlet in school. Sneaky evil, our teacher said. So what is Adam …” My voice trailed off.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you get a postcard or anything?”
“A note from Seth, saying he’s looking forward to seeing me, and to meeting you.”
“So what’s Adam talking about?” If he’d received my letter, this postcard gave no indication.
With his typical gesture, Cook smoothed his bald pate. “Vicky, I wish I knew. Here, have another of these.” And he handed me one of the empanadas, which I popped into my mouth.
The second postcard was from my brother John, in his dark, scrunched-up writing: Hope all goes well. Write details. Wish you’d told parents about school locker, otherwise least said. Hope Suzy doesn’t blab. January thaw here. No snow no skiing. Have two papers to write. Take care.
The letter was from my mother, written a week before I left, so it would be waiting for me, with P.S.s from Suzy and Rob. Mother wrote how much they’d miss me and wished me a wonderful time. She’d try to have a letter for me at Port Stanley. Otherwise, she wouldn’t try to reach me, but hoped I’d write them when I could. Suzy wrote that the weather was terrible and Ned was wonderful and her Spanish teacher was interested in my trip because he was from Vespugia and had always wanted to go to Antarctica. Four boys had asked her to a dance and she didn’t know which one to choose. In his careful printing, Rob wrote that there was no snow and come home soon.
Somehow I felt very far away from them all.
It turned out that I was sharing a room with Siri and her harp. Siri Evensen, her whole name was, from Minnesota. She was a biochemist, she told me, and her harp was her relaxation. “I’m taking a long-overdue vacation,” she said, and yawned. “All I want to do at this moment is go to bed and sleep.”
I was pretty sleepy, too, though I did want to go on the bus tour of the city at four. Siri yawned again, like a kitten, and said she’d been to San Sebastián before, so she was going to sleep until time for dinner. “Is Cookie going on the bus tour with you?”
“Yes. We’re going to meet in the lobby.”
She lay down and put eyeshades on. I looked at my suitcase and thought of the spy novels John loves, which I sometimes read. I had Adam’s “miching mallecho” postcard in my hand. I opened my
backpack, heavy from my Shakespeare book and my journal, and added it to his other cards and letters, plus Adam II’s letter, plus the warning cards from my locker. I had a weirdly sinister feeling. I should have shown everything to my parents. But then they’d never have let me go.
As though looking for inspiration, I dug around in the pocket of my backpack where I keep paper clips, fillers for my pen, an old Swiss Army knife of John’s which has a small pair of scissors, and an ancient bottle opener from the days when Coke or ginger-ale bottles had metal caps; Rob had found it and given it to me for Christmas as an artifact, as proud of it as he was of his Indian arrowheads. There was a small bottle of whiteout, which is almost becoming an artifact itself, and then my fingers touched a small roll of Scotch tape, and a crazy idea came to me. I tore off as small a piece of tape as I could and put it over the zipper on my suitcase, feeling both stupid and scared, living in a world of imagination as usual.
I flopped down on the other twin bed, listening to Siri breathing. I slept for an hour, woke up feeling hot and sweaty, and put on my bathing suit and went for a quick swim in the hotel pool, which was out back in a gracious courtyard full of flowers. The water was cool and eased the cricks left over from all the flying.
The bus trip was interesting. San Sebastián was my first foreign city, Vespugia my first foreign country, South America my first foreign continent. Sam, who sat behind me on the bus, said that some people took the Antarctic trip not so much because they were interested as because they wanted to go to their seventh continent. Seven continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica. I still had a lot of traveling to do.
We went to a museum with a collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, and a room which was a sort of Madame Tussaud reenactment of the Spanish Inquisition. I hadn’t realized before that the Spanish Inquisition had reached South America. There were life-sized figures in brown habits, their cowls pulled completely over their heads and faces, so the people being tortured couldn’t see their torturers. And there were some of the original instruments of torture, thumbscrews, racks, and other horrors.
Cook stood by me. I looked at one of the cowled monks. “How could monks do this kind of thing?”
Sam, standing near us, said, “Not only monks.”
“Who?”
Cook said, “Remember Salem, and witch-hunting. The Spanish Inquisition wasn’t the only evidence that religion can become fanaticism.”
Sam said, “It seems to be a taint in human nature, this need to torture and kill those whose belief in God differs from yours.”
I looked at a wax Indian who was being squashed by some kind of machine, and turned away, feeling sick. One man was taking pictures with a camera which Sam said was almost as complex as Jorge Maldonado’s.
“Why does he want pictures of this stuff?” I demanded.
Sam replied, mildly, “It’s historically interesting, Vicky.”
I was very glad to get back on the bus and have a drive up and down the streets of San Sebastián. The city was a mixture of beautiful nineteenth-century architecture and modern drabness. Very little from the colonial period a century before; there was one interesting old church, but we saw it only from the outside. At many intersections there were soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders, just as Adam had written. Our guide, whose English was hardly a second language, managed to make us understand that the Vespugian border was always in danger.
Sam, leaning over the back of my seat, said that when he’d been in San Sebastián before, during the presidency of El Zarco, there hadn’t been this kind of military presence. “There’s no velvet glove around this iron hand.”
It was amazing to see green trees and grass and all kinds of flowers when at home it was midwinter and when, in a few days, we’d see icebergs. We went to an elegant horse-racing club; races were held every Sunday and were a big attraction in San Sebastián. The last thing we did was drive up a horrendous winding narrow road to the top of a mountain from which we had smoggy views of the city.
Going down the mountain with all the hairpin bends was even more scary than going up. Our mountains at home are old mountains, worn by time and wind and rain. There was a raw newness to the mountains around San Sebastián, a feeling that here the planet was young, that the mountains had recently been formed.
Several people on the bus fell asleep; it was hot and humid, way up in the eighties. Even in my summer skirt and top, I was sticky and hot. I tried to listen to our guide, who was really interesting when I could understand what he was saying. He told us what Adam had told me about efforts to combat pollution.
When we got back to the hotel, our passports were returned. I stuck mine in my backpack and went up to the room. Siri was in the shower. I checked my suitcase, and there was no small piece of tape across the zipper. Something flip-flopped in my stomach. I opened the suitcase and it looked to me as though my things had been gone over and then put back in place, but not exactly. I couldn’t be sure. I looked on the floor and didn’t see the tiny piece of tape. Certainly Siri wouldn’t have gone through my things. And who would have come in while she was sleeping? Anything worth taking was in my backpack, which I’d had with me on the bus tour. I shook myself for feeling like a character in a fourth-rate international-intrigue novel.
Siri came out of the shower and said the water was only a trickle, so I put on my damp bathing suit and went back to the pool. Jorge Maldonado and Dick Hawkins were there, swimming tidy laps back and forth. Jorge Maldonado saw me, swam to the edge of the pool, and waved.
“Hello, Mr. Maldonado,” I greeted him.
“Jorge, Vicky, please, Jorge, the American way. Did you enjoy the bus trip?”
“I did, but now I’m ready for a swim.”
“The water is a great deal cooler than the air.” He pulled himself up onto the side of the pool. “Enjoy it.” Dick Hawkins kept on swimming, but paused in his stroke to smile and wave at me. Swimming must have been good for his lame leg.
Cook was sharing a room with Sam, and Siri and I joined them for dinner in the hotel dining room, along with Dick and Angelique. It was a beautiful meal, with interesting combinations. I had chicken with avocado and artichoke hearts.
We learned that Dick and Angelique usually took their vacations aboard a ship where Dick was ship’s doctor, and had seen a lot of the world that way, but this was their first trip to Antarctica. After dinner we strolled around the gardens, enjoying the evening breeze and the summer smell of flowers. Dick leaned on his cane, limping heavily, and shortly he and Angelique excused themselves and went in. It wasn’t long before the rest of us headed for our rooms.
San Sebastián was my first foreign experience, and I wasn’t going to see very much of it, because it was simply a stop on the way to our real destination. I wrote about the afternoon—though not the Scotch tape on my suitcase zipper—in my long letter to Aunt Serena, which was going to be shown to my teachers when I got home. It was more fun writing to Aunt Serena than it would have been to keep a school-type journal. While I was writing, Siri took her harp out of its case and began to play it, softly. I looked at her, enjoying the music and her grace in playing it. Her ash-blond hair swung across her cheek; she wore it shoulder-length, parted on the side, and held out of her face with a tortoiseshell barrette, sort of the way I used to wear my hair when I was ten, only it didn’t look childish on her, or as though she were trying to be younger than she was. It was simple and right.
“After having been bounced around in all our travels”—she plucked the strings gently—“she needs to make a little music.”
I finished writing and got into bed. Siri played for a few more minutes—one of my favorite songs that we sang in choir, “Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life.” Then she turned out the light. The air conditioner in our room was noisy and ineffective. I shoved down the blanket and slept under the sheet.
The next morning we boarded two buses again and were taken back to the airport and divided int
o groups. Jorge Maldonado was there and explained that the trip to the jungle would be in small prop planes. He was standing near two men in army uniforms, one young, not much older than I, and one considerably older. Jorge told us that all Vespugians must serve two years in the army, and these two soldiers would be with us as our guides on the trip to the pyramids. He introduced them, Captain Nausinio, the older one, and Second Lieutenant Esteban Manuel, the younger one.
Esteban! That was the name of Adam’s guide to the pyramids. He was nice-looking, with soft, curly black hair, bright blue eyes, and fair skin.
“Esteban’s forebears came to Vespugia from Wales.” Jorge smiled. “Which accounts for the dark hair and blue eyes. He is a musician and will be playing the oboe in the San Sebastián Symphony once his term in the army is over. He is very talented.”
While we were waiting to board the planes, I went up to Esteban. “Hi. I’m Vicky Austin. I think you know my friend Adam Eddington.”
Esteban frowned and held out his hands helplessly, and I realized he didn’t speak any English, and, unlike Adam, I didn’t speak Spanish. Jorge, carrying his camera cases, came over and I explained, so Jorge told Esteban what I was trying to say, and Esteban beamed and shook my hand and poured a torrent of enthusiastic words over me, and I couldn’t understand him any more than he’d understood me. Jorge laughed and said that Esteban was delighted to meet his friend Adam’s friend. Then Jorge asked me, “Your friend’s name is Adam Eddington?”
“Yes.”
“Is he perhaps related to the well-known explorer?”
I hadn’t realized Adam II was well known. “His nephew.”
“Tragic, his uncle’s death. You knew him?” I shook my head. “Ah, true, his death was a good many years ago. He was a remarkable man, remarkable.”
We were called to board then, and Cook and I were on the third plane. As it left the runway on takeoff, it bumped into the air so wildly that I reached out and grabbed Cook’s hand, and he held mine, firmly, for the entire flight, which took about half an hour.
Troubling a Star Page 9
