Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  “Yes.”

  “And will you write about the politics in each country?”

  “No. I’d rather write about sewage.”

  “Oh.” Andreas took some time digesting this. How could you go somewhere and not write about politics? It was as if I had told him that I was going to build a house out of peanut butter. He didn’t get it.

  “What does Garry do?” Andreas wanted to know.

  “You mean how does he make a living?”

  “Yes.”

  “He drives.”

  “Who pays him?”

  “People who make milk shakes that last nine months without refrigeration.”

  “I see,” Andreas said, though I don’t think he did.

  Spring had been a long time coming to Buenos Aires this year. The deciduous trees, the elms in particular, were still bare, but it was a brilliant, sunny day and the temperature had risen to the mid-sixties. Yesterday had been Student’s Day—Andreas said Argentina has a day for everything: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Children’s Day, Grandmother’s Day, Grandfather’s Day, Student’s Day—and that all were rather unfortunately commercialized. School is out on Student’s Day and there is usually a minor riot. Yesterday had been so drear, with a cold wind whipping, that the riot had been something of a disappointment.

  We stopped at a camping-goods store, where I found a twelve-volt heating element and a teapot Garry and I could use to heat water in the truck for our freeze-dried food. Garry had looked all over Moncton for just such a coil. To find one in South America, and at the last minute, was something of a coup. We could eat on the record run. It had, up to this point, been a very good day.

  WE WENT to the Costa Rican embassy for the second-to-last visa. It was located on the sixth floor of an older building on fashionable Calle Esmeralda. The door, with its security peephole and buzzer, was open. There was a man in a pinstriped suit sitting at one of two desks in the lobby, and he told us to knock on a door with the Costa Rican seal on it. We knocked lightly and waited for ten minutes. We asked the pinstriped man if we should knock a second time. Why not? We knocked and waited five more minutes. Finally the door opened, revealing a short man in a tweedy jacket with neatly combed white hair. He seemed annoyed. Why wouldn’t people leave him alone to do his work, his expression seemed to say.

  He said he was the acting consul and that his name was Dr. Arnaja. It would only be another short moment he said. Ten minutes later he ushered a woman from the room, a Costa Rican in her late sixties. She wore sensible black shoes, a neat, prim, dark dress, and looked like anyone’s favorite grandmother. She had a small sad smile as of someone who had seen a number of tragedies in her life. She took a chair in the lobby across from Andreas and me.

  Andreas told me that he had some trouble with the people who lived in central Buenos Aires. In the outskirts and residential sections people were more easygoing, but in the central section they were aggressive, loud. There were merchants “who would sell you a door and call it a house.” There were self-important bureaucrats who would delay important documents just to demonstrate their power. There was a name for this sort of insufferable person: chanta.

  The woman sitting in the chair opposite said that the word wasn’t exclusive to Argentina. There were chantas from many different countries. She nodded slightly toward the closed door.

  There was a frosted-glass window beside the door and some teacups so close to the inside sill that you could make out their colors. We heard a teapot whistle and then saw a hand remove one of the cups. There was the clicking sound of spoon against cup. We waited another half hour.

  Presently, the door opened and the good doctor handed the woman her passport with the air of a king bestowing a gift on a simple peasant. He did not invite us into his office but sat in a chair in the lobby and asked what it was that we wanted. I tried to explain the project, which seemed to bore him immeasurably.

  I couldn’t get a visa, he said, because I was entering Costa Rica by auto and the only way I could get a visa would be if I had, in my possession, a piece of paper from the Costa Rican embassy stating that the truck was in transit. I showed him the map and pointed out that the point of the entire project was to be in transit. Could he himself fill out such a form? Of course, but—and this he explained in the tones of a man explaining something exceedingly simple to a pair of very young children—very few people drove their cars directly from Argentina into Costa Rica. He didn’t have the form. Without the form he couldn’t give me a visa. This thing we wanted, it wasn’t his job.

  Abruptly, the acting consul cut the interview short. He disappeared behind the door. We considered the alternatives, Andreas and I. Finally we knocked again. Dr. Arnaja appeared, now very annoyed. Since I did not own the truck, I suggested that the doctor issue me a visa as a passenger. My partner would take care of the paperwork regarding the truck because he owned it.

  Such a thing, the doctor said, was unheard of. The very idea seemed to insult him.

  We left defeated, and I was depressed. There is no way to drive from Argentina to Alaska without passing through Costa Rica. And there was, apparently, no way I was going to get a visa. The whole project, it seemed to me, hung on one visa and one very disagreeable man. Garry was much more calm about this than I was. “It’s a paper war,” he said. “Every day a new obstacle. I think we can get them to come around.”

  Garry had fought paper wars before. It was why we had come to Argentina two months ago: to make connections, to locate the strings we might need to pull in just this sort of situation.

  The Canadian embassy wanted us to meet with a man named Roberto Raffo, an Argentine who was planning to ride horses from Argentina to Alaska. We had drinks in a bar that was all dark-paneled wood and hanging ferns. There were pictures of rugby players on the wall. Raffo’s projected trip would take two years, and he wanted to make a film of the long ride. Garry suggested that Raffo strike his major deal with a company that could supply film, which would be his major expense. Raffo should not give it all away: he should not sell the project to a single sponsor. The closer he got to the United States, the more people would see that his project was a winner. It would be easier to pick up big corporate sponsors and the expedition should have something to sell them by then.

  Raffo asked Garry if there was anything he could do for us. He was wealthy and well connected in Buenos Aires. What he could do for us, Garry said, was figure out how we could put some pressure on the Costa Rican embassy. Raffo said he’d think about it. It might take only a single call from the right official.

  We called Raul Capuano of GM who said he’d try to have someone call the embassy in the morning.

  Garry had some papers coming from the Costa Rican embassy in Ottawa to his office in Moncton. They hadn’t arrived before he left. He wasn’t sure what they were. Perhaps they included the “in-transit” form. If not, he could get his visa service in Ottawa to go to the Costa Rican embassy early and see if they had the form. They could fax it to us and we could take it to the disagreeable Dr. Arnaja.

  Back at the hotel, Garry called Jane in Moncton. He asked her to check the mail to see if there was a letter from the Costa Rican embassy in Canada, which had been very helpful. Maybe they could call Dr. Arnaja.

  It seemed to me that the Costa Rican snafu was critical, but Garry was calmly taking care of other business. Jane should call a photographer named Rich Cox in California. Cox would be shooting us for Popular Mechanics magazine and would meet us in Tierra del Fuego at the start of the trip. “Tell him to bring some malaria pills down to us.” Occasionally, we had heard, Nicaraguan borders are closed to those who can’t prove they are taking the pills. Also, we had not heard from the Nicaraguan ministry of tourism. They had promised us a letter when we visited Managua, something to flash at the border.

  It was an hour-long business call. Garry hung up and said that he hated the telephone. “I’m used to Jane,” he said. “And she’s used to being called from anywhere, used to the wo
rk, used to me being frantic. But Lucy grabbed the phone. She said, ‘Dad, I miss you.’ ”

  “You should have told her to go watch Zig Zag,” I said.

  Garry would not be jollied out of his sudden funk.

  “Little voice from the top of the world,” he said. “It broke my heart.” Which, as I recalled, was just what Garry had said when Lucy hadn’t wanted to talk to him in New York. The little girl could break his heart with a word.

  THE NEXT DAY we were up early, waiting for Jane’s call. For want of anything useful to do, I tried to see if I could get the American embassy to help me out with Costa Rica. I was shuttled from one voice to another and finally fobbed off on a man who said he really didn’t know what he could do for me at all.

  For contrast, and by way of making a point, Garry called Jacques Crete at the Canadian embassy. Not only had we met with Crete on our last trip, but Garry had written him frequently with progress reports. Garry explained the Costa Rican problem. Crete said he’d see what he could do.

  Ten minutes later Crete called back to say he’d talked to Dr. Arnaja at the Costa Rican embassy. The man was not very helpful, he said, but he had agreed to meet with us again.

  “Which is why,” Garry explained, “you need to make your contacts months ahead of time. This is why there is such a thing as reconnaissance.”

  I called Andreas and had him make an appointment with Dr. Arnaja at one. Andreas called back to confirm the appointment. He said the doctor sounded pretty sour on the phone.

  Jane called at noon. The Costa Rican ambassador in Ottawa did not know anything at all about a specific in-transit form. It seemed to have been something the acting counsel had made up out of whole cloth for reasons that weren’t at all obvious.

  The Canadian ambassador to Costa Rica had, however, written a letter to the minister of transportation in Costa Rica requesting his cooperation and assistance in this project. The minister had replied immediately and with grace. Costa Rica, his letter said, saw our trip as a way to promote tourism and inter-American friendship. Jane had a copy and would fax it down to the hotel immediately.

  At twelve-thirty, letter in hand, we took a cab to the Costa Rican embassy. Andreas met us there.

  We knocked on the acting consul’s door. He opened it about twelve inches, muttered something about not being able to get any work done because of all the telephone calls that morning—here he shot us an accusing look—and asked for our passports and the carnet. We slipped the letter from Canada in along with the other documents.

  We sat in the lobby, which was the size of a walk-in closet. It was paneled with very dark brown wood, and one wall was a smoky mirror that you didn’t want to look into because it distorted your features. Ten minutes later the consul opened the door and handed out Garry’s passport along with the carnet and letter. He still had my passport but he seemed to be growing smaller inside his office.

  About twenty minutes later the door opened a few inches. There was a tiny gibbering gnome inside and he handed out my passport with a grunt. We examined it. Sure enough, there was a Costa Rican visa there on the page, along with two stamps and an official signature. It said that I could pass into Costa Rica by land provided I had documentation to leave. It was valid for thirty days, and there was a space for a date, but there was no date on it.

  “This could mean trouble at the border,” Garry said. We looked at each other. “What’s he going to do,” Garry asked, “revoke it? He’s committed himself. He can’t revoke a visa because he forgot to date it.”

  Andreas knocked on the door. There was a grunt from behind the great seal of Costa Rica. Andreas knocked again, somewhat louder.

  “This must be dated, could you do that, please,” he said with a courtesy I found wondrously excessive.

  “Argghhh,” the counsel screamed. In point of actual fact, he grunted sourly again, opened the door a crack, took the passport, and disappeared for five more minutes, at which time the door opened only wide enough for an arm to reach out with the passport. Now it was dated. With a grotesque and illegible scrawl.

  “What was wrong with that guy?” I wondered aloud.

  “He’s a chanta,” Andreas said.

  “What’s a chanta?” Garry asked.

  “A dickhead,” I explained.

  “Guy’s got the bad attitude,” Garry said. “He can’t be having very much fun.”

  We said good-bye to Andreas, who wished us luck.

  The Nicaraguan embassy occupied an entire house and was located on a pleasant, tree-lined street. There was an iron gate leading up to the door. A woman answered the door and asked us to please come back at two-thirty. Garry and I took a walk. It was almost seventy degrees, the sun was shining brightly, and we were both in a good mood. The trees were glorious. In just one day leaves had virtually erupted on the elms. “When we left New York,” Garry said, “it was the beginning of fall. The temperature was about the same, but the feeling was totally different.”

  “I know,” I said.

  We went back to the Nicaraguan embassy. There was a secretary sitting at a desk in front of large wooden doors. “Canadian?” she asked.

  She had been expecting us. They had spoken with the Canadian embassy and were happy to help. The American would not need a visa. Garry’s passport was taken behind the wooden door. We should sit in a small room off to the side with Queen Anne chairs, a lopsided chandelier, a fireplace, and two intriguing portraits of Augusto Sandino. One was a filmy monochrome. The other was a poster that identified Sandino as “the General of the Army of Free Men and the Leader of the Anti-imperialist Revolution.” I read this to Garry and he muttered, “Shit.”

  Garry, I knew, had a problem with Nicaragua. He had hated it when we were there and, in our travels, referred to any hot, miserable place as “a real Nicaragua.” I found it strange: for all practical purposes, Garry Sowerby was apolitical. I glanced up at the portraits and noticed that, in each one, Sandino seemed to have one bad eye. I wondered if he had been cross-eyed and thought I might look it up someday.

  There was a click and then the sound of classical music coming from two speakers. It was something melodically frenetic and slightly discordant, something with violins in rapid conflict that I couldn’t identify, perhaps Bruckner. I wondered what it meant. Why here, under the portraits of Sandino? Presently, a voice came over the speakers and identified a Buenos Aires classical music station. An older woman who looked as if she might do a lot of mopping brought us two cups of coffee in flowered demitasse cups.

  A short time later a tall dark-haired woman in a sweater that looked Scandinavian came out to smile and hand Garry his passport.

  We walked a few blocks, feeling spring come in. “All our problems are solved,” I told Garry. “Nothing can go wrong now.”

  “Don’t say that,” Garry said.

  We walked for a while under the new leaves, for the joy of it, then took a cab back to the hotel. We passed a grassy park in which young people were studying under the suddenly magnificent trees, either that or holding each other for the rapture of spring and their own youth and beauty.

  There was a sheaf of telexes and faxes for Garry at the hotel desk. Good news and bad news. The ship from Colombia that would take us around the Darien Gap was definitely booked for October 10. The bad news was that the documentation involved in getting the truck on the ship would take a day. That meant we should probably be at the port the night of Thursday, October 8. Which meant we should probably start a day earlier than planned. Which meant our schedule was suddenly jammed up. Which meant we had to check out of the hotel—right now—and get the truck 1,800 miles south, to the start of the drive. It would be a relatively easy three- to four-day warm-up drive to the end of the earth.

  We drove south through the traffic of Buenos Aires, passing middle-class neighborhoods that looked a bit like something you might see in the Sunset district of San Francisco: neat wood-frame houses and small yards with flowerbeds about to erupt into color.

>   The roads wound about themselves—it was almost as difficult as getting out of London—and there were occasional hard knots of poverty: a square block of brick shacks, all perhaps twelve feet by twelve feet, hastily and haphazardly constructed, set cheek by jowl on a muddy plain. Through open doors I could see dirt floors and walls decorated with illustrations torn from magazines.

  Everywhere, there was graffiti spray-painted on whitewashed walls and roadside political billboards, ELECT A WORKING MAN TO WORK FOR YOU, advised one sign that featured a picture of a real bruiser in a blue work shirt with a noble look on his face. There were small signs, white letters on a blue background, informing the driver that, despite whatever he may have read in the newspaper, THE MALVINAS [Falklands] BELONG TO ARGENTINA. Some of the graffiti I found entirely opaque: ENOUGH OF PAPER, NOW WE WORK FOR OUR CHILDREN.

  The traffic was brutal, even when we got onto Route Three out of the city. Though the weather was dry, the road itself was slick with the secretions of various vehicles. Trucks crept along at twenty-five and thirty miles an hour on a two-lane highway.

  The industrial section, infested by these creeping trucks, extended for what seemed to be a couple of hundred miles. The sunset on this splendid spring day was intense, consisting of flashes of crimson which muted down to rose, and pink streaked with bands of gold. The whole effect was magnified tenfold by a thick haze of industrial pollutants that hung in the air and took on the colors of the setting sun, so that, for just a moment, that which is ugly by definition partook of beauty.

  By eleven, five hours later, we were out of the metropolitan circle, out in the ranches of the pampas.

  We were standing there, Garry and I, beside the truck on an empty highway, relieving ourselves under unfamiliar stars. The night was moonless, black, and there were frogs in the irrigation ditches setting up an eager cacophony. The velvet night was full of amphibian mating calls—“take me, take me now”—and the sound of it was odd, a note struck on a large stringed instrument, or perhaps a padded mallet on a metal bar.