by Pico Iyer
I also took the opportunity, while here, of purchasing a copy of Kim Jong Il’s ground-breaking study, On the Art of the Cinema. In it, the Dear Leader begins, surprisingly, by contending that “Art and Life are important activities.” He goes on to pronounce that “Make-up is a noble art.” He concludes, with typical boldness, by asserting that “A person with a low level of technical skill cannot make an excellent technician.”
People say that Pyongyang is a dreary city, but I found no shortage of diversions there: I was taken to the subway stations (with their 250-foot mosaics, marble pillars, and gold chandeliers, built at air-raid-shelter level), and to the Thermal Power Station; to the Korean Revolutionary Museum, and to a performance by the Korean People’s Army Circus (whose artists wielded guns while doing handstands and chanted slogans while revolving in midair). I even got a tour around the five-hundred room Children’s Palace. “Children are very important,” my guide pointed out. “We must always think of the future.” The future and the past, in fact, seemed the places where the North Koreans felt most comfortable: anywhere but now.
“The system is like a big family,” he went on.
“Does your president remain close to his family?”
“Yes,” he said. “But Kim Jong Il has his own room. He is grown up enough. He is forty-eight.”
The deliriously smiling infants at the palace were kind enough to put on an hour-long variety show just for foreign guests. In one dance, a laid-back cicada, cradling a guitar, tried to persuade a group of smiling ants to join him in the shade. The hardworking insects, collective-minded to the end, smilingly rebuffed him, and when a blizzard came, the cicada was left friendless and unprepared. “This is a simple parable,” my guide whispered to me. “But it has a big meaning. For example, if we try at a socialist revolution …”
There was also much else to do. At night, in Pyongyang’s equivalent of the Rainbow Room, I heard a six-piece band play “The Isle of Capri,” and I once played billiards with a large Bavarian businessman made maudlin and drunk by the fact that the North Koreans had unexpectedly agreed to pay off a fifteen-year-old debt to his company. Downstairs, in the blue-lit Koryo Tea Room, the Village People were once again in fashion. I was pleasantly surprised to read that in the Second Pyongyang Film Festival, the Gold Torch for documentaries had been given to a Korean film; the Koreans had also taken the gold in the women’s adult group and the junior group events of the World Radio Finding Championships (and a silver in the junior group individual event). They had ample occasion to practice, I imagined: every radio in the country, after all, was fixed so as to receive only one acceptable frequency.
And so great was the triumph of nurture over nature here—or of mind over matter—that the North Koreans looked, to my eye, quite different from their cousins and brothers in the south; in some respects, indeed, their ways seemed more refined—or beaten down—than the pell-mell boisterousness of Seoul. Yet in many ways, it was easy to see how the militaristic drills, the pragmatism, the collective-mindedness of the North Koreans, their tireless construction of concrete towers and fanatical determination to make good—no pain, no gain!—were not so different from what one found in the south. In that sense, North Korea, for all its anonymity—its air of Everyplace—did seem a distinctly East Asian place. For all across the region—in Japan and South Korea as much as in China and North Korea—one finds the same remarkable gift for regimentation and self-surrender, for hard work and discipline, as if the religious impulse had simply been channeled toward country or company or cause. It hardly seemed to matter whether the object of this devotion was nominally capitalist or communist. And it was scarcely a surprise that these proudest and most standoffish of countries were also famous for their nationalism and xenophobia (the “Hermit Kingdom” tag has been passed around from one East Asian country to the next for centuries). Certainly, a professedly “homogeneous nation,” which boldly asserts that it has “never had mixed blood with other races,” and a country where 50 percent of the people, by one estimate, have the same surname (Kim)—“The characteristically photogenic face is a typically Korean face,” wrote the cineast Kim Jong Il—has a head start when it comes to single-mindedness and solidarity. My guide, in fact, took pains to stress patriotism far more than Marxism; his country, he implied, was the lodestar of his love. And “the people who do not have a patriotic idea,” he said, in a rare burst of fury, “they are no better than animals!”
My guide—an uncommonly urbane character, articulate, quick-witted, and fluent in Urdu—had seen the world outside North Korea during three years of study in Pakistan. But he had seen the world through North Korean eyes, and he could not help but feel that, by comparison with the poverty and chaos of other parts of Asia, his was an unusually civilized country. He accepted that his land was not perfect and conceded that there might be dissidents; but peer pressure was so great, he said, that the few were bound to get swept along by the many. (Once, he explained, when he was tapping his cigarette in the street, his seven-year-old son had quickly challenged him: “Father, why do you do this? My teacher says you should use an ashtray!”) His greatest strength, indeed—the result, perhaps, of much practice—was in making preemptive strikes, countering my criticisms before I had even made them. “We are not a rich country,” he conceded. “But we have pride. All this we have achieved by ourselves.” Westerners, he went on, “say we do not have freedom. But we have a different concept of freedom.” His government, he explained unexpectedly, deliberately made Pyongyang gray so that not too many people would move there.
The only thing that upset him was the fact that some countries were not strong enough for Communism. “In other socialist countries,” he said, “it is not real socialism. The young people, they have stupid ideas.” When I asked him whether his people were worried at all by the worldwide repudiation of Marx, he sounded adamant. “A strong country does not worry about the world situation. A terrier cannot harm a strong person.” His confidence struck me, in fact, as genuinely unshakable. “When you go home,” he pleaded, “don’t repeat my propaganda. Just tell your friends what you saw and thought and felt here.” He really did assume, I think, that seeing was believing here; that to know North Korea was to love it. He could not imagine that anyone could lay eyes on the modern blocks and enormous statues of Pyongyang and not want to commit himself to this socialist paradise.
My last day in Pyongyang, I decided to try one last time to walk across the deserted street. As soon as I reached the other side, however, I found an angry citizen waiting to reproach me. The next time I found an empty road I wanted to cross, I, like everyone else in Pyongyang, descended into one of the unlit, but luxurious, underground passageways, joining the ranks of expressionless faces.
Argentina: 1990
LA DOLCE VITA MEETS “THE HYPER”
“Welcome to Jujuy! Jujuy is the capital of the province of Jujuy!” cried the perky tour guide, a Joel Grey look-alike, as our “Bridge of the Incas” minivan bumped across the darkened plains of the Andes. “We are now in the province of Jujuy. The capital of Jujuy is Jujuy!” This pronouncement, unremarkable at the best of times, was not made easier by the fact that “Hoo-hooee” sounds as if it consists of nothing but vowels.
“Un Arabe,” whispered a Frenchman called Yorick (alas, poor man, I knew him well). “That is why he is so slow. You must never forget history! The Arabs lived in Spain for seven hundred years!”
“This is Jujuy,” the guide went on, undeterred, as we drove past the inevitable Korean department store, the lottery shops, the esoteric bookstore. “Jujuy is the capital of the province of Jujuy!” We stopped in a desolate Indian village, narrow, deserted alleyways running up to craggy red-rock canyons. A Belgian got out and took a video of his meat. A local boy recited a poem about his misery, and three large Argentines at the next table wept over their beef. The Frenchman and I went back to discussing which was the dirtiest race in Europe, he arguing passionately for the English, and I, hélas, for the Fr
ench.
Then the van started up again, and the guide returned to outlining the relationship between Jujuy and the province of Jujuy, in French, Spanish, and English, none of which could be told apart. “I am a sightseeing guide, not a homosexual guide,” he volunteered unexpectedly. A lonely gaucho, with a weathered Indian face, plodded slowly on his horse across the empty pampa; a boy walked past carrying a wriggling iguana by the tail, home to his mother’s cooking pot. The guide took a break from his exertions just long enough to quiz me on the immigration policies of the U.S. and to confess a lifelong urge to migrate to Australia. He was twenty-two, he added disarmingly, and he had been in this business eight years. The Frenchman muttered something venomous about the absence of free-market competition in the tour-guide trade.
After fourteen hours of this—we had set out that morning at five forty-five—I began to feel that I knew Jujuy fairly well, and was all too glad to tumble out of the van back into my hotel. But later that night, when I went to the local casino (not far from the bingo hall and just down the street from the office where they were announcing lottery winners), I suddenly heard an all-too-familiar voice behind me. “Good morning,” it piped (it was 10:30 p.m.). I turned around to see the frisky young guide adjusting a bow tie above his tuxedo. “Jujuy is the capital of the province of Jujuy,” I reminded him. He looked exultant. “Tomorrow you go to Cafayate?” “Yes.” “We meet at six forty-five! I am your guide! Good morning!” Preparing himself now for a moonlighting spell as a croupier, the poor man was apparently going to be working for thirty-six hours without stop.
The chaos and commotion of the day were not, it is true, very typical of Argentina, a nation that carries itself with the fastidious dignity of a maître d’ anxious to assert his distance from all riffraff. But the episode did bring home to me that la situación (as the Argentines call their economic crisis—inflation was recently projected at more than four million percent a year) exists on more than paper. It reminded me that the friendly restraint of the people is maintained at some considerable cost. And it proved that, for all the partying till dawn and black-tie revelry I had seen across the country, it really was true that many Argentines were being forced to take on two, or even three, jobs to survive.
All that had been easy to forget amidst the fifth-arrondissement comforts of Buenos Aires, a city more fashionable and deluxe than anything I had seen in Paris or Milan. In the relentlessly chic quarter of Recoleta, I had felt closer to Belgravia than Bolivia as gilt-edged society ladies showed me their pictures in recent editions of Town & Country and boys in leather jackets committed Margaret Thatcher to hell. I had ended up, so it felt, in some extravagantly translated version of Europe—its elegance made more absolute by its distance from its source—where grandes dames in Impressionist-filled apartments told me of shooting parties with the Duke of So-and-soshire and how “simply mahvelous” were the penguins of Patagonia; while tycoons dropped the name of “Jackie” (the Maharaja of Baroda) and deplored the growing “commonness” of Monte Carlo. When I tried to put the two scenes together—the pressures of hyperinflation and the designer assurance of the beau monde—the only thing I felt I could be sure of was that Jujuy was the capital of the province of Jujuy.
Argentina is one of the longest countries in the world, stretching from the subtropical jungles of Brazil to the frozen wastes of Antarctica, a country almost as large as India, with only a sixth as many people as Indonesia has; yet on our mental map, at least, it is a Lonely Place. Colombia, we know, means drugs; Peru means Incan ruins; Brazil means fun. But what do we know of Argentina? We may hold a few darkly romantic images of the place—of gauchos and the tango, Sabatini and Borges, repressive military juntas and dashing polo players—but few of us realize that it is a country large enough to contain all contrarieties. A vast, rich immigrants’ hope that has always been seen as a land of opportunity, Argentina sounds in the guidebooks like a United States of (South) America, a southern reflection of our home. It has, after all, a soigné, highly sophisticated city in the east; cowboys in the high sierras of the west; in the center, great plains and commercial centers; to the northeast, famously romantic waterfalls; and, amidst the baronial ranches of the south, oddity and a kind of Flannery O’Connor isolation. Yet to liken it to the United States is not to do Argentina justice. For Buenos Aires has a kind of café society cosmopolitanism that could put New York to shame. The mountains in the west have foothills taller than the Rockies. The Iguazú Falls are twice the width of Niagara; and the sprawling estancias, or ranches, are in some cases larger than whole countries. As for the unending wasteland of the Patagonian plains, blurring into the chill extremities of Tierra del Fuego, it is the last word in strangeness, all but synonymous with the ends of the earth.
Most of all, though, what makes Argentina a Lonely Place—and something quite other than its ostensible twin—is its longing, in the midst of New World spaces, for the Old World it has left. And that curious kind of displacement, played out in Wild West châteaus, finds its truest reflection, ultimately, in the madness of a roller-coaster economy that makes the country a bargain one season and an extravagance the next: to cite but one example, a visitor who changed his dollars into australes five years ago would now have to pay $100,000 for a taxi into town. A night in a good hotel would cost him roughly a million dollars.
The first, and probably the last, cliché you’ll always hear about Argentina is that it’s European, and certainly its international debts are never surreptitious. The Claridge Hotel is just around the corner from Harrods department store, and the clock tower in the Plaza Británica is modeled, down to its chime, on Big Ben; the gray Peugeots sitting along elegant, tree-lined boulevards in the rain could almost belong to professors at the Sorbonne. When they were constructing “the Paris of the Americas” in the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires’s developers shipped over huge statues, cobblestones, even whole buildings from Europe; and to this day, six in every seven Argentines claim direct European descendancy (more Italian, as it happens, than Spanish). There are virtually no blacks in Argentina, and very few Indians; in the cities’ trendiest cafés, the dominant color is blond.
But things are a little more quirky than that. For Argentina is also rich with Basques and Welsh, and has a Jewish community of 250,000. Tens of thousands of Koreans live here now. President Carlos Saúl Menem is, famously, of Syrian descent. And one day, as he threaded his way through rush-hour traffic, a Saudi Arabian cabbie gave me a thirty-minute introduction to Mormonism. Everyone is hyphenated here, and the melting pot has been nothing if not vigorously stirred: the first time I opened up the Buenos Aires Herald, I found a picture of a schoolteacher at “St. Paul’s College, Hurlingham,” with the inimitable, and thoroughly Argentine, name of Margarita Churchill Browne de Gómez. At its best, Argentina can seem almost like an anthology of greatest hits: Parisian streets, Milanese styles, and Knightsbridge manners; American spaces, Continental cinemas, and Oriental bazaars.
As I settled down in my hotel along the gracious streets of Recoleta, however, the place I felt closest to was the Upper East Side of New York. Bejeweled matrons led their pedigreed dogs past Charles Jourdan and Guy La Roche, and private-school kids shuffled home in blue blazers and tartan skirts. Riding-school girls with Benetton bags buzzed up to ninth-floor gold-paneled apartments, and eight-year-old boys strode along with rolled-up umbrellas—all of them graced with the thoroughbred, golden-skinned confidence of future dance-school graduates. The nearest disco was called Snob, and a shop down the street was Connoisseur Snob. Buenos Aires, in fact, was the first place I’d ever visited where I always felt underdressed: when I went to a tearoom, my first afternoon in town, at three o’clock on a weekday, every single male in the place—but me—was wearing a tie. Only a few years before, men had been arrested for wearing shorts in the street.
After nightfall, the city’s imposing sense of high style was even more overpowering. The first time I rang up a porteño (as natives of the capital are called
), he invited me to meet him at his café around midnight. When I arrived, it was to find a long table of the country’s jeunesse dorée, in cocktail dresses and tweed jackets, talking of Trastevere and CNN over bottles of champagne. “Life here isn’t just comparable to life in Paris or New York,” one of them told me, in fluent English. “It’s better. Here I can live in a huge house for a hundred dollars a month. I can dine in four-star restaurants for ten dollars. Domestics are cheap too.” Another explained that he was about to put his vintage American sports car up for sale. “Is there a market for that?” I asked. “There is a market”—he smiled charmingly—“for everything.” When I asked him for an address, he pulled out a monogrammed gold fountain pen and scribbled it off with a flourish of antique elegance.
When finally I excused myself, at 2:30 a.m., all the partygoers looked decidedly surprised. Outside, the streets were so crowded I could hardly walk. I stopped by my local café, but every one of the thirty or so tables was taken. People buzzed around a kiosk selling the latest issue of House & Garden and Mad. The streets of Recoleta at 3:00 a.m., in fact, were like the runway at some fashion show: one never-ending parade of long-legged, long-haired Dominique Sanda beauties, some of them dressed as nuns, some with stars on their foreheads, all done up in black leather microskirts and flawless makeup. I felt as if I were walking through the pages of Italian Vogue.
