by Pico Iyer
Yet the problems, and the elegies, only mount as the country gradually turns into one of those nations it has always looked down upon. Not long ago, Argentina was the capital of Latin American publishing (as recently as the forties, 80 percent of all books in Spain came from Argentina); now Chile and Mexico are taking its place. Of the country’s three great modern writers, Manuel Puig chose to live in Rio; Julio Cortázar lived (and died) in France; and Borges spent much of his time on American campuses, or, in his mind, in the company of Chesterton and Beowulf (the fact that he does not seem Argentine may be the most Argentine thing about him). On every side, the belle époque seems to be receding fast. Yet in some sense, I could not help but feel that unsettledness is almost native to the land. More than 150 years ago, when Darwin came to Argentina, he wryly noted that there had recently been fifteen three-year governments in the space of nine months. And when Naipaul visited eighteen years ago, the local currency was already devaluing by the day, and people were already searching for dollars and taking on extra jobs. “I’d expect you to be confused here,” a young local writer told me (she had studied English at summer school in Eton). “Even we are confused. Because we keep expecting things to change, but everything always stays the same.”
Through all this, however, the division between city and country remains as intense as during the bloody street fights of the last century; and almost anything one says about the capital is contradicted elsewhere. A few characteristics, inevitably, seem indigenous. When I arrived in the old colonial city of Salta, for example, the streets were still buzzing at ten-thirty on a weekday evening. Music blared out of an Arabic restaurant next to Maxim’s. Just down the street from Benetton, a fancy bookstore showed off new copies of García Márquez, Kundera, The Satanic Verses—and I Visited Ganymede: The Wonderful World of the Ovnis, by Yosip Ibrahim. Shop-window girls swapped secrets in chic Italian cafés, and bulletins on windows offered “Yoga Classes for Children.” In the main plaza, a couple of hundred striking architects were banging drums and waving banners and demanding “Real Social Justice.” Nearby, in the cathedral, a poster of the Virgin Mary reassured, “Argentina: it is in crisis, but not in dissolution.”
Yet apart from these common features, much of the country proceeds as if it has never been told that it is meant to resemble Europe. The great glories of Argentina, in fact, lie in its Nature. Wake up in the freshness of an early morning in Iguazú, and the forest glistens with a newborn clarity. Rainbows arc across the crashing falls, and blades of grass gleam emerald under dripping water. Toucans flood the trees, and fat lizards sunbathe amidst roots and branches. Later, as the day develops, co-atimundis burrow and scurry across one’s path, and serpents slither over catwalks. Above, far above, condors circle the blue with blackness. Though hundreds of miles from the Amazon, the area feels like a tropicolored Amazonian dream, the cover of some Latin American novel magically come to life.
And even for those, like Greene’s CIA man, for whom the spread of 275 falls is “just a lot of water,” the world around the falls feels Edenic. The greatest of all its wonders, for me, were the Nabokovian rainbows of butterflies—indigo, lavender, white, and gold—that skittered about my arms and alighted on my fingers till my fists were bright with yellow and black. Turquoise jewelry on wings, glittering against the misting of the foam.
The other secret pleasure of Iguazú is that it allows one to slip across the border and, in the process, across centuries and continents. For Argentina and Brazil are as far apart as three-piece suit and one-piece thong; as fashion show and carnival; as Europe, in fact, and Africa. The Brazilians undress as routinely as the Argentines dress up. And the minute one arrives on the Brazilian side of Iguazú, colors brighten, buttons come undone, inhibitions slip away. Well-muscled boys in shorts preen and howl, flashing-eyed girls whisper in the husky seduction of Portuguese, the shops turn giddy with cartoony postcards setting off the falls with topless girls. Along the border, I could not help recalling what a wealthy Argentine administrator had told me, wistfully and with a touch of envy. “The Brazilians are a people of nature—simple people in paradise, like animals in the Garden of Eden. In Argentina, we live too much in our heads.” Cross the border back into Argentina, and you feel as if you’re reenacting the fall into self-consciousness.
Even better, Iguazú is a gateway into Paraguay. And though the inimitable General Stroessner is gone now, his notorious home for fugitives and deviants, where one car in every two is stolen and two-thirds of all goods are smuggled, is still its famous, irredeemable self. As soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk in Paraguay, a young boy offered me a packet of pink condoms. Another philanthropist blew the dust off a stack of pirated cassettes, including such classics as “Rod Steward: Greatest Hit’s.” Everywhere I looked, bored shopgirls were sitting over showcases heavy with pink panda-faced minipianos and Rambo .357 magnums. Casa Chen, Casa Mo Mo, Casa Very Good. At Casa Wang, the dusty cases were full of Bust-Emulsion creams and Cosmetic Pencil Sharpeners; at Casa Ping (just down from Casa Ting, and not so far from Casa Ming), boxes of Yu-fung Drop-Proof Multi-Testers sat amidst forty-piece ratchet-socket sets. Wild Arabic music flavored the air, and the smell of cheap foo yung. Taxi drivers played checkers with the rusty caps of soda bottles.
In the middle of the street sat stripped-down stolen Chevrolet Opalas and Ford Nopals, circled by policemen looking for bribes. A disembodied pair of stockinged legs jutted into the air. Casa Hokkaido, Casa Snoopy, Snoopy World. I saw UFO Beach Radios for sale (“sand resistant”) and toucan-faced quartz watches. I saw an elephant that played the drums, three bears in caps, which mechanically skipped rope, a pair of roller skates shaped as elephants. I saw hamburgers clad in pink on skateboards, and telephones in the shape of penguins, sporting red bow ties. I saw gold-dealers and criminals and street-corner toughs. At the end of the day, Puerto Iguazú, back in Argentina, with its brassy posters advertising Brazilian mulatta girls and a Chinese show called Tra-Lá-Lá, seemed almost tame.
In the Andes, too, I found myself a universe away from the capital’s feverish gaiety. It feels like siesta around the clock in the low, sunbaked villages of the northwest, with their long, empty streets and haunted shadows. Bowler-hatted women stand sleepy in the shade, selling ponchos and Batmobiles. Around them, the town stretches out like some forgotten settlement in New Mexico, white churches dazzling under high blue skies, cacti against hills as many-colored as an Indian quilt. In the dark, as Andean folk songs echo across the pampa, the place feels as lonely as the sound of panpipes.
Farther south, near the park-filled city of Mendoza (its willows and plane trees imported from Europe), the mountains are even more spectacular. In the silent, blue-sky villages, on a brilliant Sunday morning, bells toll parishioners to mass, and mountain light streams musky along avenues of elms. Nearby, a winding road slices through the snowcaps, past Incan ruins, all the way to the Chilean border. Yet even here, one is always in Argentina. “WARNING,” announces the notice in a ski lodge. “It is prohibited here to speak of Politics; Economics; the Rise of the Dollar; the Cost of Living; Personal Finances; Unpaid Debts; Rising Costs; Various Anxieties. Be friendly; go easy on your Nerves.”
It isn’t always possible, of course, for locals to forget la situatión—especially in places far from the sources of power. Even in dusty, pre-Hispanic villages like Humahuaca, the walls are scrawled with appeals for “Democracy Without Hunger.” And even in Tierra del Fuego, there are busts of Evita. Even in Ushuaia, in fact, a drizzly, windblown settlement that calls itself the southernmost town in the world, shopkeepers confess their dreams of emigrating to Quebec two years from now, and unwealthy squatters transport their houses, on sleds, along the main road.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ushuaia is pervaded by a polar stillness; and not surprisingly, perhaps, it looks like a mirror image of Isafjördhur or the other eerily silent Icelandic fishing towns around the Arctic Circle. The gray feels perpetual here, along the sludgy streets, and the town seems almost
a study in gray—the water behind it like dishwater, the snowcaps above moody and looming, the sun a dull nickel in the sky.
Ushuaia is still an Argentine place, though, which means that it offers stylish art galleries and concerts of Ravel and the names of French perfumes above its row of duty-free stores. On a slippery gray outcrop in the silver light of the Beagle Channel, black cormorants line up like boys at a black-tie ball, while sea lions huddle on slick rocks in the steady rain, then bark and romp like dolphins in the freezing water. High up, near the glacier that overbroods the town, the snow is inches deep around the autumn auburn trees. And in the Museum at the End of the World, there are not only taxidermists’ models of all the Fuegian birds, and skulls of three-ton sea elephants, but also, most excitingly of all, a copy of the famous Yahgan-English dictionary compiled by Thomas Bridges, the intrepid Anglican missionary who was the first foreigner to settle here (okka—“Oh dear me! Ah! Oh!” okkonoma—“To persist in asking for food, as a hungry child from his father”). In the same case is an even more touching symbol of the region’s enduring strangeness: a copy of John’s Gospel translated into Yahgan.
But the most magical of all Argentina’s pleasures, for me, was Patagonia. The skies are celestial in this no-man’s-land, lit up with unearthly shades I have never seen before. While driving through the desert, as a full moon set above the scrub, sending lavender and pink streaks across the sky, I could see nothing but miles of nothingness. Occasionally, an eagle circling above a carcass. A hut. The rusted shell of an abandoned car. A flock of ostriches. Around them all, stretching everywhere, miles and miles of nothingness.
Even the small towns in Patagonia are touched with a kind of Alice Springs desolation: the queer displacedness of boxlike settlements set down in a grid in the middle of nowhere. A town with the English name of Rawson is next to one with the Welsh name of Trelew and another with the Indian name of Guyman. But the town with the Indian name is, in fact, a cluster of Welsh red-brick cottages, with tidy rose gardens in the back and flowerpots lined up under white lace curtains. Red British postboxes stand on lanes called Miguel D. Jones and Juan C. Evans, and a central park remembers an idealized hedgerow-and-Spenser sceptered isle. Inside their little houses, Welsh women, speaking Spanish, serve traditional teas in semi-Wedgwood pots, with Cadbury’s Milk Tray cups.
There are still eisteddfod singing contests in the pavilion in the plaza here (and an even truer sign of Britain—a kiosk flooded with reggae music, run by a polite skinhead with a John Lennon pendant around his neck). And as the shadows lengthen in the otherworldly light, shopkeepers sip their thick-bowled maté pipes, and boys play Ping-Pong in a tiny, one-room Adventist Temple. At night, the place is silent again, except in a couple of cafés where boys sit motionless with upturned faces, captive to Bruce Lee.
And then, of a sudden, one blustery autumn morning, I found myself alone in a colony of two million penguins, stretching out in crowds as far as I could see; thousands upon thousands of the engaging little creatures, shuffling backwards into their burrows, bending their heads together under bushes, scurrying along their “penguin highways.” Down below, some of them were waddling into the clear blue water, preparing to travel north for the winter, while others padded off in pairs, like weary old men on their way to the pub. Around me, their plaintive, keening wails sounded like the cries of distant children in a playground. Yet as I walked among them, the quiet, cordial figures neither recoiled from me nor advanced, but simply stood there, heads tilted quizzically to the side, like professors waiting for another question.
That night, driving back across the flat Patagonian nothingness, flat as a map or a photograph, tango music playing on the radio in the dark, the ruddy-faced Welshmen with their sheepdogs behind me, the full moon turning the sea into a silver plate, and the penguins on their way to Rio for the winter, I thought back to the wealthy entrepreneur whom I had met in the capital, railing against Nixon’s institution of the dollar standard. “Paper money’s a fiction,” he had almost shouted. “A fiction! It does not exist except in the mind. Soon there’ll be some big changes in the world. You’ll see! There’ll be many, many surprises! And the leading powers are going to be the countries with the greatest resources—Australia, South Africa, Argentina!”
A little later, when I turned on the TV one Saturday night, it was to see President Menem on a variety show, smiling in a sea of blondes and crooning a song of his own composition. The next day, the government announced that inflation for the month was 95.5 percent.
Cuba: 1987–1992
AN ELEGIAC CARNIVAL
Gorgeous Cuba knows
tornadoes that never swept
tame northern lands.
MELVILLE
Another cheerful day in Cuba. I wake up in the Hotel Pernik in Holguín and get into an elevator to go to breakfast. The elevator groans down a few feet, then stops. I press a button. The button falls off. I ring a bell. There is silence. I kick the door. The elevator groans up to the floor just left. Outside, I can hear excited cries. “Mira!” “Dime!” “El jefe!” A little later, the doors open, just a crack, and I see a bright-yellow head, and then a black face with a beard. “Don’t worry,” the face assures me. “You cannot move.” The doors clang shut again, and I hear a crowd gathering outside, more “Psssts” and cries. Every now and then, the doors open up a few inches and a new face peers in to wave at me and smile. Then I hear a voice of authority, and as a chain gang of men strains to push open the doors, a teenager gets up on a stepladder and, methodically, starts to unscrew the whole contraption.
Twenty-five minutes later, I am released upon the Pernik dining room. My British guidebook, not generally bullish on things Cuban, waxes rhapsodic about the hotel’s fare. “Eat and drink extremely well,” it says. The Pernik, it adds, has “a long and appetising menu featuring steak in many forms, good fish and chicken, and fresh fruit and vegetables—even including avocado.” Not today, it seems. “What would you like?” a smiling waitress asks. “What do you have?” “Nothing.” “No eggs, no tea, no avocado?” “Nothing. Only beer.” At the next table, a waitress is prizing open a bottle top with a spoon. The “typically cavernous Eastern European dining hall” is full of happy diners this morning, but not, it seems, of food.
Outside, my school friend Louis and I run into a woman from Aruba who is here to find her grandmother. The grandmother, unfortunately, is lost, but the Aruban has decided in the meantime to smuggle out a ’56 Chevy. “Here the people have no salt, no sugar, only one piece of bread a day,” she informs us as she gets into our car, “but this is a paradise compared with Aruba.” Where are we from? England. “Ah,” she sighs, “like Margaret Snatcher, the crime minister.” Louis, a Thatcher devotee, accelerates. We drop her off at the airport and head for Santiago. Only four hours as the Nissan flies.
Driving along the one-lane roads, past sunlit fields of sugarcane, we pass billboards honoring the great revolutionary heroes (Martí, Guevara, O’Higgins), signs declaring SPEED IS THE ALLY OF DEATH, lonely ceiba trees, and goat-drawn carts. Flying Pigeon bicycles are everywhere, and vintage Plymouths, and hissing, rusted buses. Sometimes we stop to pick up hitchhikers, and Louis serenades them with passages from The Waste Land, ditties from the Grateful Dead, and—his latest attraction—manically pantomimed scenes from The Jerk. Bicycles, chickens, children swarm and swerve across the roads. I remember the time in Morocco when, on our way to the airport, he hit a dog. The dog bounded off unhindered; our Citroën limped to a halt.
Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, a bicycle swerves in front of us, there is a sickening thud, and our windshield shatters, splattering us with glass. I cannot bear to get out to see what has happened. But somehow, miraculously, the boy on the bicycle has been thrown out of the path of the car and gets up, only shaken.
A crowd forms, and, a few minutes later, a policeman appears.
“We’re so sorry,” I tell him. “If there’s anything we can do …”
“No problem,”
he says, patting me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. These things happen. We’re sorry if this has spoiled your holiday in Cuba.”
Spoiled our holiday? We’ve almost spoiled the poor boy’s life!
“Don’t worry,” he assures me with a smile. “There is just some paperwork. Then you can go on.”
A car comes up, and two more imposing cops get out. They take some notes, then barrel up towards us. “These boys,” says one. “No, no. It was entirely our fault.” “These young boys,” he goes on. “You will just have to fill out some forms, and then you can be on your way.”
Soon we are taken to a hospital, where a young nurse hits me on the wrist. Then she asks me to extend my arms, to touch my nose, to touch my nose with my eyes closed. Luckily, it is a big target: I pass with flying colors.
Then we are taken to the local police station, a bare, pink-walled shack in the town’s main plaza. Inside, a few locals are diligently observing a solitary sign which requests them to SPEAK IN A LOUD VOICE.
Across from us sits our hapless victim, next to a middle-aged man. Sizing up the situation, we go over to him. “Look, we can’t apologize enough for what we did to your son. It was all our fault. If there is any …”
“No, no, my friends.” He smiles. “Is nothing. Please enjoy your time in Cuba.” Louis, overwhelmed, presents the family with a box of Dundee Shortbread, purchased, for just such occasions, at the Heathrow Duty-Free Lounge. A festive air breaks out.
Then we are ushered into an inner office. A black man motions me to sit before his desk and hand him my passport. “So, Señor Pico.” “My surname, actually, is Iyer.” “So your father’s name is Pico.” “No, my father’s name is Iyer.” “But here it says Iyer, Pico.” “Yes. My family’s name is Iyer.” “So your mother’s name is Pico.” “No. My father’s name is Iyer.” “So your mother’s name is …” This goes on for a while, and then a baby-faced cop with an Irish look comes in. He claps a hand on Louis’s shoulder. Where are we from? England. “No wonder he looks like Margaret Thatcher,” he exclaims, and there is more jollity all around. Then he leans forward again. “But you are from India, no?” Yes. “Then tell me something.” His face is all earnest inquiry. “Rajiv Gandhi is the son of Indira Gandhi?” Yes. “And the grandson of the other Gandhi?” “No. He is the grandson of Nehru. No relation to the other Gandhi.” “No relation, eh? Not a grandson of the other Gandhi?” The Irishman shakes his head in wonder, and the black man sits back to take this thunderbolt in. Then he resumes typing out his report six times over, without benefit of carbons.
