Falling Off the Map (7 page)

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.

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.

Finally, he turns to Louis. “So your family name is Louis,” he begins. “No, no,” I break in, and add, “he cannot speak Spanish.” There is a hasty consultation. Then the Irishman pads off, only to return a few minutes later with a trim, round-faced boss with glasses and a tie. “
Guten Tag
,” cries the police chief, extending a hand toward me. “No, no,” I say. “It’s him.” The police chief spins around. “
Guten Tag
,” he cries, greeting Louis like a long-lost friend and proceeding to reminisce about a “
Freundin
” he once knew in Leipzig. Things are going swimmingly now. “Margaret Thatcher, very sexy woman!” exclaims
the Irishman. “Rajiv Gandhi is not the grandson of the other Gandhi,” explains the black man to a newcomer. “
Aber, diese Mädchen
 …” the police chief reminisces. We could almost be at a Christmas dinner, so full of smiles and clapped shoulders is the room. “If this were anywhere else,” Louis whispers, “if this were England, in fact, and a foreigner hit a local boy, they’d probably be lynching him by now.”

At six o’clock—it is clear that the police plan to make a day of it—the police chief invites us to dinner at the town’s only hotel. Guests of the police, he says. We sit down, and Louis spots a glass of beer. He orders one, and drinks it. Then another. Then another. The chief orders more beers all round, then proposes a toast to
Die Freundschaft.
The waitress drops off a few beers. “She worked in Czechoslovakia for four years,” the chief proudly informs us. “How is the weather now in Prague?” Louis asks her in Czech. “I worked for four years in a Trabant factory,” she answers. The police chief, exultant, proposes more toasts to
Die Freundschaft.

“Paraguay is the only place in the world where you win at blackjack even if you’re only even with the bank,” offers Louis.

“
Gut, gut, sehr gut!
” cries the chief, more animated than ever.

We renew a few pledges to eternal friendship, then get up and return to the police station, which is sleepy now in the dark.

Louis sits down and promptly slumps over. A group of policemen gathers round him to peer at his handless watch.

Then, suddenly, he sits up. “I’m feeling really terrible,” he announces and, lurching out to the terrace, proceeds to deposit some toasts to
Die Freundschaft
in the bushes.

The police chief, anxious, comes over. “I’m sorry,” I explain. “We haven’t eaten properly for a few days, we were somewhat dehydrated already, and he’s probably anyway in a state of
shock.” With a look of infinite tenderness, the chief summons a lieutenant, and, one on either side of Louis, they take him to the hospital.

Ten minutes later, the team returns, all smiles.

“How are you feeling?”

“Great. All better now.”

“Good.”

Louis slumps over again, and I maintain our vigil for the man from the car rental firm who is due to take us to Santiago. He was expected at two-thirty. It is now nine-fifteen.

Suddenly, a policeman walks into the room and summons me urgently over. I hurry to his side. Maybe he will give us a lift? “You are an Indian?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Then tell me something.” He points to a TV. “Two months ago, we saw Rajiv Gandhi being burned. Why did they not put his body in the ground?”

What is the Spanish word for “cremation”? I wonder wildly. “
Cremación
,” I try.

“Cremation, eh? Is that right? Thank you,” he says, and walks out.

A little later, Louis gets up again and staggers to the terrace. More toasts to
Die Freundschaft
go down the drain.

“I’m really sick,” he says. “I can’t move. Just get me a bed.”

I relay the request to the police chief.

For the first time all day, his commitment to our friendship seems to flag. “
Hier gibt es kein Bett!
” he barks. “
Das ist nicht Hotel! Das ist nicht Krankenhaus!
”

“
Jawohl, mein Herr
,” I say, and we go on waiting for the car rental man.

Suddenly, headlights sweep into the plaza, and a car pulls up. I hurry outside. A man gets out, with an air of great briskness, and I hurry over to him. “So you are Indian?” he says.
“Yes.” “Then tell me something, please. When Rajiv Gandhi died, why did they not put his body in the ground?”

“Cremation,” I reply with tired fluency, and, satisfied, he gets in his car and drives away.

Watching this open-air university in action, the police chief is shamed, perhaps, by his earlier brusqueness. “Once,” he tells me in German, “I traveled for six hours by train to Dresden to meet my roommate’s sister.”