The Writer and the World (72 page)

“We had to invest our money. We invested it in Argentine money, to get the thirty per cent a month. You couldn’t get a better rate anywhere in the world, and money was flooding in from abroad. The thing was to
take your interest and get your money back into hard currency before the situation blew. I tell you, you were living on your nerves every minute. Every minute you were wondering whether you were doing the right thing—because at the first little whiff of insecurity or danger all that foreign money was going to leave. Within days the whole thing could blow, and you were running in to change money all the time.

“We timed it right. We got back into dollars ahead of the crash, which came in January or February 1981, when there was a ten per cent devaluation of Argentine money, followed a month later by a further twenty per cent. The whole thing just collapsed then. People who had borrowed to re-equip their factories lost fortunes.

“We invested our dollars and got a little more, and then we proceeded to lose a certain amount of what we had gained: our bank manager invested a third of our money in gold. We bought at $800, and got out at $680 an ounce. Still, at the end we had enough to buy this desirable flat in one of the best parts of the city. We bought in August 1982, when just for three weeks—because of the Malvinas war—prices were at their lowest for twenty years. At the end of those three weeks the prices rose again by more than sixty per cent. If we had delayed we wouldn’t have been able to buy.

“In a place like Argentina you make money only by being lucky. There’s always a crisis in one direction or other. What happens is that you have no sense of the future. You don’t do anything for the future. The European idea of securing your future doesn’t exist. I often wonder how I’ve adapted to this sort of thing. The other thing is the sensation you have all the time of being robbed, if you’re an employee. If you don’t have to go through that experience, and you can live in your own area of happiness, shall we say, it can be a delightful place to live in. And this, I suppose, is what lulls everybody.”

I
N
1972 B
ORGES
said he never read the newspapers. “Those things sadden me. They are also trivial.” Borges could say that—of the daily acts of guerrilla or police violence, and the manoeuvring of politicians, passing figures, who were far smaller than the moment—because for Borges Argentina was a country he had already lost.

What Borges said then others said now, in different ways. A woman I knew said, “We have become stupider.” She had been Peronist in 1972,
full of expectation. Perhaps then or a little later she had also been “Marxist,” buoyant with her simplicities, ready to preach them. Now she had forgotten she had been either of those things, and—in the general enervation—was nothing; there were no political systems left to try. Women like her were turning now to “meditation”—every day the newspaper listed lectures and sessions.

Ricardo, who had known the guerrilla leaders at school and had felt some sympathy for the cause, grieved for that educated, destroyed generation. Those many thousands of New Men (and women), in whom religion and revolution had met, were the grandchildren of immigrants; they would now have been in their forties. As we were walking back after our meeting with the former guerrilla (who had presented himself as a defeated man), Ricardo said, with sadness, “Maybe we have to accept the idea that this country is not viable. The young people I meet take it for granted that Argentina will become a nation in the near future, and that might lead them to new adventures and false conclusions.”

Ricardo was talking, like Borges, out of his own grief, out of his own need for philosophical systems, his now outdated ideas of revolution and right action. Those ideas had gone with the Trojan ending Borges had prophesied; and in their place, out of the very enervation and fatigue of that ending, new and simpler ways of thinking had come to Argentina.

A businessman I met listed these new ways of thinking. Argentina no longer believed in the foreign enemy; no longer believed it was a European country; and had lost the idea of the limitless wealth of the land.

The three ideas were linked: together, they added up to an intellectual revolution. That idea of wealth—it had been part of the folk wisdom of the country. My 1972 notebooks are full of it. “This country can never sink.” “Still, you live better here.” “God undoes at night the mess the Argentines create by day.” That idea of wealth had come down from the Spanish time, and had been born again with the Conquest of the Desert. It had encouraged the great greed of the
estancieros
, who thought of the wealth of the country in the Spanish way, as something indivisible, which had to be denied to as many people as possible. This had in its turn encouraged the greed and plunder of Perón and his successors, and the claims of their supporters. It had destroyed the idea of the pioneer, the idea of self-fulfilment coming through work; it ennobled instead the idea of sharpness,
la viveza criolla.
It had encouraged the idea of blood and revolution, in unending sequence: just one more fresh start, the finding
out and killing of just one more enemy, and the wealth of the country was going to cascade down.

All that had now gone. To continue, people would have to enter into a new contract with the land. This implied a new contract with other people, a new kind of political life. Argentina had made people dream too much, Ricardo had said; and now the country wasn’t viable. But this kind of despair was as much of an abstraction as Father Mujica’s revolutionary wish to undo the enemies of the people and develop the human spirit. In Argentina people needed simpler gestures, a simpler morality.

Together with news about the government’s attempt to stabilize the currency, gossip about the new president’s family life, and conjecture about why the embalmed body of Perón had had its hands cut off, there were reports about the weekly March of Silence,
la marcha del silencio
, in the northern town of Catamarca. Catamarca, warlord country in the early nineteenth century, and now very poor, was controlled by a single powerful family. A young woman had been murdered in Catamarca. Local people were outraged by the way in which the matter had been hushed up; and in that town, where there had been an authoritarian tradition since the Spanish time, and where now most people (of the twenty-four grades) depended for their livelihood on the patronage of their local rulers, there had started this weekly protest March of Silence, led by a nun. The number of the marchers had grown; the effect had been overwhelming; the federal government had had to intervene. The powerful governor had resigned; someone else had gone to jail. Then the marches had stopped; the nun had returned to her convent. Father Mujica and the guerrillas, in their own eyes New Men confronting injustice, had never done anything as brave, or made a profounder political and moral point. Perhaps no such gesture had been made here since the Spanish conquest.

Catamarca was a late-seventeenth-century foundation. It was on the site of an older Andean settlement which the Spaniards had attempted in the early 1550’s, just twenty years after the conquest of Peru. This first town or settlement had been destroyed very soon afterwards by the local people, not yet abject. Its Spanish name—in honour of the marriage (1554–58) of Philip II of Spain to Mary Stuart—was Londres de la Nueva Inglaterra, London of New England.

E
VERY
session of the Republican Convention opened with an invocation (after the presentation of the flag and the singing of the anthem), and closed with a benediction. A different man of God was called upon on each occasion. The benediction at the very end, after the acceptance speech by Mr. Reagan, was spoken by Dr. W. A. Criswell.

Dr. Criswell is the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, and in Dallas he is famous, not only because he is a powerful preacher, but also because his church and church buildings, which are in a cluster in downtown Dallas, are now—with the boom—valued at $200 million. Money is revered everywhere but in Dallas it is holy; and something like grace—a reward for faith in God’s land—attaches to real-estate success. Every day in Dallas (since journalists are obedient people, and also want to do what other journalists do) I read an article about, or an interview with, Trammell Crow, the local real-estate king, who has built many of the glass skyscrapers and hotels. Again and again I read that Trammell Crow was worth about a billion dollars. Dr. Criswell wasn’t in that class, but—offering benediction to the Republicans where Trammell Crow could offer only welcome and money—he trailed his own double glory.

On the Sunday after the convention, when most of the delegates and press had gone away, and the congregation was nearly pure Dallas again, Dr. Criswell preached on “The White Throne Judgement.” The title of his sermon was displayed in movable letters—like the title of a film or play—outside his redbrick auditorium. The auditorium—big, square, plain except for the coloured glass—was packed.

People like myself, arriving late, or without reserved places, stood at the back. The time came when we all had to kneel; and it was hard for me then, kneeling with the others, heads bowed in prayer all around
me, to continue making notes on my own Sheraton-Dallas Hotel bedside pad.

The choir wore dark red gowns. Dr. Criswell, like Mrs. Reagan at her first appearance in the convention hall, wore white or cream or a very pale colour. The colour contrast would have helped the television picture. There was a television camera in the aisle between the pews of Dr. Criswell’s church. The service was being televised live, and a note in the program sheet (which also contained a “decision card”) said that video cassettes of the service could be obtained from the “Communications Department” of the church.

D
R.
C
RISWELL
, working up to his Judgement theme, spoke of homosexuality. His language was direct. No euphemisms; no irony; no humor. He was earnest from beginning to end. He moved about on the platform and sometimes for a second or so he turned (in his white suit) to face his red-gowned choir.

“In our lifetime we are scoffing at the word of God … and opening up society and culture to the lesbian and sodomite and homosexual … and now we have this disastrous judgement … the disease and sin of AIDS …”

AIDS, on the first Sunday after the Republican Convention, and in that voice of thunder! But if you thought about it the topic wasn’t so unsuitable. There was something oddly Biblical (though Dr. Criswell didn’t make this particular point) about AIDS, which struck down buggers and a special kind of black and spared everybody else.

“God is like his LAWS!” Dr. Criswell thundered. “There are laws everywhere. Laws of fire, laws of gravity.”

From this idea of Judgement and the laws (two distinct senses of “laws” run together) Dr. Criswell moved on to Karl Marx. A bugger? Only metaphorically. Karl Marx had his place in this sermon as a nineteenth-century atheist. Dr. Criswell gave Marx’s dates but said little about the heresies: in this auditorium Karl Marx was just his demonic name, and it was enough. Karl Marx wasn’t dead, Dr. Criswell said (or so I understood him to say: the theology was a little difficult for me). Karl Marx was still alive; Karl Marx would die only on the great Judgement Day.

“The great Judgement Day comes at the end of time, history, civilization
… The whole universe shall be turned to conflagration … The caverns beneath this earth, the whole thing, shall be turned to dreadful fire and fury when the Lord cleanses this earth and purges this earth … when God comes to the end of the world.”

A wonderful cosmic idea, God coming to the end of the world: barely imaginable. But even less imaginable was the idea that many of the people in the auditorium were to be saved in some way from the cosmic nothingness; and that it was open to anyone to be saved. You could make a start by filling in the decision card in the programme sheet; and, as in a hotel breakfast card where you put a tick beside the chosen hour of your breakfast service, so on the decision card you could put a tick beside the hour of the service that had awakened you. So commonplace and everyday was the idea of religious salvation and decision here.

M
ANY PEOPLE
, like myself, had come only for the Criswell sermon. We didn’t wait for the hymn or the reception of new members.

To leave the air-conditioned auditorium and go outside was to appreciate anew the extent of the church’s properties, many of them named after Dr. Criswell. It was also—though the shadows of tall buildings made the street look cool—to be reminded of the one-hundred-degree heat of Dallas.

Most of the time you were protected from the heat, and were aware of it only as a quality of the light or in the colour of the sky. But from time to time the heat came upon you like this, a passing sensation, not unpleasant, a contrast with the general air-conditioning, a reminder of the bubble in which you lived.

Dallas was air-conditioned—hotels, shops, houses, cars. The convention center was more than air-conditioned; it was positively cool, more than thirty degrees cooler than the temperature outside. Air-conditioned Dallas seemed to me a stupendous achievement, the product of a large vision, American in the best and most humane way: money and applied science creating an elegant city where life had previously been brutish.

Yet in this city created by high science Dr. Criswell preached of hell-fire and was a figure. And the message of convention week was that there was no contradiction, that American endeavour and success were contained within old American faith and pieties. Karl Marx and homosexuality were on the other side of these pieties and could be lumped together.

The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self. Practical matters were in the party’s printed platform and remained locked up there. Apart from Jeanne Kirk-patrick’s speech about foreign affairs, there had been very little of purely political discussion. Americanism had been the theme of the convention, now defiant, now sentimental, as in Mr. Reagan’s acceptance speech. Fundamentalism, in its Republican political interpretation, was not just a grim business; it was as stylish as Mr. Reagan himself. The Republicans were “pro-life.” That meant anti-abortion; but during the week another, metaphorical, meaning began to be attached to the word. To be pro-life was to be vigorous, joyful, and optimistic; it was to turn away from the gloom and misery of the other side, who talked of problems and taxes.