Tramp Royale (15 page)

As soon as it starts to get dark the park fills up with couples. The chaperone is a thing of the past in Chile; señoritas are not tagged around by duennas keeping a close eye on the property. There is a cop in the park but he is not there to bother them; he is there to see to it that they are not bothered. But
honi soit qui mal y pense;
one is justified in assuming that Cerro Santa Lucia, where romance is accepted as one of the good gifts of God, is in truth a bit more proper than any lookout point or drive-in theater in the states.

In South America, praise be, you can kiss your wife on a crowded downtown sidewalk without causing anyone to stare. You can even kiss another man on both cheeks for that matter, although personally I have never cared for whiskers.

Cerro San Cristobal is much more nearly a mountain and is ascended via a funicular railway. The vendor sold us first-class seats (at six cents) instead of second-class (at three cents) before we opened our mouths-being a gringo must show, though I don't know just how. All the natives rode second class, the only difference being that the cushions on the seats were thin in second class. I looked for, and did not find, the safety device for funiculars where a catch drops into place immediately if the tension on the cable fails. I did not mention this until we were down again as I had assured Ticky that all funiculars were so equipped everywhere. Probably Saint Cristobal protects this one; nobody has ever been hurt.

Or it might be the Virgin, as the
cerro
is the site of a great statue of Maria Inmaculada, seventy-five feet high and weighing about 400 tons; it must have been quite a job to get it up there and put together. The mountain as a whole is too large to irrigate but the top is gardened and a little church nestles under Her skirts. The view is what you would expect-we've been over that ground.

Further down the
cerro
are the National Zoological Gardens. I am a sucker for zoos. We visited the one in Lima, which consisted solely of South American birds and animals; the zoo in Santiago was a global one but seemed to lack the one thing that made the zoo at Lima outstanding: Andean condors. The condor is not only of noble size; he seems also to like to spread his wings for display, an effect like a Stratocruiser coming in for a landing.

We climbed a great deal of Cerro San Cristobal several times, trying to find more condors. I am not sure they don't have them; they may have been inside somewhere. But time at a zoo is never wasted; we saw lots of other things including that repulsive oversize South American rat about the gross of a fat shoat. We were the only spectators, it being siesta time; the zoo staff were stretched out here and there, snoozing and sometimes looking up at the
locos norteamericanos
walking around in the hot sun.

We walked back to the hotel, as the taxi drivers were taking siesta, too. The Chileno is a very sensible fellow.

Regrettably the day arrived to leave Chile. It was necessary to be out at the airport nearly an hour early in order to go through outgoing customs and police check, both of them useless ceremonies. In the last-minute scurry Ticky remembered that we had not left a thank-you gift for the night maid; since she was not around I called the desk to get her name. "Señora Hoan-Ace," I was told.

"Spell it, please."

"Hoan-Ace-J, O, N, E, S."

"Oh-"

We flew in Pan American's
El Inter-Americano,
a luxurious, pressurized DC6B. The hostess had a luxurious and pressurized look about her, too. Airline hostesses have probably done more to popularize air travel than all other factors put together, but where in the world do they find them? They all have beauty, intelligence, friendly charm, and the hard, practical ability to cope with impossible situations more to be expected of barroom bouncers.

We were lucky in that it was a beautiful, clear day which permitted the pilot to detour and drop down to let us have a look at the Christ of the Andes which stands on the border between Chile and Argentina and celebrates eternal peace and friendship between the two nations. We had a quick view and then it was gone; from the air at more than three hundred miles an hour is not the way to see a statue. But the Christ of the Andes is not easily seen any other way; high up in the Cordillera, it is probably as hard to reach as any statue in the world.

Our real luck was the view of the mountains permitted by the good weather. The Andes are magnificent from a distance but terrifying from above-and from the sides, as we flew between peaks more than 22,000 feet high. The endless snow fields, the sharp, raw cliffs and crests, are frightening; I felt relief when we were at last out of the mountains and over the endless plains of the Argentine, even though I had relished it immensely and would not have missed it.

I had wondered from time to time just why the Andes are so much more impressive than other mountains. Ticky and I have our home on the foothills of a mountain more than 14,000 feet high. We are very fond of it and it really is a big mountain, but it is not in the same class with the Andes. A little arithmetic shows why and proves why the Andes may reasonably be considered the highest mountains in the world, despite the Himalayas-thus: heights of mountains are measured
above sea level.
This is crucial to an alpinist half dead from anoxia on the crags of Mount Everest but it has nothing to do with how tall a mountain looks; its majesty depends on how high it thrusts up above the plateau at its base.

By this rule:

Pikes Peak-14,000 minus 6000 gives 8000 feet apparent height.

Mount Everest-29,000 minus 15,000 gives 14,000 feet.

The Andes-22,000 minus only 2000 gives 20,000 feet, which leaves the Andes the winnuh and new champion by more than a mile in height which you can raise your eyes and see.

There are other criteria. Mauna Loa in Hawaii is 32,000 feet high from summit to base, but 18,000 feet of it is concealed by the Pacific Ocean; you can't see it. Nor can you see barometric pressure or "sea level" height. A barometer states that my home is 6015 high; unfortunately only the last fifteen feet of that shows from our garden; the Chrysler Building, a full mile "shorter" than my home by the sea-level scale, is nevertheless a bit more impressive.

The same common-sense criterion that makes a great skyscraper more impressive than a one-story house states that the Andes are the tallest mountains in the world.

The transition from the Cordillera to the prairies and the plains in Argentina is much like the same transition in the United States, except that the great open spaces are even more so than our own, even though we were flying over the most populous part of the back country. There were hundreds of miles of open range and farm with only an occasional village and very few roads. It was impressive in scope but monotonous.

I stared at it and tried to get my thoughts straight about Chile. What was the spirit of Chile? What characterized it? The guidebooks emphasized the Chilean wines, and the fish both for catching and for eating, and the outdoor sports of all sorts, from skiing to surfing. All those things were true but they did not seem to me to spell Chile; take them away and the spirit of the country would remain.

No, not fish, not wines, not sports-but flowers, and serious pursuit of knowledge and an overwhelming kindliness. These were Chile.

IV
The Land of"Papá"

Once upon a time a big, sleek, fat Argentine dog met a little, skinny, wretched Chilean dog at the border between their two countries. They exchanged sniffs and discovered that each was headed for the other's native land. "But
why?
" the Chileno mutt wanted to know. "You don't know what you are getting into. I love my native land but I've just got to make a change; I haven't had a square meal in months. But Argentina is already your home and you are well fed, fat, healthy, obviously in the pink-so why don't you stay where you are well off?"

The Argentine dog glanced over his shoulder, then whispered behind his paw: "I want to
bark.
"

I heard the above anecdote in Brazil. It is a fair thumbnail sketch of the difference between the two countries. When Ticky was laying out our itinerary she planned only four days for us in Argentina on the assumption that four days was the longest she could possibly keep her mouth shut. I felt that she was overly optimistic; Ticky makes a vice of telling the truth. I simply hoped that Perón's police would be either too gallant or too cautious to throw a señora from the States into jail.

As it turned out we stayed much more than four days, as our ship, as is customary with ships, was much delayed in sailing. Then much to our surprise we found that we liked Argentina very much. Wait a moment, I do not wish to be mistaken for a crypto-fascist or whatever the communists these days are calling an authoritarian who is not a communist authoritarian. I do not like police states. Like the fat Argentine dog, no matter how good it is some ways I still like to bark. But we did like the country called Argentina and we liked the citizens thereof very much.

However I am going to say some fairly gentle things even about the present government of Argentina. I ask that it be kept in mind that I am simply trying to report what I saw and heard and that there can be qualitative differences between dictatorships, say between Argentina under Perón and Germany under Hitler. The observations made imply no approval of suppression of free assembly, of press, of free speech, of opposition parties, nor of the jailing of opposition leaders. As this is being written, Argentina has just held another election. Perón won it as usual and, also as usual, the opposition party, brought out and dusted off for the campaign, was promptly suppressed once the election was over. This is not our notion of free democratic choice.

But we received a very strong impression that President Perón enjoys a very wide popular support and probably could win an honest election by a good majority. True, he is not taking any chances. There have been several elections since he seized power and he has won all of them, but they have been much of the quality of an election in a social club which is dominated by a clique which controls both the nominating committee and the membership committee; the opposition might as well stay in bed-or over in Montevideo where a lot of them have taken up permanent residence in exile.

Nevertheless I think there are about as many Argentinos who like "Papá" Perón as there are of us who like Ike. As one of them told me, "Practically all of us like
him,
or at least most of the things he has done, but practically everybody hated
her.
" I was not able to judge the latter half of his statement; Eva Perón had already gone to her reward when we were there and very few people mentioned her name. Not that one could forget her, for her name and her face were everywhere, but she was no longer an issue. But it did seem as if Perón were the prisoner of a myth he had helped to create. I do not see how he could marry again should he wish to do so. He set up his deceased wife as a
de facto
saint; it would be awkward, to say the least, were he now to marry an "ordinary" woman.

I asked my informant why Evita was disliked when Juan was liked. "I'll give you a couple of examples. When Eva was a young actress she was beaten out for a part in a play by another and better known actress. She swore that she would get back at her. She did-when she became the President's wife she not only used her influence to keep the other woman from ever being cast for any part, she also drove the other actress right out of the country. That's the sort of senselessly vindictive woman she was and a lot of people knew it. Or take this case- A while back the girls that clerk in the department stores needed a raise, so the heads of their union went around to see Eva about it. She ran everything of that sort.

"She said she would think it over. Things went on for several months while she 'thought it over.' Then suddenly a raise was announced for women clerks, effective at once-but with the pay scale retroactive to the first of the year. A big bonus for the girls? Oh no! The accumulated difference was to be paid over into the Eva Perón Foundation; the clerks are pleased with the raise and they know who got it for them-Evita-and Evita has her hands on several more millions of pesos."

"Then she would spend it on herself?"

"Well, no- Yes and no. She
couldn't
spend very much of it on herself, no matter how many fur coats she bought. There was too much of it. But there never has been any accounting made of the money that goes through the Foundation, either where it comes from or where it goes. Evita used to give audiences in one room in the Foundation; people would file in and tell their stories. If the stories appealed to her, she would reach in a drawer that was stuffed with money and hand over fistfuls of the stuff-no system, no records.

"Mind you," he added, "I'm not saying the Eva Perón Foundation didn't do any good. It did a great deal of good and it still does. Hospitals, orphanages, all sorts of things."

I do not know how true the above stories are, but they seem to be typical of popular opinions. One of the odd things about Argentina, as a police state, was that the ordinary citizen seemed quite unafraid to talk about politics and to express criticism of the government. There is no possible doubt that the
Peronistas
have curtailed civil liberties and suppressed opposition, yet most of the citizens seemed to feel that they were free and well governed.

I do not understand this, nevertheless I will express a few horseback opinions-I can't be much farther off than are most professional pundits. I suspect that the typical South American is such a free soul that he simply will not stand for outright thought policing; if he can't speak his mind, he will rebel. Consequently a South American dictator can't get away with the sort of stuff that the commissars pull; the South American boss must seek real popular support to stay in power. Certainly Perón has sought, and gotten it, from the "shirtless ones." He seems to have much middle-class support as well.

Besides that, Argentina does not have our firm tradition of civil liberty and democratic process; the citizen is more likely to judge results than methods-the "Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time" school of political science. All through Buenos Aires we saw big signs: PERÓN CUMPLE-which freely translated means that Perón keeps his word, Perón finished this or that public work just as he promised he would. This sort of thing makes an impression even in the States. The city I was reared in was dominated by the Pendergast machine; I can testify that my neighbors were more interested in the quality of the paving in their own block (which was good) than they were in the graft in the city hall concerning that pavement (which was scandalous).