Tramp Royale (9 page)

Buenaventura, Colombia, is not worse than other ports; for pure villainy it is not in the same league with the racket-infested docksides of New York City. In fact, the purser tells us that Buenaventura is safer than it used to be, as "the officials are no longer hungry." About six months earlier there was a revolution, or rather a military coup d'état; since then the port officials and the police have been paid regularly. They do not need to steal nor to seek bribes in order to eat.

The notion that a military dictator can produce a better government than an elected regime is obnoxious, but clearly this is an occasion for suspended judgment. Our Latin neighbors move in mysterious ways. Where we would use a recall or simply wait for the next general election, they wake
el presidente
up in the middle of the night, stick a gun in his face and tell him that he is through . . . they hardly ever kill him.

I find it necessary to remind myself firmly that the customs of my own tribe are not the laws of nature.

The stevedores all come aboard carrying empty sacks; when they leave the sacks are not empty. The sacks may contain U.S. cigarettes purchased from crew members and destined for black market ashore, or they may contain anything that is not riveted down. The chief mate tells us that he has found them taking away crumpled pieces of old newspaper-trash-used in stowing cargo and left in the holds. Or they will gather up a few coffee beans left on the floor plates. These people are poor; to them anything is worth salvaging.

It was raining when we reached Buenaventura. During the two days we were there the rain stopped once for about two hours. Buenaventura enjoys, or suffers, three hundred and fifty inches of rain a year or about an inch a day. A freighter skipper hates to rig cargo awnings as it slows up the work greatly and cuts into the slim margin of profit, but in Buenaventura it is done as a matter of course. Much of the cargo loaded there is coffee; to allow it to get wet is financial disaster.

Colombian coffee is precious stuff, much prized for blending. A prime reason why it is almost impossible to get a decent cup of coffee (by American taste) anywhere but the United States is that coffee made elsewhere is likely to be Brazilian coffee, strong and bitter. We use the hearty Brazilian coffee, too, but we blend it with milder coffees of vastly different flavor from the highlands of Costa Rica and from Colombia. The purest water, used with great care in Silex or drip pot, will not produce an "American" cup of coffee if our American blends are not used.

Most of our tonnage for Buenaventura was a couple of dozen big motor buses, carried on deck and in the upper holds. Rain would not hurt them and there was no need to rig tarpaulins until they were out of the way, but rain could and did slow up the work and make stevedores and crew miserable. It was hot, tropical rain. We slept naked on sheets with blowers playing on us full blast, and we soaked the sheets. I used three shirts a day in a hopeless attempt to be neat and the neckties I did not wear nevertheless mildewed on their hooks. Towels never dried, clothing was damp when it was put on, my typewriter rusted to immobility, and I broke out with a superior grade of athlete's foot.

Ticky looked at me with quiet reproach and said, "I thought you told me you
liked
the tropics."

The rain slacked off and the sky almost cleared the middle of the next morning and Ticky and I, Vi and Bob Markham, went ashore. Buenaventura is a very busy port, serving all the west slope of Colombia, but it is a small town, about 14,000. It looks like any number of other small towns through Central America and is rather pretty when the sun is shining. It has a one-sided main street, a hotel, a Catholic church, several cantinas, and a few shops where the rush of trade is slowed down to a tranquil hush. Once you are off the docks and through the customs gate there is little danger of being run down by the traffic, nor are the sidewalks crowded. One swarthy fellow, perfect type casting for the assistant villain in a tropical melodrama, followed us around the whole time we were ashore, but he never attempted to speak to us. Apparently he just wanted to look at the gringos.

We exhausted the sightseeing resources of the town in an hour and had exhausted ourselves in the heat and humidity even at a very slow walk. It was beginning to rain again; we returned to the ship.

I was assured by several members of the ship's company that Buenaventura might be sleepy in the daytime but that it possessed a very rugged night life "up on the hill" with music and liquor and entertainment downstairs and anything at all that one cared to pay for upstairs. I thanked them and let it go at that, saying that I had a date to play cribbage.

The cribbage game never came off because the chief engineer took advantage of our stay in port to give a cocktail party, announced as a meeting of the D.M. Club to induct four new members: the Heinleins and the Markhams. "D.M." stands for "Dry Martini." It also stands for "Dead Man," and is an intentional play on words. The chief engineer made excellent dry martinis; regrettably he served them in water tumblers. I do not have the constitution to play "al seco" or "bottoms up" with martinis of that size and I refused to do so, even though repeatedly urged-nevertheless the drunker I stayed there the longer I got.

I was saved by the dinner bell. We all piled into the dining saloon and started wolfing comestibles. I needed same.

A careful reconstruction of what happened next seems to establish clearly that Ticky fired the first shot. The Captain was sitting across the room from her and failed to answer when she called out something to him. Ticky is not a woman to be ignored with impunity; she wadded up her napkin and let him have it. The first salvo was short and landed in his soup.

For several days we had had bowls of kumquats on the table. The kumquat is a very pretty fruit and makes excellent preserves but they are not much to eat raw. I never saw anyone eat one and I think the waiters simply dusted them off and brought them back, meal after meal.

But they are a nice size for throwing and have excellent ballistics properties in the medium ranges. Very soon the air was filled with kumquats. Each kumquat could be used over and over again (and was) until it got tired and burst, which it did. As the kumquat supply diminished, other things were pressed into emergency service, rolls, more wadded napkins, anything that came to hand. I was very hungry and did not take full part in the festivities, limiting myself to grabbing anything that landed near me or on me and firing it back blindly over my shoulder. There being a solid rank of ship's officers behind me, I stood a good chance of getting the junior third or the mate even if I missed the skipper or the engineer. So I kept on eating.

The officers' waiter, a young Cuban called "Chico," entered into the spirit of the occasion and started running ammunition in from the pantry to the Captain's table, starting with more kumquats and branching out when they ran short. He came in at last with a large platter covered with cold cuts, which was intended for midnight lunch. He offered it proudly to Captain Lee.

The Captain looked at it, grinned, and reached for it-then demonstrated the qualities of leadership, mature judgment, and restraint that had carried him to the top: he firmly refused it and made Chico take it back, much to Chico's disappointment. This act of renunciation turned the tide; a few more desultory salvos and the battle was over.

Bob Markham told me afterwards that the finest moment of the engagement known from then on as "Kumquat May"-a poor pun but it was awfully hot-was an incident that I did not actually see because I was in it. Someone hit me fair in the back of the neck with an entire plateful of tossed green salad, well marinated, and I did not flinch nor cry aloud but kept on eating. Markham seemed to feel that it showed rare aplomb.

I gave him the aw-shucks-fellers-it-warn't-nothing-anybody-else-with-courage-and-a-cool-head-would-have-done-as-well routine. The fact was that I wanted my dessert. It was a plain one-egg cake with icing which I prefer to most fancy desserts; I was durned if I was going to miss finishing my dinner simply because lettuce was dripping from my ears. Once I finished the cake I gathered up everything that I could reach and threw it at the Captain in one saturation barrage. I was not sure that he had thrown the salad at me but I believe in the sound and ancient principle that the commanding officer is responsible for everything that happens in his ship.

I must say that Captain Lee looks well in chutney.

After dinner someone again suggested that we all go ashore and try the entertainment offered up on the hill. Ticky was willing but I vetoed it and was supported by Bob Markham. No doubt a solid phalanx of ship's officers, ably led by the Paul Bunyan figure of the Captain, would have supported us in any difficulty-but I do not trust remote tropical seaports after dark; I have seen too many of them as a young bachelor. The guardia is never around when you need it and a surprising number of the citizens carry knives. We went to bed instead.

It was clear for almost an hour the next day when we steamed out. Buenaventura is located in a very beautiful estuary which would no doubt be still more beautiful if the clouds would clear away and give a view of the snow-capped Andes only a few miles beyond. I had looked forward to seeing the Andes here, for it was through these mountains that Simon Bolivar the Liberator, a man half devil and half saint, had dragged his consumption-racked body to lead his starved and ragged army on to victory and freedom.

But I had to be content with a view of the harbor and the surrounding jungle. Colombia, although a country of Spanish and Indian tradition and culture, has a major strain of Negro. Accompanying us out into the stream were many dugout canoes paddled by blacks and on the shore we could see grass huts appropriate to Africa but which looked decidedly out of place in South America. Most of the Negroes here are supposed to be descendants of slaves escaped from farther north and who made their way through jungle and along the shore to freedom. It seems plausible, for it looks as if Congo culture had been preserved almost unchanged here through the centuries, only a few miles outside a town having most of the hallmarks of modern Western culture.

The
Gulf Shipper
turned south and soon entered the Humboldt Current, which sweeps north along the coast all the way from Antarctica. The weather turned chilly and we crossed the equator under two blankets-after sweltering in our bare skins only a few miles to the north.

Three days later the
Shipper
stood into the harbor of Callao, Peru, the seaport of Lima, the capital. The metropolitan district of Lima contains more than a million people and is a good place for a gringo to start getting over the notion that South America is an uncivilized back country. True, South America is thinly settled compared with the United States and it still has ahead of it perhaps a century of frontier exploitation whereas our frontier has moved on up into Canada. But Lima is both one of the oldest and in some ways the newest city in the Western world.

As a Western city it dates back to 1530, Pizarro's conquest, ninety years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock; its origin as an Indian city is lost in antiquity. Its university is the oldest in the Americas. But in new Lima are mile after mile of homes in the style called "modern" and which perhaps should be called ultra-modern, since nowhere in the United States can there be found modern architecture to compare with these in abundance, in lavish use of color and glass, and imaginative freedom of design. Admirers of Frank Lloyd Wright, of Schindler, and of Neutra, if suddenly plopped down in new Lima, would probably conclude that they had died and gone to heaven.

The ship docked late in the day; it was early evening before we could leave-five of us, Ticky and I, the Markhams, and Mr. Tupper, the honorary "cruise director." Captain Lee had intended to come with us but business with the company agent held him up; he asked us to meet him at the Gran Hotel Bolivar at seven-thirty.

We drove the seven miles from the port to Lima along the beautiful Pan-American Boulevard. The countryside, vegetation, and buildings looked to me much like many places in Southern California, except that the Coca-Cola signs read "bibo" instead of "drink." We could see the Andes from time to time, but not very impressively as they were obscured by the same high haze so common in Southern California. It looked to me as if it might be gathering in for a rain storm and I asked the driver about it. He said that he did not think so, as it had not rained for thirty years.

He was not pulling my leg. All of the water in Lima is brought down from the mountains; there are grown men there who have never seen rain. The incredible change from the never-ending inch of rain per day of Buenaventura to the endless years of no rain at all in Lima only a short stretch of coast to the south is accounted for, so they tell me, by the ocean currents; the cold Humboldt Current laps Peru while the hot Counter-Equatorial Current runs straight into Colombia.

We passed through cuts in hills which had a faintly artificial look to them, being composed mostly of thousands of little boulders, polished smooth to the size of grapefruit. The artificial look was justified; they were Indian burial mounds. Here and there one could see a thigh bone sticking out, or ribs, and sometimes a boulder turned out to be a skull. Indian families had huts here and there among the partly destroyed mounds and babies played among the bones of their ancestors.

The taxi driver let us out in the Plaza de Armas in downtown Lima and charged us twenty sols or one Yankee dollar, seven miles for five people. The present rate of exchange is very favorable to us
norteamericanos
and it does not seem quite fair. We strolled around the plaza for a while, an impressively beautiful place, then sought out the Hotel Bolivar-with a couple of narrow squeaks from traffic. Lima has excellent traffic cops who handle the extremely dense traffic efficiently and with rare dignity-their stylized gestures remind me of a Balinese dance in slow motion. But the signals they use are not the signals our traffic cops use and every Latin American drives with courage. He understands the decidedly different driving customs of his country and he expects pedestrians to understand them also. Getting from curb to curb without any intention of jaywalking can be a hair-raising experience. By the time we reached the Gran Hotel Bolivar I was glad to seek out the bar and have a tonic for my nerves.