To the Ends of the Earth

So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentina frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pajamas and went to bed.

Buenos Aires

BUENOS AIRES IS AT FIRST GLANCE, AND FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, a most civilized anthill. It has all the elegance of the Old World in its buildings and streets; and in its people, all the vulgarity and frank good health of the New World. All the newsstands and bookstores—what a literate place, one thinks; what wealth, what good looks. The women in Buenos Aires were well dressed, studiously chic, in a way that has been abandoned in Europe. I had expected a fairly prosperous place, cattle and gauchos, and a merciless dictatorship; I had not counted on its being charming, on the seductions of its architecture, or the vigor of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and while walking I decided it would be a pleasant city to live in. I had been prepared for Panama and Cuzco, but Buenos Aires was not what I had expected. In the story “Eveline” in James Joyce’s Dubliners, the eponymous heroine reflects on her tedious life and her chance to leave Dublin with Frank: He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Aires, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Frank is an adventurer in the New World and is full of stories (he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians); soon, he proposes marriage, and he urges her to make her escape from Dublin. She is determined to leave, but at the last moment—All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart—her nerve fails her. Frank boards the boat train, and she remains in Dublin, like a helpless animal.

The stories in Dubliners are sad—there are few sadder in literature—but “Eveline” did not seem to me such a chronicle of thwarted opportunity until I saw the city she missed. There had seemed to me to be no great tragedy in failing to get to Buenos Aires; I assumed that Joyce used the city for its name, to leave the stinks of Dublin for the “good airs” of South America. But the first girl I met in Buenos Aires was Irish, a rancher, and she spoke Spanish with a brogue. She had come in from Mendoza to compete in the World Hockey Championships, and she asked me—though I would have thought the answer obvious—whether I, too, was a hockey player. In America, the Irish became priests, politicians, policemen—they looked for conventional status and took jobs that would guarantee them a degree of respect. In Argentina, the Irish became farmers and left the Italians to direct traffic. Clearly, Eveline had missed the boat.

In the immigrant free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which a full third of Argentina’s population lives, I looked in vain for what I considered to be seizable South American characteristics. I had become used to the burial ground features of ruined cities, the beggars’ culture, the hacienda economy, and complacent and well-heeled families disenfranchising Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colors of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and had spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard to become exercised about press censorship in Argentina, which was ambiguous and arguable and mainly an idea. I had been dealing with enlarged visual simplicities; I found theory rarefied and, here, in a city that seemed to work, was less certain of my ground. And yet, taking the measure of it by walking its streets, restoring my circulation—I had not really walked much since I had left Cuzco—it did not seem so very strange to me that this place had produced a dozen world-class concert violinists and Fanny Foxe, the stripper; Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolf Eichmann had all felt equally at home here.