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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Buenos Aires in the 1920s was a fascinating destination for a young person looking for a new life: a place of fantasy, adventure and prospects of fast wealth. In Goodbye Buenos Aires Andrew Graham-Yooll weaves together a lightly fictionalized biography of his father, who arrived from Edinburgh, penniless, in 1928, and an account of twentieth-century Argentina. He provides a vivid description of the country, of the torment of emigration and of the catalogue of characters – from the Prince of Wales to Lawrence Durrell and Aristotle Onassis – who flaunted their fortunes and vented their fury about life in this city on the River Plate.
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Goodbye Buenos Aires
ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOLL
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In memory of Douglas Noel Graham-Yooll and of Ines Louise Tovar and with thanks to my sister, Joanne Graham-Yooll
Contents
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‘I don’t see much difference between an autobiography and a novel.’
Christopher Isherwood to Michael Davie
From Christopher Isherwood Diaries: Volume One (1939-1960),
ed. Katherine Bucknell (Methuen, London 1996)
Introduction: 1918-1928
THIS IS A STORY I wanted to tell you. It is my father’s story, mostly; it is written as he told it to me, in some ways. This is how his times were and the way I think they should be told. By this means he will survive me. Thus together we can make up for his early death.
My father’s is the story of Argentina, of the end of Empire; an empire built by small countries to make a strong nation and by men who knew that hard work left no time to make money but only made rich men richer.
All the characters in these pages are real, distorted by memory, influenced by imagined recollections. All the situations are true, yet none of them need to be believed. This might cause some confusion. For what we understand is not true we call fiction, and what we do not believe we call fantasy. Such rules are clear. To alter them could give rise to mistaken impressions. This record has to be so.
This is a novel which claims to be the truth, sometimes.
The starting time is in a golden age of English influence in Argentina. It is English. It is not Scottish or Welsh, or anything else, because English is what people in Argentina called it. The ingleses were superior. That age is in part memory alone. Hence the events are recreated with a dash of whim by which many people recalled that they were part of events. Many thought that they were actors with a role to play.
My father was one of those many. The English, Scots and Welsh, and the US citizens, and the Canadians and Australians too, of that period at the start of the twentieth century in South America had much in their favour. It was enough for a man, and especially for a woman, to speak English to feel better than the others. England was at the centre of the world. That time of rich memory and impoverished reality also had the possibility of adventure in places remote from conventional society.2
People dreamed of a chance of success without too much work, of the titillation of moderate danger, and yet they seemed fully aware of an approaching apocalypse leading to a future crash. For ‘Anglo-Argentina’, an expatriate state in which people were constantly escaping from the surrounding reality, and for the literary genre named Southamericana, that era, of commercial success, personal escapades and English-speaking pre-eminence, began in 1918. The period was intense and short.
That time began at the end of the First World War. On 2 October 1918, The Times printed a report from its Buenos Aires correspondent that showed just how ‘European’ Argentina wanted to feel:
Argentine joy at Allied victory. Buenos Aires, July 25: When brought into contact with the everyday life of Buenos Aires, it is difficult to believe that one is breathing a neutral atmosphere. Allied flags are everywhere; practically the entire Press rejoices with open enthusiasm at the news of Allied victory, and the Fourteenth of July was marked by a gigantic procession, which passed along profusely beflagged streets… When the news first arrived here of the dramatic turn of fortune on the Marne and the rolling back of the Hun forces, I was walking down the Calle Florida, the principal street of Buenos Aires. Newspaper boys were shouting the latest developments with enthusiasm…
European immigration and farming exports had made Buenos Aires one of the great cities of the world in under three decades. It was an attractive destination for expatriation. Think of a Europe blacked-out by war, sickness and poverty, trying to put behind it the enormous grief of long and bloody battles. Then imagine a Buenos Aires of bright lights twinkling, with the magic of wealth and new opportunities, without grief.
As recently as the end of the nineteenth century Buenos Aires had been a small town. The guide books had still been able to inventory facilities available in the urban centre that was to become a capital.
George Newnes’s 1895 book, From London Bridge to Charing Cross Via Yokohama and Chicago, described the city as a large village. He listed four Protestant and twenty-five Catholic churches, eighty-three streets, twenty markets, fifty-five clubs, fifteen hotels, 322 schools and a fire brigade of seven companies. Helpfully, Newnes wrote:3
In all parts of the city, and more especially in the vicinity of the Boca, there are numerous ‘conventillos’ or common lodging houses in which human beings are crowded together in a manner unknown in the worst slums of London. Some of these dreadful rookeries contain as many as 150 to 200 apartments… The air was deafened by the hiss and creak and rattle of machinery, trains, and lumbering vehicles; the hooting of tram horns, the shrill whistle of the police, the hum of myriads of insects, the incessant lurking of villainous dogs, and above all the peculiar, metallic, ear-splitting chirp of the tree frogs… The appearance of the city is monotonous and dismal, the majority of the streets being only forty feet wide, with high houses, and each bloc, or ‘manzana’, covering an area of about four acres.
But the gleam of something better was there. ‘Very cosmopolitan are the crowds on the streets of pleasure-loving Buenos Ayres. Most people are dressed in European fashion, but large numbers of Basques and Italians wear their national costumes: moreover, the poorer classes of Argentine women still wear their picturesque mantilla,’ wrote Newnes.
By the end of the First World War, Buenos Aires had nothing of the small town and was growing rapidly, in a haphazard way. J.A. Hammerton, author of The Argentine Through English Eyes, wrote in the Argentina chapter of Peoples of All Nations, a twelve-volume cyclopedia published in 1923:
There is no romantic element in the character of the Argentine today. The vision of opportunities to make money in large quantities, and in a few years without much labour, took hold of him as soon as the development of the Republic by foreign capital began to bear fruit. He thinks about money all his time, he talks about it most of the time, he spends it lavishly, both in Buenos Aires and in Paris, and he is always planning how to get more…
This aspect of Argentina, Argentines, Argentineans, whatever, would never change. This was the country that the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and then the Duke of Windsor, found on arrival in 1925. For the British and North Americans, corporations and individuals, in Argentina the decade was developing into one of comfort and success, of money, lots. Business had little difficulty in its operations.
President Alvear liked the English and tried to accommodate their wishes. The threat from an organized trades union movement had been eliminated after 4a decade of growth in labour strength. A strike in 1920 at the British-owned tanine producers, The Forestal Land, Timber and Railways Company in Santa Fe, had been crushed by the army. The defeat of a strike at the port of Buenos Aires, in May and June 1921, put an end to years of union progress. And the powerful railway unions had also been demolished. In Patagonia, a strike organised by expatriate European anarchists at British-owned sheep farms had been ended by the army, with the execution of the ring-leaders who fell riddled with bullets into the graves they had dug.
English and Scottish emigrants, travelling on their own, were favoured by a post-war fall in European immigration to Argentina. This made jobs easy to find for the loner with something of an education. Argentina’s interests in foreign commerce made employment with export traders attractive and easily available.
The visit to Argentina by the Prince of Wales had been preceded, in August 1924, by that of the heir to the crown of Italy, Umberto di Savoia, who had been met at the port by over one hundred thousand of his homesick countrymen. He wanted his photograph taken with the tango singer and actor, Carlos Gardel. Everybody wanted their photograph taken with Gardel. He was a popular hero, known in all the capitals of Latin America, in New York, Paris and Madrid. So Gardel posed shaking hands with King Alphonse XIII of Spain, with the writers Ramón del Valle-Inclán and José Ortega y Gasset, with the French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, and with many more.
Even the Prince of Wales admitted that he would like to meet Gardel.
Buenos Aires and its stars had that kind of effect on visitors. The Maharaja of Kapurtala travelled to Buenos Aires wondering what the fuss was about and wanted to meet Carlos Gardel.
The city by the great brown river was an attraction to the wealthy and adventurous from all over the world, and the locals were flattered by such attention.
Ralph Deakin, correspondent of The Times, in his report on the Prince’s tour in Africa and South America, and in his book Southward Ho! (1925), described great scenes of welcome. There was the city, three weeks sailing from Tilbury and two from New York, feeling far away, delighted to have European visitors, at once trying to lavishly care for and defraud those who made the long voyage south.
Ear-splitting shouts of ‘Viva el Príncipe de Gales!’ broke out. The Prince’s coach, one of the rarely used state landaus drawn by four magnificent black 5horses in gilded harness, was bombarded with roses, daffodils and lilies, which came hurtling down mercilessly shower after shower from women and girls leaning over the parapet of the Immigration Building. The carriage entered streets where millions who had waited impatiently almost exploded with enthusiasm… Progress through Florida, the Bond Street of the capital, was at a good deal less than walking pace. The party had just reached the state rooms at Government House when a mass of young men penetrated the hall below and had to be forcibly ejected.
From Casa Basualdo (the Ortiz Basualdo family base known as the Palace Andrew) in Buenos Aires, the Prince of Wales wrote to his ‘Darling Mama’, on 17 August 1925. He said that his stop in Montevideo had been more enjoyable, and quieter.
Thank you so much for 2 very sweet letters received in Monte-Video & will you please thank Papa for his & all the nice things he says about S. Africa which I appreciate very much. My 3 days in the capital of Uruguay went off all right tho, it was a comic turn we had some grand laughs – But they gave me a fine & I think genuine welcome & I did my best. I’m picking up a little Spanish and tango as well so as not to feel too much of a stranger in this continent of S. America! And neither are very difficult.
Of course this is a far bigger fence – the Argentine (than Uruguay) where we landed from ‘Curlew’ this afternoon sleeping the night on bd – to come up the Plate from Montevideo. You’ll remember the President, Alvear – he came to London in 1923 – and seems a friendly man, tho I’ve seen but little of him as yet, only on an official drive thru this gt city, tho I had a fine welcome here.
The mail goes to-morrow so it’s a rush but I wanted you to have a few lines from here even if I can’t tell you much about this place yet. There’s a big official dinner to-night – a full dress uniform stunt – and I’ll have to read a speech. All of this week is mostly official but I hope it’ll be better after that both in B.A. and way out in estancias in the country. I’m so tired of all these official stunts and stale too. You can understand that and you are too after this hectic summer you’ve had in England.
This is a wonderful city, some very fine buildings, and it’s all lit up to-night. But there were huge crowds in the street – all making a lot of noise and throwing flowers – so one couldn’t look around much. The Alstons, our minister and 6his wife, are v. nice. I was over at the Legation for tea this evening and met their staff and other Englishmen and their wives. But I must stop now and put my full dress uniform on. Bless you darling Mama. I’m very well but fed up with all these official stunts…
The prince’s second letter from Buenos Aires on 24 August, addressed to his father from the Estancia Huetel, on the Southern Railway, revealed a man exhausted by the hospitality. He had come to Argentina after a gruelling four-month tour of Africa. Protocol and Royalty demanded tours, and public understanding of the significance of such visits.
I’ve had a frightful official week in Buenos Aires. The worst of my life, I believe, and it’s a relief to get out to ‘el campo’ for a couple of days.
President Alvear and his wife are both v. nice and human but he has overdone the stunting and entertaining and we were all of us thru yesterday, tho feel better to-day after the first real night’s sleep we’ve had! These Argentines are queer people – v. Latin in their touchiness and excitability but also human and cheery tho with quite a heavy veneer of pompousness. Their official and ceremonial stunts are v. ostentatious, but absolutely lacking in organization and time means nothing to them. Two or three days of it would have been interesting but a whole week has been too much. However I hope and believe there’ll be a let up from now onwards and I’m doing two days stunting for the British Community in B.A. this week…
I’ve spoken in Spanish three times, just a few sentences and am picking up a little of the language. The wealth in B.A. is amazing, and the cost of living there is 40 per cent more than in New York. But I’m v. glad I’ve been able to come here despite having to go thru with last week and hope I’ll enjoy the remaining month a bit – More private and peaceful days in B.A. and then seeing some estancias.
Still it’s some consolation to feel that it’s all been quite a success and these Argentines certainly are very enthusiastic and demonstrative in their welcomes everywhere. I’ve been absolutely mobbed at most of the stunts and I’ve had the wind-up for the safety of the people involved in the crowds. Alston has been wonderful and helped us thru marvellously. He and his wife are charming and I escape to the Legation often. He’s coming around with me everywhere thank goodness…
7There were between thirty and forty thousand British subjects in and around Buenos Aires and they had to be entertained. The North Americans were estimated at a little over one thousand, and they came along too. Keeping them happy was no easy matter. On 28 August, for example, the Prince was required at St Andrew’s Scots School, founded in 1838, at 10 o’clock, within an hour he had to be at the British Hospital, on that site since 1887. Lunch with the British Chamber of Commerce at the restaurant in the Retiro terminal of the Central Argentine Railway was at 12.30. And then there was polo at Hurlingham Club at 2.30pm. Oh, and a banquet in the evening, poor Prince.
In Latin America society begins its evening festivities at a late hour and finds it easy to turn night into day. The Prince drove to the State banquet at Government House at nine o’clock through thoroughfares as brightly lighted as at the hour of his arrival. The whole length of Avenida de Mayo was bridged with portals of electric light suspended above the sidewalks by invisible wires, the Prince’s motto and feathers alternating with the Federal coat of arms and the English word, ‘Welcome,’
wrote Ralph Deakin in Southward Ho!
Along the railway, which is British controlled and mainly British-owned, the settlements waited and waved, and at Temperley a large community of English residents hailed the train… ‘There does not exist,’ said Dr Cantilo, the Governor (of Buenos Aires), ‘any expression of culture or progress in the province which, directly or indirectly, does not owe its growth and prosperity to your country…’
The Prince’s third and last letter from Buenos Aires, sent to his mother on 1 September 1925, was written on the notepaper of the Argentine Navigation Company (Nicolás Mihanovich) Ltd.
I’m sorry I’ve not written you in so long but these…! Argentine officials have given me a frightful program and no chance at all, with the result that I’ve been absolutely dead beat. You have to see the way they run an official visit before you can have any idea what it’s like. ‘Qué lástima!’ as they say in Spanish ’cos I’m interested in Argentina as I am in any new country and its people but I absolutely cannot compete with it all and be natural and cheerful when they won’t treat me like a human being, which they don’t seem to be able to do. But I won’t bore you with details now… But how can one see estancias or 8anything when one is surrounded by absolutely hundreds of officials – police – newspaper men (most of the police are newspapermen) and masses of stray and casual hangers-on who are using us (staff and self) to have a good time and eat and drink as much as possible at the expense of the Argentine government. And crowd out the special trains too.
I can laugh now but ‘entre nous’ I was as near a mental crash on Saturday night when I left Buenos Aires as doesn’t matter. I felt so crushed by it all when I expected a little freedom and to be peaceful here. So much so that the Admiral and White suggested cutting out Chile.
I thought it over a few hours and then felt better and have decided to go thru with it. I really do feel better now although it’s been a ghastly 2 days in a train going up to Mercedes (Provincia de Corrientes) and Colón (Provincia de Entre Rios) to see Liebig’s estancias and ‘frigorifico’ or meat packing plant. I would have been interested without the crowd and have learnt something of it all despite everything. But it’s a great relief to be on board this ship taking us back to B.A. down the Río Uruguay, where I can any way sleep which I couldn’t do much in the train. We go to the Nelson’s estancia at San Marcos for 2 days before we leave for Chile. I spent 3 days stunting for the British Community in B.A. last week before this trip…
The year 1928 was a good one in which to say goodbye to Scotland and take refuge in Argentina. In South America life looked more lenient than in the old world. In Argentina the British could enjoy the wealth of their fathers and grandfathers, their trade protected and encouraged by the mighty power of their faraway island and their responsibilities were few. Their idea and innovations were also reduced in number. But that was not noticed amid the great riches. In Buenos Aires, in spite of the distance, people tried to emulate some of the desperate search for a good time that occupied an impoverished Europe. The difference was that Argentines had few of the difficulties of the post war. In Europe history was being written with anxiety and refused to be ignored. Events raced into being, grandly, or perhaps quietly, but never furtively, to the breathless rhythm of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which was published in 1928. The Opus Dei was started in Spain, Trotsky went to Siberia, Bertoldt Brecht published The Threepenny Opera, Aldous Huxley published Point Counterpoint; Andre Malraux’s The Conquistadors, Federico García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover all went into print in that year.9
The writers of Europe produced the papers that would punctuate the passage of a special decade in the century.
In Argentina history did not matter, there wasn’t any, the country was not old enough to have a history.
‘South America’ was a vast region of cheer, tragedy and excitement, in large portions. It said so in The Times, in every report from the continent. The Manguera samba school was started in 1928.
Also in Brazil, Colonel Fawcett vanished. In a report dated in New York, on 11 October, The Times quoted commander George Dyott saying that he was convinced that Colonel P.H. Fawcett, the British explorer, his son John and Mr Raleigh Rimmel, of Los Angeles, missing since May 1925, were dead.
‘He had found traces of their camps and trails, but rumours among the Indians indicated that the party had perished,’ along the Xingú river.
Meanwhile, the Spanish were ‘following with interest the progress of the flight of the Graff Zeppelin, because it depends on the result of the flight whether the airship service from Seville to Buenos Aires will be opened next spring or be postponed again.’ A man named Jorge Luis Borges, aged 27, published a study of Argentina’s Spanish, The Language of the Argentines. Nobody seemed to understand it very well but readers said that was because Borges was educated in Switzerland. To the embarrassment of the English-speaking community another local writer, Benito Edgardo Lynch (1880-1951), a descendant of Irishmen resident in Buenos Aires since the eighteenth century but identified by Anglo-Argentines as one of their own, published El ingles de los güesos (a play on words which translates as ‘the Englishman of the bones’, a thin man, but also an archaeologist). In the story, an old professor goes to work in a place uninhabited but for a family living in an isolated hut. There is an adolescent daughter whose wordless relationship with the visitor ends in tragedy. People thought that was bad for the English image: the old man and the young girl. The title soon entered the language as a cliché to describe an imaginary prototype of a tall, shy, eccentric Englishman.
In Buenos Aires, on 13 October 1928, Dr Hipólito Yrigoyen began his second term in office as President, amid forebodings of failure. Argentina’s exports had totalled £200 million, the peak of prosperity of the golden years.
10
PART I 1928-193412
Chapter 1
DOUGLAS NOEL, so named for being born on Christmas Eve at Heatherlie House, in Leith, in the Royal Republic of Scotland, landed at Buenos Aires on Saturday, 13 October 1928, with one cabin trunk.
There was no other baggage to follow. Disembarkation took all day because Immigration authorities were searching the passengers’ list for anarchists and prostitutes, the officials said, causing deep distress to the English and other European wives who were brusquely questioned.
As he came down the gangway of the Royal Mail Ship Highland Rover, Douglas thought of himself as a courageous figure whose past was in ashes, burned out of mind. Only memories could be kept and they weighed no more than he was prepared to carry. Those were the thoughts of a young man of twenty-one arriving in the new world, determined to leave the old one behind.
He was alone. His mother had promised to send a telegram to a lawyer who was eminent, to meet Douglas at the dock. Nobody showed up to welcome, let alone assist him. Douglas learned later that the acquaintance lived in Rio de Janeiro. But ‘Buenos Aires, capital of Brazil’ was a mistake that was common in Europe.
It was early Spring, the weather was beginning to warm. At times the sun over the River Plate faded into a cloud.
Guided by the ship’s purser, he took a room at the Phoenix Hotel, on San Martín street, at the corner of Córdoba avenue. He liked the symbolism of the fresh start. He collapsed quite early into a deep sleep. The initial hours in the new country were a blank.
On Sunday, the purser took him to early Communion at St John’s Anglican cathedral, then on a boring tour of port bars used by ships’ crews from all over the world and by the local shipping agents. There were dozens of bars, with 14women stripping right through the day, from after early Communion to long after midnight Mass.
In the evening of his first day in the city he decided to go on a stroll to glimpse the people he had heard talked about. He stopped near the corner of the hotel. A few men in Sunday afternoon suits and wide rim felt hats chatted quietly on each corner. They glanced up and down the street, waiting for some event, anything, not disturbed but reflecting the slightly uneasy peace that is a feature of Sunday afternoons. The men looked like players off stage waiting for their cue to walk on. Before arrival Douglas had imagined the city populated by elegant men and very rich women who dressed in Paris. They did not leap into sight now. Buenos Aires, in his readings, was the gayest city in South America, but he found the streets without laughter. In a conciliatory mood, he told them, speaking to himself, that he too disliked the tail-end of Sundays.
The wheels of a tram ground the tracks noisily up the avenue from the port terminal, but there was little other traffic on the cobblestone street. Tomorrow, when the week started in earnest, he would find the city he had read about. He quietly screamed his excitement at the novelty and uncertainty and then mumbled a reminder that he was terrified of the future. He felt the joy of expectation and the restrained laughter made him shiver and sense a giddy lightness.
Alone, without any ideas better than his own, he looked at himself in a store window and saw that his cream gabardine suit had made him into a reasonably smart figure. Then he walked into the bar on the corner. There were two large billiard tables in a space well removed from the counter. A large blue fly chose his nose for scrutiny and circled it like a speedy bird of prey.
‘Inglés?’ asked a man with an apron around his waist.
‘Yes, er, no, Scots…’ Douglas replied, in an early assertion of identity in his new home. He had enough Spanish to enable such a defence.
‘All the same,’ the barman said. ‘All from ‘Inglaterra’,’ he laughed. ‘Here is “Mac”, a gentleman inglés from the railway.’ The introduction was commercially friendly, but the response from ‘Mac’ was limited to a nod, hardly a grunt. Mac needed somebody with whom to play billiards.
He was a middle-aged expatriate, thin, with a bulging belt, whose nearly white hair exaggerated his years. Mac’s economical introduction revealed a troubled bachelor so timid he did not raise his voice for fear of offending his own ears. They played three games, with long intervals for conversation. Mac, all the time fighting to break with the silence of the shy, spoke rapidly, his teeth clenched, expressing himself in the manner of the veteran resident. He ridiculed 15the newcomer for choosing this, of all places, for his future. He gave advice on the certainty that the ‘lately-landed’, as he called Douglas, would fall victim to one of the Chilean pickpockets on the pavement. If they did not finish him off, the country would. This land was corrupt; the soil so rich that everybody thought life was easy. A man could be destroyed by apathy and self-indulgence, envy and fantasy; all these states were easy traps for a person with no devotion to hard work.
Douglas listened, trying to shape a smile of contempt, without success. Mac warned that those who arrived without a return passage would never go back. Implicit in his remark were the unsaid words, ‘… like me.’ Mac took rooms at the Phoenix Hotel whenever he was in town from work at the Rosario Junction, on the Central Argentine Railway, three hours north of Buenos Aires. The Phoenix was the trusted ‘English’ hotel; the closest he could get to England outside of the railways, he joked.
One of the drunks that are part of dusk on Sundays entered the bar, shouting his support for a cause known only to inebriates. He waved a knife which had a hard, vicious little blade that sliced bread on weekdays. Mac described him as a regular at the bar, one who had been sacked from a South Dock meat-packing company within weeks of it opening. The man had threatened Mac recently for no better reason than that he was an Inglés de mierda.
Mac recalled and retold the incident then took fright at his own tale and, without a word, hid behind the curtain that covered the passage to the toilet. There he held his breath against the stench from the loo and tried to control his own asthmatic wheeze which might betray the hiding place. The drunk said ‘Hah’, in a manner that could only have meant he had sighted the place to relieve himself. But in a sequel never properly described, the drunk dived at the curtain and plunged his knife through the cloth into Mac’s small paunch.
There was no complaint, no exclamation of pain. The only sound was that of a rush of air, as if Mac had been deflated, then a thwup when the blade was pulled out. Mac emerged from behind the curtain holding what looked like most of his intestines in his hands. Over the billiard tables, with the lethargy of evening, floated the deep penetrating smell of long suffered constipation, caused by too many hard spirits and not enough wine. The blue fly which had first met the ‘lately-landed’ Scot at the door of the bar swooped on the contents of Mac’s hands and then flew to Douglas with a report of filth that only flies can find attractive. From that day on, every time a ‘blue-bottle’ fly came close to his nose, Douglas would remember Mac’s bowels.16
The record of what happened next has been pruned, polished and improved over the years, but the truth told by Douglas was that he panicked. He spun the billiard cue round as only a man with fifth form and much truancy at Edinburgh Academy could have learned and with the tip in his hand he swung the pole. The grip hit the knifeman’s forehead with the force of a lamppost racing towards a drunk. The bar’s proprietor said for years after that the blood flowed as copiously as at the defloration of a farmer’s fattest daughter. He said he knew. In Douglas’s memory the spurt of blood reminded him of the bidet he had been sprayed by in his hotel room on discovery of the appliance that afternoon.
The bar owner filled a bucket of cold water and threw it over the bloodied floor. Stained sawdust floated on a pink tide onto the tiled pavement. Outside, somebody shouted ‘Sangre!’ The barman cleaned the polished wood frame of the billiards table and checked the baize for stains. Then he turned to the injured.
‘Inglés!’ he shouted.
‘Scot!’ Douglas retorted. But he shook with shock and shivered all over. He lit a cigarette.
Mac grunted and sat down, then fainted onto the floor, fussed over by the owner who cleaned the blood off the chair. Douglas was speechless: he did not know the man, he knew nobody. He was frozen as much by fear as by the frustration of his ignorance as to where to run. He looked at the collapsed body of the drunk, his head in a pool of blood which the owner could not contain even with a floor mop and the evening newspaper. People were coming in from the darkening street. Where had they all been? A little earlier the avenue had been empty. A tram stopped and out ran the conductor and most of the passengers for a look into the bar. The owner pointed to the Inglés, and people muttered admiration for the youngster who had floored two men without creasing or staining his smart suit. That was style! Somebody patted his shoulder and the bar’s proprietor pushed the admirer away, warning Douglas to look after his pockets. Somebody shouted ‘Policía!’ and the onlookers crowded at the door to keep the law out, but no police arrived. Douglas fetched Mac’s coat from a peg on the wall and searched the pockets, hearing the bar owner repeatedly say, ‘Hospital Británico…’
Carefully folded inside Mac’s pocketbook were two pieces of paper that Douglas unfolded, in search of an address. One was called a ‘Seaside song’, nine couplets about drinking probably picked up from an organ grinder’s parrot on some cold promenade and now kept as a souvenir of the good times that were possible in another land called ‘home’:17
The horse and mule live thirty years
And nothing know of wine and beers.
The goat and sheep at twenty die,
And never tasted Scotch or Rye.
The cow drinks water by the ton
And at eighteen is mostly done.
The dog at fifteen cashes in
Without the aid of rum or gin.
The cat in milk and water soaks
And then in twelve short years it croaks.
The modest sober bone dry hen
Lays eggs for nogs then dies at ten.
All animals are strictly dry
They sinless live and swiftly die.
But sinful-ginful-rum-soaked men
Survive for threescore years and ten.
And some of us, the mighty few,
Stay pickled till we’re ninety-two.
The other was a newspaper cutting. Douglas was aghast as he saw that it was the same news item that he carried in his own pocket. Trembling, no longer with a thought for the unconscious man, he opened Mac’s piece of newspaper.
The Times, Tuesday, 18 December 1894. Death of Mr R. L. Stevenson.
Apia, Dec. Mr Robert Louis Stevenson, the well-known novelist, has died suddenly of apoplexy. He was buried at the summit of Pala Mountain, 1,300 ft. above sea-level. At the time of his death Mr Stevenson had half completed a new novel. - Reuter.
Sydney, Dec. 17. Advices just received from Samoa announce the death of Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, the novelist. He had been in much better health lately… As for his native Edinburgh, much as he admired it he wisely avoided what he has denounced as the vilest climate in the world… We regret Mr Stevenson selfishly as well as sincerely, because in the crowd of successful and rising writers there is no one left who can even approximately fill his place…
This was Mac’s testimony of expatriation. A piece of newspaper over thirty years old. Douglas wondered if the cuttings were in wide circulation, here, where the 18new world was the end of the world. ‘You’ll never go back,’ Mac had said. Douglas took from his pocket his own copy of the obituary, cut from The Scotsman, given to him by a friend after a farewell supper in Edinburgh. ‘The epitome of exile, take this as a warning that you must try to come back,’ his friend had said when presenting the cutting from The Scotsman. Douglas quickly placed it in Mac’s coat and pocketed the one from The Times. He was sure that in this part of the world, The Times carried more weight than The Scotsman – even if the presentation by his old school chum, on the pavement in front of 17 Heriot Row, in Edinburgh, carried strong personal memories. Douglas recited the words to himself in a whisper.
For we are very lucky with
a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as
he lights so many more
And O! Before you hurry by with
ladder and with light
O Leerie, see a little child and
nod to him good night.
The shouting around him was loud. He recognised the words Inglés and Hospital Británico. He came out of his daze when he heard asesino spat across the billiard table. At that sound, the bar owner grabbed him by the elbow and rushed him on hands and knees through a small door behind the counter and into a patio that connected with the rear of the Phoenix Hotel. ‘Wait,’ the man signalled with hands together and two index fingers pointing at the floor tiles. Douglas spent his second night in Buenos Aires in that patio, surrounded by crates of empty wine and beer bottles, under an open sky. Two packets of cigarettes kept him company for a short time. He heard the police in loud conversation with the bar owner, but only recognised the words Inglés and accidente. Entering through another door, police searched the patio. But their prey was hidden in a chamber of bottle crates.
Douglas later heard the night porter at the Phoenix Hotel speaking loudly to police in the light well between buildings, denying any knowledge of the new guest – probably under threat of physical injury from the bar owner, a man of considerable girth and not much hair, who wanted to protect his patrons, especially the English ones. During Mac’s introductory monologue Douglas had 19been told that it was important to Argentines to be able to say that they had ‘English’ friends.
Grunting from the effort, the owner crawled into the patio where Douglas sat on an empty crate in sweat soaked clothes, his body chilled by the night air. The man said Mac was comfortable at the British Hospital. There was no news of the drunk who might be dead, which was fine, the proprietor said. If he was dead there would be no witnesses and the case would be closed quickly. Each word was shouted, and accompanied by side-long glances at nowhere. The night and the possible police presence imposed caution. But comfort, reassurance, were the main aim of the speech, which was formulated slowly, lips framing the words, with the apparent conviction that volume facilitated comprehension. When Douglas said ‘Qué?’ the same words were repeated, even more loudly, caution abandoned. Douglas began to tremble, shaking with feverish convulsions. He was assured that another inglés, one of Mac’s bosses on the Central Argentine Railway, would arrive with daybreak to sort out everything.
The police gave up their search; the two buildings fell quiet. The proprietor gave Douglas an unknown drink so strong that he bent double from the blaze in his bowels. But the shivering stopped. The owner smiled.
