Falling Off the Map (6 page)

Speculations, though, come in many forms, and one of the distinct pleasures of Argentina for the visitor is that so many of its people can speak so eloquently and thoughtfully about their own predicament; everyone, in this most self-conscious of places, is an analyst—and, therefore, an elegist—of his motherland. That may help to explain why the country has always attracted as many travel writers as tourists—it is such a fascinating case study (and the one place I can think of on which Naipaul, Theroux, Chatwin, and Jan Morris have all written extensively). What makes the country so intriguing to the visitor, in fact, is precisely what can make it so agonizing to the resident: it has the urbanity to reflect on its steady loss of all that urbanity entails.

“This crisis is the best possible thing that could happen to Argentina,” says an Anglo-Argentine, with a subversive gleam, as his friend, a novelist, buries his head in his hands. “It may at last bring Argentines down to earth. We’ve been living too long on dreams and expectations. And that’s all they are—dreams and expectations!” Above us, the murals and frescoes of a cavernous hundred-year-old restaurant gather dust. The novelist, gloomily announcing that even democracy has been exhausted now, quotes Clemenceau’s remark, on visiting Argentina, that this was a country with a wonderful future—and always would be.

Indeed, if conversation is one of the most stylish arts in Argentina, politics is one of the greatest sights; for the central issues of the day are played out in every street and café, in a land that seems almost to feed off soap-operatic calamity. The first time I went to the Plaza de Mayo, a group of old-age pensioners was holding up masks and waving banners outside the presidential Casa Rosada (now, all too fittingly, swathed in scaffolding). Nearby was a clamor of student nurses chanting, “We want teachers!” while under a nearby arcade, a line of haggard
peronistas
was staging some kind of hunger strike. The next day, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo conducted their weekly march, followed by a motley crew of complainants that included Trotskyites, Communists, and gays.

But the political pageant is hardly confined to the central square. The clangor of opinions is everywhere, as omnipresent as the mimes and clowns and illusionists who perform around the shopping streets. The Communist Youth are organizing a rally that somehow combines the fashionable issue of privatization with the fail-safe cry “The Malvinas [Falklands] belong to Argentina!” Outside the Greco-Roman Congress, under a lamppost consecrated to Thomas Edison, a Muslim is displaying
pamphlets that predict the advent of the Khomeiniite revolution. On Calle Florida, the main pedestrian shopping street, gaggles of old men conduct ritual debates (“This is an economic problem!” “No, it is political!”) in front of a wall plastered with posters: one celebrating Menem; one outlining the rules for buying and selling dollars; one showing a turbaned guru; and the last pointing out that extraterrestrials are dispensing wisdom directly to one Señora Valentina de Andrade.

Indeed, the fascination with flying saucers that so obsessed the Argentine priest in Greene’s
Travels with My Aunt
seems almost a national trait. Wealthy denim matrons pore over ads for parapsychology and devour the cover story of the Spanish magazine
Muy Interesante
, with its “Manual for Living in Outer Space” (another of its stories deals with “Transparent Bodies”). In remote Jujuy—the capital of the province of Jujuy—a Gnostic group is offering a series of weekly lectures; in Mendoza, the bookstores are heavy with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. And when I went to the annual book fair, an almost three-week-long event that draws more than a million people, the flashiest sign of all, advertised by a dazzling pink neon sign, belonged to the Hare Krishnas (the stall next door was that of the University of Moron). Menem himself took office on a day deemed astrologically propitious.

The other great rage in Argentina—which may respond to the same kind of needs—is psychology. Freud and Lacan dominate the bookshop windows, and, as everyone always mentions, there are three times more therapists and psychiatrists per capita in Buenos Aires than in New York State. Streetside kiosks sell magazines called “Real Problems in Psychoanalysis” and others whose covers say, simply, “Anguish”; the hot issue among the jet-setters is antidepressant drugs. What impressed me most about Argentina was not just that shrinks are as common
as occultists but that both, like health clubs, are the kind of leisure-class accessory one usually associates with affluence. And as affluence grows more precarious, the need for miracles grows more intense. “We want even our politicians to be like magicians,” an Argentine told me, “just to wave a wand and make our problems disappear.”

Yet the problems, and the elegies, only mount as the country gradually turns into one of those nations it has always looked down upon. Not long ago, Argentina was the capital of Latin American publishing (as recently as the forties, 80 percent of all books in Spain came from Argentina); now Chile and Mexico are taking its place. Of the country’s three great modern writers, Manuel Puig chose to live in Rio; Julio Cortázar lived (and died) in France; and Borges spent much of his time on American campuses, or, in his mind, in the company of Chesterton and
Beowulf
(the fact that he does not seem Argentine may be the most Argentine thing about him). On every side, the
belle époque
seems to be receding fast. Yet in some sense, I could not help but feel that unsettledness is almost native to the land. More than 150 years ago, when Darwin came to Argentina, he wryly noted that there had recently been fifteen three-year governments in the space of nine months. And when Naipaul visited eighteen years ago, the local currency was already devaluing by the day, and people were already searching for dollars and taking on extra jobs. “I’d expect you to be confused here,” a young local writer told me (she had studied English at summer school in Eton). “Even we are confused. Because we keep expecting things to change, but everything always stays the same.”

Through all this, however, the division between city and country remains as intense as during the bloody street fights of the last century; and almost anything one says about the capital is
contradicted elsewhere. A few characteristics, inevitably, seem indigenous. When I arrived in the old colonial city of Salta, for example, the streets were still buzzing at ten-thirty on a weekday evening. Music blared out of an Arabic restaurant next to Maxim’s. Just down the street from Benetton, a fancy bookstore showed off new copies of García Márquez, Kundera,
The Satanic Verses
—and
I Visited Ganymede: The Wonderful World of the Ovnis
, by Yosip Ibrahim. Shop-window girls swapped secrets in chic Italian cafés, and bulletins on windows offered “Yoga Classes for Children.” In the main plaza, a couple of hundred striking architects were banging drums and waving banners and demanding “Real Social Justice.” Nearby, in the cathedral, a poster of the Virgin Mary reassured, “Argentina: it is in crisis, but not in dissolution.”

Yet apart from these common features, much of the country proceeds as if it has never been told that it is meant to resemble Europe. The great glories of Argentina, in fact, lie in its Nature. Wake up in the freshness of an early morning in Iguazú, and the forest glistens with a newborn clarity. Rainbows arc across the crashing falls, and blades of grass gleam emerald under dripping water. Toucans flood the trees, and fat lizards sunbathe amidst roots and branches. Later, as the day develops, co-atimundis burrow and scurry across one’s path, and serpents slither over catwalks. Above, far above, condors circle the blue with blackness. Though hundreds of miles from the Amazon, the area feels like a tropicolored Amazonian dream, the cover of some Latin American novel magically come to life.

And even for those, like Greene’s CIA man, for whom the spread of 275 falls is “just a lot of water,” the world around the falls feels Edenic. The greatest of all its wonders, for me, were the Nabokovian rainbows of butterflies—indigo, lavender, white, and gold—that skittered about my arms and alighted on my fingers till my fists were bright with yellow and black.
Turquoise jewelry on wings, glittering against the misting of the foam.

The other secret pleasure of Iguazú is that it allows one to slip across the border and, in the process, across centuries and continents. For Argentina and Brazil are as far apart as three-piece suit and one-piece thong; as fashion show and carnival; as Europe, in fact, and Africa. The Brazilians undress as routinely as the Argentines dress up. And the minute one arrives on the Brazilian side of Iguazú, colors brighten, buttons come undone, inhibitions slip away. Well-muscled boys in shorts preen and howl, flashing-eyed girls whisper in the husky seduction of Portuguese, the shops turn giddy with cartoony postcards setting off the falls with topless girls. Along the border, I could not help recalling what a wealthy Argentine administrator had told me, wistfully and with a touch of envy. “The Brazilians are a people of nature—simple people in paradise, like animals in the Garden of Eden. In Argentina, we live too much in our heads.” Cross the border back into Argentina, and you feel as if you’re reenacting the fall into self-consciousness.

Even better, Iguazú is a gateway into Paraguay. And though the inimitable General Stroessner is gone now, his notorious home for fugitives and deviants, where one car in every two is stolen and two-thirds of all goods are smuggled, is still its famous, irredeemable self. As soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk in Paraguay, a young boy offered me a packet of pink condoms. Another philanthropist blew the dust off a stack of pirated cassettes, including such classics as “Rod Steward: Greatest Hit’s.” Everywhere I looked, bored shopgirls were sitting over showcases heavy with pink panda-faced minipianos and Rambo .357 magnums. Casa Chen, Casa Mo Mo, Casa Very Good. At Casa Wang, the dusty cases were full of Bust-Emulsion creams and Cosmetic Pencil Sharpeners; at Casa Ping (just down from Casa Ting, and not so far from Casa Ming), boxes of Yu-fung Drop-Proof Multi-Testers
sat amidst forty-piece ratchet-socket sets. Wild Arabic music flavored the air, and the smell of cheap foo yung. Taxi drivers played checkers with the rusty caps of soda bottles.

In the middle of the street sat stripped-down stolen Chevrolet Opalas and Ford Nopals, circled by policemen looking for bribes. A disembodied pair of stockinged legs jutted into the air. Casa Hokkaido, Casa Snoopy, Snoopy World. I saw UFO Beach Radios for sale (“sand resistant”) and toucan-faced quartz watches. I saw an elephant that played the drums, three bears in caps, which mechanically skipped rope, a pair of roller skates shaped as elephants. I saw hamburgers clad in pink on skateboards, and telephones in the shape of penguins, sporting red bow ties. I saw gold-dealers and criminals and street-corner toughs. At the end of the day, Puerto Iguazú, back in Argentina, with its brassy posters advertising Brazilian
mulatta
girls and a Chinese show called Tra-Lá-Lá, seemed almost tame.

In the Andes, too, I found myself a universe away from the capital’s feverish gaiety. It feels like siesta around the clock in the low, sunbaked villages of the northwest, with their long, empty streets and haunted shadows. Bowler-hatted women stand sleepy in the shade, selling ponchos and Batmobiles. Around them, the town stretches out like some forgotten settlement in New Mexico, white churches dazzling under high blue skies, cacti against hills as many-colored as an Indian quilt. In the dark, as Andean folk songs echo across the pampa, the place feels as lonely as the sound of panpipes.

Farther south, near the park-filled city of Mendoza (its willows and plane trees imported from Europe), the mountains are even more spectacular. In the silent, blue-sky villages, on a brilliant Sunday morning, bells toll parishioners to mass, and mountain light streams musky along avenues of elms. Nearby, a winding road slices through the snowcaps, past Incan ruins, all the way to the Chilean border. Yet even here, one is always
in Argentina. “WARNING,” announces the notice in a ski lodge. “It is prohibited here to speak of Politics; Economics; the Rise of the Dollar; the Cost of Living; Personal Finances; Unpaid Debts; Rising Costs; Various Anxieties. Be friendly; go easy on your Nerves.”

It isn’t always possible, of course, for locals to forget
la situatión
—especially in places far from the sources of power. Even in dusty, pre-Hispanic villages like Humahuaca, the walls are scrawled with appeals for “Democracy Without Hunger.” And even in Tierra del Fuego, there are busts of Evita. Even in Ushuaia, in fact, a drizzly, windblown settlement that calls itself the southernmost town in the world, shopkeepers confess their dreams of emigrating to Quebec two years from now, and unwealthy squatters transport their houses, on sleds, along the main road.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ushuaia is pervaded by a polar stillness; and not surprisingly, perhaps, it looks like a mirror image of Isafjördhur or the other eerily silent Icelandic fishing towns around the Arctic Circle. The gray feels perpetual here, along the sludgy streets, and the town seems almost a study in gray—the water behind it like dishwater, the snowcaps above moody and looming, the sun a dull nickel in the sky.

Ushuaia is still an Argentine place, though, which means that it offers stylish art galleries and concerts of Ravel and the names of French perfumes above its row of duty-free stores. On a slippery gray outcrop in the silver light of the Beagle Channel, black cormorants line up like boys at a black-tie ball, while sea lions huddle on slick rocks in the steady rain, then bark and romp like dolphins in the freezing water. High up, near the glacier that overbroods the town, the snow is inches deep around the autumn auburn trees. And in the Museum at the End of the World, there are not only taxidermists’ models of all the Fuegian birds, and skulls of three-ton sea elephants, but
also, most excitingly of all, a copy of the famous Yahgan-English dictionary compiled by Thomas Bridges, the intrepid Anglican missionary who was the first foreigner to settle here (
okka
—“Oh dear me! Ah! Oh!”
okkonoma
—“To persist in asking for food, as a hungry child from his father”). In the same case is an even more touching symbol of the region’s enduring strangeness: a copy of John’s Gospel translated into Yahgan.