One Damn Thing After Another (27 page)

Roissy, now known as Charlie-Airport and it is not a change for the better, opens its maw and processes you. Treblinka railway-siding, with its gay paint, little trees, enthusiastic posters of happy families setting forth for happy hols, is nothing to it. Come on lads and lassies, Arbeit Macht Frei. Buy scarves, umbrellas, Scotch cameras and Japanese whisky. Arlette sat there and longed for someone to come and give her a fatal injection.

But once – at last – aboard Aerolineas' spanking treasure-loaded galleon, spirits rose. Nowhere else for them to go. De abajo, arriba, which is Spanish very roughly for up-up-and-away. There was no space in front or behind, but by God's infinite mercy there was space to the side for the junk she had – very little – and the junk the girls brought – a great deal. She organized herself – se las arregló – and began to feel comfortable. She was not in the least an Experienced Traveller, but did know the basics of airlines, which are after all relatively simple: never eat the food; never try to call the girls; support it patiently when they come unbidden; never, never try to go to the lavatory. She got hold of a mask and some pillows, curled
up and Slept. Missed, mercifully, breakfast in the middle of the afternoon, exciting views of Dakar, The Movie, virtually all of the aloft part.

She woke vastly refreshed. A couple of hours to go, but that would give her time to start speaking Spanish. A girl passed by and beamed at her: one passenger who had not given any trouble. Would she like some coffee? A drink? She had a couple of stiff jolts of those weird things with names like Pampero or Rawhide and containing passion-fruit-juice. The girls instantly looked much nicer; even the passengers became tolerable. By a succession of extraordinary Lotto-wins the lavatory was free, clean, and tidy: she repaired herself lavishly and made a hearty lunch of gambas and espárragos and polio, all tasting exactly the same, but she didn't mind a bit.

If the first discovery made about Argentina is that the wine at five francs is as good as the French equivalent at twenty dollars, one is on the right track. Further proof: the pleasure of watching all the other passengers rushing for the lavatory in the hour before touchdown and frustrating one another very greatly. And Buenos Aires Airport is dirtier than Roissy, but there is no way it could be nastier. It also smells a great deal better. She was not even shaken by contact with officialdom. She was, by all means, a tourist. She was by no means a member of the Communist Party or indeed any other. To the best of her knowledge she was uncontaminated by cholera, typhoid, yellow fever or foot-and-mouth disease: her Documentación was simply fine. And it was a lovely day.

It was time to gather her wits and find out what she did know about Argentina. Which was very little, but it would have to do.

I am in the Southern Hemisphere, where I have never been. I crossed thus the Equator, but still in Roissy air, so that was all
mierda de toro
. The thing to remember is the seasons are back to front: Christmas is summer, so this is now late spring and very nice too. It rains quite a lot, but I 'ave the umbrella and I 'ave the raincoat, so that's all right. I 'ave further strong flat shoes; good because I'm going to do a lot of walking. It is a very large city indeed, but there is the metro, and I'm on
expenses, there is the taxi. I will walk as much as I possibly can, but will not murder the feet. There is nothing here in the least strange or disconcerting. You might as well be at home. This is not just a much larger, much prettier Marseille, or even Barcelona: it has, obviously, dimensions you see but do not understand: it suffices to know they are there. A peculiar flung-together impression. Add Barcelona and Marseille and Genoa: then forget all about the Mediterranean and throw in Hamburg. Add, lavishly, that pretty strong stuff distilled from cactus-juice. And passion-fruit juice.

With much politeness and efficiency and carrying-her-bag, the taxi left her at her hotel. A short trip, but he had certainly gone around a long way. She did not care. The hotel was like every hotel she had ever stayed in in Paris: an antiquated décor and a lift best avoided; a superb staircase with much lavish ironwork to the balustrades, stucco to the ceilings and faded but impressive velvet. Many huge spotty looking-glasses, and curly rococo tables with people's breakfast trays on them. Mysterious doors with screens in front of them. Rooms being redecorated, with the plasterer sitting on the rolled-up carpet drinking beer. Complicated cutglass chandeliers being mended by nobody, with a lot of disembowelled wiring hanging down. A very pleasant large room, high-ceilinged, with shabby faded furniture, a new bed replacing the old horror with a valley in the middle. The Spanish pageboy, called grimly in French a chasseur, is called in Spanish a buttons. She overtipped
los botones
largely: he grinned at her and from the superiority of eleven years old said, ‘You want anything, I'm your man'.

Very nice. A telephone that didn't work and a bathroom that did, with massive nineteenth-century plumbing in bronze coexisting with twentieth-century ditto in shiny black plastic and peeling chrome.

The doorplates and handles were in the same thick, luxuriously figured bronze, and concealed solid old-fashioned locks with a night latch. Good, she wasn't going to get murdered in her bed, nor raped neither by no big hairy macho cabrio. And as for the street … and as for all these winding passages too, full of curtained doorways, massive pieces of man-high
furniture, and dud electric-light bulbs … One could hear hair-raising tales of assault just about anywhere on the American continent. There was enough truth in these to make a woman by herself take a precaution or two, and Arlette reckoned herself a careful girl. One of the things she had learned from Corinne Klein, who had given her self-protection lessons, was that the scene in which the slightly-built virgin tosses the huge inflamed goat airily through the landscape fails to work except with singularly timid and fumbling goats.

Arlette unpacked. In the bowels of her suitcase was a small box of manicure things, metallic objects which do not set airport security-checks a-tweeter. In with the scissors and files was a knife, an ordinary folding pocket-knife but the best there is, a hand-made Laguiole with a brass and ivory grip and a long narrow blade of razor steel. When opened it has an excellent balance. The bag she had brought was likewise a solid affair; the oblong type with a flap coming all the way down. Under this flap was stitched a loop, and the open knife lodged in this loop. The bag carries on your left side, under the arm. It slides easily to the front and the right hand makes the same movement as a cross-draw from a shoulder holster. Experience has shown that if the most professional and evil-minded of goats takes you in an armlock you lose consciousness very fast, but you have plenty of time to get at your knife. On the occasions when you are not wearing your gun in its hip holster, when for instance you are wearing a frock, the knife is as good or better. It has both edge and point. Either will take a goat's mind off the object in view, for any length of time up to permanency.

When she sallied out, feeling chipper, the crooked corners and shadowy alcoves of all these damn passages were not alarming.

Hotels will often try and sell you the kind of cigarettes advertised in glossy magazines. They have also dinky little street maps with cute little drawings of the more grandiose monuments. Arlette went down the street until she met a cigar shop, and went in. Here she met a gossipy, friendly person, and the usual conversation ensued. Oho, and aha, una Francesa, with
out doubt a Parisiensa? No no, dear man, de Mediterráneo, de cerca de Toulon, all right if you want it so de cerca de Marsella. Yes, all extremely bonita and hermosa and how about some Argentine cigarettes? Oh they're blonde tobacco? Don't like blonde cigarettes, make me cough, wuff wuff. That's right, brown ones, like French ones if you insist, but want local ones, something like Cuban or Colombian ones.

This cast a slight chill. Cuba I seem to have heard of: where is Colombia, isn't that some banana place with earthquakes? You had better be clear about this: in the South American continent, only Argentina exists. Brazil exists, or so it is said, but those are blacks. And don't speak Spanish. Not like us. Now a rubia from the Mediterranean, that is like us.

A bountiful friendship was flowing by this time. Arlette secured small nice cigarillos, and went off with her ears ringing. She had learned that Porteño, and there's nothing more patriotically Porteño than people in cigarshops, bore only a vague resemblance to her kind of schoolgirl Spanish.

There was also this damn street map. It was the other kind, which is big enough to be readable, but a great deal too big to do anything with on street-corners, except to be blown away in a high wind. She bought a large straw shopping-bag to keep it in, and had a drink to get her breath back.

One never sees anything of large cities, for one only sees when walking, and while one can walk, one gets nowhere much. The distances are very distant, sure, but much worse is the concept of grandeur that squashes human beings. This lack of proportion is very boring. As Thomas Beecham said of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it is far too large and should instantly be knocked down; this applies to everywhere. Crossing the Champs Elysées becomes a chore akin in strenuousness to swimming the Channel: it is now too much of a bore to go and see what is on the other side. Walking down Piccadilly is the stupidest thing you can do, because all you come to is Hyde Park Corner.

The modern world has also removed perspective, as costing too much. Some very large buildings are extremely beautiful, like the Louvre, which is why the City of Paris has arranged
that you should no longer see it. Saint Peter's is visible, just, because nobody has quite dared yet knock down the Bernini colonnades. The converse is also true: the huge and magnificent perspective down the Mall shows you – alas – Buckingham Palace, which is unmistakably Barclay's Bank. The difference between visible and invisible cities is the difference between Venice and Rome.

With a considerable expenditure of energy Arlette discovered the metro, and eventually the Chancellery of the French Embassy, greatly fortified against hostile natives and guarded by gorillas, for fear that an Argentinian ayatollah should declare all the paperwork to be Espionage.

As in all chancelleries, in all embassies, there were elegant young women, and elegant young men, with the universal family look of incapacity. With a succession of these physically and mentally feeble persons there was a succession of long arguments.

She wanted the Consulate. No she did not. Yes she did; no she didn't. She must be warned with the utmost emphasis against all ill-judged and tactless approaches to the Authorities. Now who was she, anyhow, apart from plainly being an excessively tiresome person?

After a while she fought her way into an inner office, where there was an Attaché. Now would she please explain herself clearly? An Embassy Official? Next best thing: a highly-placed Consular Official. Who was he? If he had wished that known, doubtless he would have made the necessary approaches himself.

After mulling this over for a long time, and remaining flummoxed, and finding her immovably obstinate to both threat and blandishment, the Attaché went and got the Counsellor, an elderly diplomat of a long thin sort, with bilious eyes and stiff grey hair in a long brosse that made him longer and thinner than ever, but being Counsellor had much experience and some brains, and even some traces of humour.

“Let me tell you this, Madame. Anybody searching for missing persons in this city, in case you hadn't heard, is about as welcome as Fidel Castro, and just about as conspicuous, and
we can't do anything about that. En cada tierra su uso, or roughly, other land, other manners.”

“To which my cleaning woman would reply, Dame dinero y no me consejos, give me the money and not so much advice. Seriously, this isn't a political matter, or I don't believe it to be so. If it is, it's a French affair, which is why I respect my principal's desire for anonymity. All I want is the right address, which you certainly know.”

“You realize that the Embassy will take no responsibility whatever for you, and is not to be held liable for any scrape you get into? Nor can you mention any names belonging here. Do that and they'll check it out, and then heaven help you.”

“If I didn't know this, I wouldn't have come in the first place.”

“As long as you do: the trouble we got into over those awful nuns …”

“A quien madruga, Dios le ayuda.” Those who get up early, God helps.

“That had better be true. Very well, there's a Captain Barton who might conceivably see his way to straightening you out. They do, occasionally, upon no logic that anybody has ever been able to discover. No I won't write it down: do that for yourself. The address is that of the police Kommandatur.”

“In, no doubt, the Prinz Albrechtstrasse.”

“Don't make jokes like that around here. I can tell you, they don't go down at all well. If, furthermore, you have invented this tale of a consular official, it is my duty to warn you that you may not feel inclined for any further joking.”

“You mean like telling a traffic cop I'm the Senator's cousin and I'll have the badge off the bastard? That would indeed be childish, here.”

“So my fairly considerable experience of human beings inclines me to judge. Or you wouldn't have got in here. You would do better, you know, to tell me who it is. If it's as you say, he'll be in our book. There is – then – a possibility that we might be able to help you.”

She shook her head.

“I promised,” she said.

“Well well; I can respect that. I can also respect your confidence.”

“There would have been people in Paris equally well placed. He chose not to confide in them. People who had been at school with him. I wasn't going to argue with him about it.”

“Maybe I see his point,” muttered the Counsellor. “Well, I'll press you no further. You handle your own responsibilities.”