George Bartram - Under the Freeze

It was not like Tarp to hesitate, but that took him a fraction of a second. “There’s nobody left to see.”

“I thought — When I left, there were some. Weren’t there?”

“Later, there weren’t.”

Another silence. Then the man at the other end said, “I thought I might go look at this new memorial in D.C., you know? Look for some names.”

“They wouldn’t be there.”

“Yeah. Well, I sort of thought that. Well. Hey, listen, drop in sometime, hey? We’ll tip a few tequilas, talk over — some things. Hey?”

“Yeah.”

He bought a role of plastic tape to mark the shoulder bag, then ate, read a Spanish paper and a French paper, then flew to Rio and slept until morning, when another plane flew him to Brasilia for the change to Aerolineas Argentinas. At a little after noon, he came down the steps to the dry, hot field at Santiago.

A middle-aged woman had a 9mm Luger for him in an ancient shoulder holster. She led him into a baggage area, where they stood fifty feet from the clattering belt that was bringing bags past a few travelers. She handed him the gun in a paper bag.

“Cartridges?”

“There are eleven in the bag. All we had.”

“Are they the right caliber?”

“My husband said so.”

The gun was too big and too heavy, but there was nothing he could do about it. He gave her money. “Is it hard to get guns in Buenos Aires?” he said.

“No harder than here, maybe.”

“Not so hard, then?”

She seemed very ladylike. “Nothing is hard if you have the money,” she said. He thought that perhaps she and her husband had had money and had fallen on bad times. In Argentina that was not so unusual.

There was a night train to Buenos Aires. The train itself looked well intentioned but inadequate, which was perhaps a fitting symbol for a country in which so many things had started out well and gone so wrong. His sleeping car had once, perhaps, been up to the standards of a run-of-the-mill European train, but that would have been many years before. Now, layers of paint had been allowed to pile up on the inner surfaces, obscuring all detail; the sink gave only a trickle of water; the bed, when folded down, made noises as if it might collapse altogether. Through some mix-up, he had not gotten the private compartment he had paid for but was put instead into a small double with another man. When he showed his ticket, the conductor explained with some asperity that there were no private compartments on this train and it had been foolish of him to try to buy one. If he wanted a single, he would have to take the noon train tomorrow.

“This will be splendid,” he said.

Tarp was uneasy about the gun. He had it in the flight bag, but he thought it might be safer worn under his arm. Any question he had about it was removed some minutes after he went into the compartment, when his companion removed his own coat, shook out a sporting newspaper, and sat by the window with a cigar. He was wearing an enormous automatic under his arm.

“Cigar?” he said amiably to Tarp.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Mistake. Keeps off viruses.”

His cigar would have kept off anything. Tarp went into the corridor and watched the Santiago suburbs groan by. A solemn child was waving at the train. Tarp waved back, but the child’s seriousness did not change. A dog watched him. Two women watched, so still they might have been frozen. He saw another child, standing under a wall with a faded message urging power to Perón, the child and the message like the national hope and the national ghost. Tarp supposed that he could have seen these things anywhere, but his ideas of Argentina were much colored by what he knew of the country’s past — its seedy fascism during World War Two, its sanctification of Perón’s wives. Thus, Tarp saw his preconceptions: a sad, rather baffled country where things had been done slightly wrong, not wrong enough to bring revolution, but a little wrong again and again and again, so that now it had its shaky military junta , its memories of Perón and Evita, and the Falklands war like a hangover.

“You really do not smoke?” his companion said. He had come out of their compartment to join Tarp in the corridor.

“No.”

“But you used to smoke, eh?”

“A little.”

“And you gave it up because of the propaganda, eh?”

“No.”

“Of course you did. Where are you from, Paraguay?”

“France.”

The man was instantly suspicious. Argentina had wasted a century trying to be France, an effort that made it both envious and paranoid. On the other hand, the man was certainly aware of France’s help in the Falklands (here, the Malvinas) war. Thus, he was both suspicious and grateful, or about as amiable as a panhandler.

“You sound like a Paraguayan.”

“France.”

“What do you think of Argentina?”

Tarp had bought an American travel book to read on the plane. He knew what the correct answer to the question was. “It is the best country in South America.”

The man nodded. “It is our gift for facing reality. The other countries, they are dreamers, madmen, idiots, whatever — one way or another, they do not face reality.”

In Santiago, Tarp had already heard a couple of songs about the Malvinas war. They were nostalgic and patriotic. They did not, in his view, face reality.

He sat in the dining car, inevitably, with the same men and two others much like him. They were younger than Tarp, rather hearty, almost swaggerers. Machismo ran very deep here, and with it a suggestion of sexual uneasiness and a resulting overplaying of the sexual hand: men were too much men; women were so feminine they made the teeth ache. These men were loud and rather pleasant, except that they used the word faggot for everything humane and different. The British who had conquered the Malvinas were faggots; liberals were faggots; newspaper editorial writers were faggots; Americans were faggots.

“What do you do?” his compartment mate said.

“I’m a salesman.”

They all thought that was good. What did he sell?

“Computers.”

Computers were fantastic, they all agreed.

When the meal was over, Tarp had not touched his huge steak.

“Not good enough?” one said. “Mine was fantastic!”

“Argentine beef is the best in the world!” said another.

“I’m a vegetarian,” Tarp said.

He might as well have told them he was a faggot.

When he awoke in the morning, they were barreling through the outermost fringe of Buenos Aires. As he stepped around his sleepy companion so that he could shave and dress, he watched the landscape urbanize itself. It looked like Italy, he thought: put Mussolini’s name where Perón’s appeared and it could be suburban Naples thirty years ago.

“Buenos Aires is a beautiful city,” the other man said with unnecessary force.

“So they say.”

“See for yourself.”

He gestured toward the slum beyond the window. Then, looking at the scene, he said, “Soon.” Tarp smiled and took the Luger out of its paper bag and checked it over, making sure that the ammunition fit it before he put it away in the flight bag. The other man looked at him with something approaching approval, as if he had made up for some of his losses of the night before.

Tarp stepped down from the train into a cool bath of morning air that smelled as sweet as a park full of flowers. He walked out of the huge old European station into streets where men in coveralls were hosing and sweeping in brilliant early sunlight. The air had just that edge of coolness that tells one it is not quite yet the warm season, or that the warm season has not quite ended. Yet the air was clean, almost pure, and it was possible to look for blocks down broad streets and see everything sharp-edged, handsome, pleasing because the air was thin. It was the kind of morning to make him smile.