The Argentina Rhodochrosite (23 page)

47

With the television volume loud enough
to rattle her seat, Ainsley couldn’t believe that anybody on this bus was honestly sleeping.

She was staring at a flatscreen that had been mounted at the front of the coach, just above the windshield. Onscreen, Jean-Claude van Damme was delivering a roundhouse kick to a quartet of enemies. Every strike sounded as loud as a gunshot.

Ainsley was back in Argentina.

A week and a half after being expelled, she was heading to Patagonia on an overnight bus. The return hadn’t been easy.

There had been two major concerns: money and immigration officials. In short, she needed more of the first, less of the second.

She still had two thousand dollars left, but the flight cost fifteen hundred. That left her with five hundred dollars in her wallet.

To solve this problem, Ainsley had hit upon the solution of flying to Uruguay first. In that country, she still had a plastic bag of thousands of pesos that she’d dropped into an outhouse toilet during a stressful moment on her previous adventure. If she could recover that money, she’d be set.

And that’s exactly what had happened. Another long flight, a quick rental car in Montevideo, a five-hour drive up to Artigas, a return to Guarasquil, and an afternoon socializing with the village.

Before she had left that she country, she had instructed the people of the village to haul the money out of the toilet, clean it, and repackage it. They’d done so. Ainsley had counted every peso, and nothing had been missing. They loved her. She had seen that their stolen treasure, El Árbol Negro, was returned to them.

The second reason for going to Uruguay was more bureaucratic. Ainsley suspected that officials at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires would be on the lookout for her return. The worst case scenario was that her passport would be flagged, if the military wielded that type of influence.

But she discovered something else: the Argentine national immigration system was very, very uncoordinated. Quick research on the Internet had shown her many people, mostly American and British expatriates, posting long screeds about how inefficient the country’s computer systems really were, how the provincial offices had poor access to central records in the capital.

And so that’s why she’d taken the Buquebus—again—across the Rio de la Plate. To arrive by sea increased her chances of slipping through the net. She’d walked down the plank, held her breath, and handed her passport to the lady official at the immigration desk.

“Welcome back to Argentina,” the woman had said, stamping it.

Ainsley had practically sprinted across the lobby with the hanging bulbous lamps, past the spot where Nadia’s driver had held up a sign, past the bar where she’d met Bernabé and Hector, outside to the taxi stand.

Back again. Victorious.

She’d zipped across Buenos Aires to the Retiro bus station, where she’d purchased a ticket on an overnight bus to Patagonia. It was a twenty-three-hour-long journey.

And that’s where she was now, on the seventeenth hour of the haul, trying in vain to get some shuteye.

She pushed earplugs into her ears, cranked her seat back to an almost full recline, and yanked the curtain around her makeshift bed. It was a sleeper seat. This bus was remarkably well equipped, especially when a ticket only cost a hundred and thirty dollars, which included three meals with alcohol.

But sleep wasn’t coming. Ainsley became more and more convinced that the Argentine government had sprinkled caffeine into the national water supply.

She cranked her seat back up to a sitting position, clicked on the light, and pulled out her e-reader.

Before she left America, Ainsley had loaded up on e-books about the dirty war. After all, she’d had lots of empty transportation time, first on the plane, then on the boat, now on the bus.

What she read gave her the shivers.

The Argentine navy considered itself the protector of civilization. And as such, the navy was—and is—proud that they gave the prisoners Pentothal before tossing them out of airplanes. That was the civilized way to kill someone, they argued.

She looked up from the screen, alarmed. Maybe that’s what they’d injected her with. And they’d even loaded her onto an airplane too. Fortunately, they’d skipped the last step.

Ainsley went back to the text. The Argentine navy often boasts of its European roots, and most of the officers speak more than one European language. It’s consistent with the myth that Argentines have created about themselves: that an accident of geography has placed these Italian, Spanish, and British people, all white-skinned, in the middle of what they perceive as a sea of barbarism. Ainsley learned that they even deride their Peruvian and Brazilian neighbors, those of native or African heritage, as
cabecitas negras
, or “little black heads”.

“Coffee, coffee,” said a voice. Ainsley looked up. A steward was walking down the aisle with a tray of paper cups and an aluminum thermos. Ainsley took one with cream and sugar.

She returned to the text. During the dirty war, the navy’s treatment of the prisoners veered from abusive to friendly. Some prisoners broke during torture, and subsequently went out into the street with the guards to point out and turn in their
compañeros
. Some of the prisoners even stayed in the navy for years afterwards, adopted the rigid mindset, forgot their subversive past, and rose through the ranks of one of the most reactionary organizations in modern memory.

Ainsley was especially curious about the female prisoners. She was surprised to learn that rape actually wasn’t common. Even more surprising was the fact that the female prisoners had been sometimes asked out to dinner by the guards, who had used the opportunity to vent, over plates of pasta and glasses of wine, that their relationships with women had been destroyed by the demands of the
junta
.

How absurd.

Furthermore, the guards and officers had secretly admired the women prisoners. These were usually members of the
Montoneras
, the urban Peronist guerilla group. They were free-thinkers, often university students, and could discuss books, travel, movies, politics. The officers’ wives, on the other hand, were usually from other navy families, had been raised decoratively, and didn’t know how to talk about anything at all.

Once in a while, Ainsley learned, after a few such dinners with a handsome officer, a female prisoner sometimes ended up falling in love.

Ainsley tried to imagine how those dates must have ended, back at the prison. A romantic kiss at the door of the cell, a blindfold slipped sensually across her eyes, handcuffs clicked onto her wrists, and the cell door closed gently behind her. The torturer’s gentle farewell: Good night, my dear, let’s meet again Tuesday, no, wait, I’m scheduled to electrocute your cellmate that night…

Marriages had even occurred this way, which seemed utterly ludicrous.

Ainsley was still thinking about that as the sun began to rise at the far edge of the horizon, and the bus began to slow down.

48

Holy mother of God, Ainsley thought.

The wind.

It howled around her like the screams of the spirits of the dead. She pulled her knitted wool hat lower over her ears. It was a new addition to her wardrobe back in the States, a cutesy blue and green number. She’d thought it would be perfect.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. Loosely-knitted fabric was useless in the face of wind like this.

The bus had stopped, and Ainsley stepped out onto a plain. It wasn’t a typical plain, the type that ended in a row of hills, or a line of trees, or an ocean, or a developed subdivision.

This field didn’t end.

She squinted her eyes and spun around. The plain stretched out to the horizon, in every direction, forever. It was carpeted in a gray-green vegetation, no more than a few centimeters high.

This was Patagonia.

The temperature was hovering around an ordinary spring day, but that bastard wind made it feel nearer to freezing.

She was standing on Route 40, the main thoroughfare through all of southern Argentina. The bus had stopped in front of a small tavern. It was the only structure within sight for a hundred miles. A single gasoline pump was stationed outside of it.

Tucking her chin into her coat, Ainsley headed across the pebbles towards the door.

Inside, she stamped her feet, ripped off the hat, and shook off the wind. Then she studied the room.

A long copper bar stretched along one wall. A ceramic penguin filled with peanuts sat forlornly on its countertop. A photo of Martín Fierro hung on the wall. There were a few wooden tables arranged on the other side of the room.

In the middle stood an empty salad bar. An unplugged electric cord lay coiled on the floor next to it. The scooped-out plastic containers that once held soft vegetables now held bolts, washers, electrical cords. Someone’s dream of serving fresh salads had bitten the dust. It seemed that there were higher priorities down here, at the far end of the world.

A middle-aged man with a moustache like a turn-of-the-century Frenchman waved to Ainsley. He was standing behind the bar, filing a fingernail.

“Do you have the piece?” he said.

Ainsley drew a blank. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You came on the bus?”

“Yes.”

“The catalytic converter? I ordered it from Buenos Aires a week ago.”

“How am I supposed to know?” Ainsley said.

“Did you see anybody put it into the luggage compartment?”

This man was practical. Ainsley immediately sensed that everybody was expected to pitch in here.

“No, I didn’t. Do you want me to check?”

“Never mind,” he said, “I’ll just do it myself.”

He rapped on the bartop with determined knuckles. Then he went outside. A gust of wind blew through the room until the door swung closed behind him.

Ainsley was alone in the small tavern now. She could hear the wind howling, the bus idling outside. Apparently nobody else was getting off at this stop.

She needed to call Marcelo. She pulled out her Blackberry and turned it on. There was no service. She didn’t know if it was because she’d failed to convert the phone back to Argentina’s standards, or because there just weren’t any cell phone towers.

Then she heard a clunk against the tavern. Alarmed, Ainsley went outside.

A huge automotive part was leaning against the tavern wall. It hadn’t been there a minute ago. The tavern owner was shaking out his arms as though he’d just dropped a huge stack of weights.

Behind him, the bus driver was closing the luggage compartment on the bus.

“That’s the piece,” he said.

“Can I use your phone?” Ainsley said.

“Of course. It’s on the—” The tavern owner trailed off. He was studying the piece, his head cocked. “Oh my God. They sent the wrong one.”

He turned around and ran towards the bus. The driver had just closed the door on the coach.

Ainsley went inside, leaned over the bar to retrieve the phone, and dialed Marcelo’s number. The line rang several times before someone picked up.

“Hello,” said the voice.

“I’m here,” she said.

“Who is this?”

“Ainsley Walker.”

“You’re in Patagonia?”

“Yes. I just got off the bus.”

He paused. “Are you at the tavern?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll come pick you up.”

Don’t go anywhere: that was funny. Ainsley hung up the phone and parked herself at a table and stared out the window at the dreamy landscape. The only trees in sight—a row of seven poplars near the window—were bent at a twenty-degree angle. The wind had kicked up a brown dust cloud in the fields. But she felt warm and protected.

Ainsley heard the bus pull away. The owner returned from the outside. He washed his hands in the sink.

“Goddamn them,” he said. “In Patagonia we help each other. That
porteño
bastard wouldn’t even put the piece back inside. Now I have to pay someone else to ship it back.”

He shut the water off with a forceful twist. Ainsley shrugged. Maybe life down here, at the end of the world, wasn’t that much different from life anywhere else.

“Maté?” he said.

“Sure,” said Ainsley. This place was making her feel oddly safe. Certain rooms did that. Maybe it was the harshness of the weather outside.

“Sweet or bitter?”

“However you like it.”

He boiled the water, went through the steps of the ritual, then came out from behind the bar. She took the first drink. The owner seemed to like it bitter. When she was done, he filled the
calabash
a second time and drank.

Neither said anything. Ainsley decided to wait for him to open the next part of the conversation. Country people never like chatterboxes.

It took three refills before he started talking again. “I can’t get Volkswagen parts anywhere down here,” he said, “and the order from Buenos Aires takes a week to ten days to arrive.”

“That’s too bad.”

He nodded, wiped his face. “My brother offered me his Renault 12, but I didn’t want to take it. Maybe that was a mistake.”

Ainsley said nothing. She checked her watch and wondered how long it would be before Marcelo arrived.

“So what are you here for?”

“Adventure travel,” she said. It was pretty close to the truth, and it was plausible. Most foreigners came to Patagonia for mountain-climbing or skiing.

“This time of year?”

“Sure.”

“But the winds…”

Ainsley thought fast. “I got a discounted deal on the trip.” Then she drank the maté a little too fast and coughed.

He waited until she’d recovered.

The man changed subjects. “You should try to listen to the whales.”

“Where?”

“At the coast. You can camp just a few meters from the water. The whales come right up to the beach and sing.”

“Beautiful.”

An hour passed like this, the man recommending activities for Ainsley. He brought out some
alfajores
, Argentina’s favorite cookies, two pieces of thin shortbread pressed together with
dulce de leche
and dusted with powdered sugar. They went through three pots of water and even more trips to the bathroom. Nobody entered the tavern.

Two hours later, Ainsley heard the sound of an engine motoring up. Then it turned off, and the door slammed.

The tavern owner had cocked an ear. “I don’t know the sound of that door.”

A burst of wind announced that the motorist had entered the tavern. He was about sixty years old but carried himself like a man half that age. A shock of white hair curled out from beneath his jaunty black beret. He wore a red corduroy jacket, a heavy gray sweater, another shirt, and a bright yellow ascot. His skin was tanned and his face was lined.

“Ainsley Walker?” he said.

“Marcelo,” replied the tavern owner, standing. “
Macanudo
. You dog.”

“Don’t bother me now,” said Marcelo. “My life can’t tolerate another problem.”

“Is your herd still living?”

“Yes, and it’s a miracle. I’m thinking of getting out of this game.”

“You should, while you’re still young,” said the owner.

Marcelo didn’t laugh. “You’re a comedian. Now I know why I don’t come here.” He turned to Ainsley. “Are you ready to go?”

She looked at the tavern owner. “What do I owe you?”

He waved it away. “It’s nothing. You’re leaving with a legend of Patagonia. I owe him many favors.”

Ainley didn’t know how to take that. The comment was straddling on the line between sincerity and sarcasm. She thanked him anyways, picked up her purse, and followed Marcelo outside.

As they drove away, the tavern owner watched Ainsley through the window with curious eyes.