Innocent Abroad
Jordan, Rosa
THE LAST WORD Rosa Jordan Innocent Abroad Visually, the Argentine pampa is a lot like the American Middle West. Apart from the province of Buenos Aires, where the occasional pink flamingo mingles...
...She was an atomic physicist...
...I was swept by a sudden sense of shame...
...She asked where else we had traveled...
...Entering the province of San Luis, the bus passes under an arch decorated with a picture of a gaucho on horseback trampling an Indian underfoot...
...Yet here was a woman on a bus in the middle of nowhere looking at me as if I were hopelessly (or deliberately) ignorant...
...Her low-pitched voice shook...
...We skied the snows of Bariloche in T-shirt-warm, September spring sunshine...
...The Vietnam war was still on...
...I woke up when we stopped in a small town—an Indian reservation, judging by the faces and the poverty...
...We were hoping Allende could make it...
...I closed my eyes and let the big Mercedes lull me to sleep...
...Below us lay deep, dazzling Lake Nahuel Huapi, in the center of which is a forested island where the book Bambi was written...
...He looked at the round-faced man across the aisle, then at me, and said, "Salvador est a muerto...
...But our attention, for the most part, was elsewhere...
...My companion and I were still focused on Southeast Asia and knew only that a Marxist president had been elected in Chile...
...The driver slowed...
...a-day train was no longer bringing in food...
...But when we arrived in Santiago, we found closed shops, gasoline stations guarded by men with machine guns, a scarcity of food, truckers on strike...
...Americans...
...At last we reached Bariloche, an alpine village perched on the edge of a lake, and climbed out, stiff-jointed from two days on the bus...
...Now they work for the CIA...
...Are you certain he'll lose the next election...
...What did she think of the callousness of an American who had chosen to go on a ski trip in a country where the United States was engaged in the overthrow of a 187-year-old democracy...
...This trip had been motivated by a need to escape the barrage of political insanities emanating from Washington...
...he said, in a way that made me feel he saw me as I had been seeing myself: a tourist from a bullying nation, either callously indifferent or incredibly ignorant...
...There was, incongruously, a larger-than-life statue of John F. Kennedy...
...it is said that when the conquistadors first came to claim the pampas, the Indians ate them...
...But the onceRosa Jordan is a free-lance writer in Mal-ibu, California...
...We were discussing it when an Argentine woman across the aisle addressed us in English: "He said that dinner will be served at the next stop...
...We were interested to see how his brand of socialism would work out in the context of their democracy...
...Because I was sleepy, and because Salvador translates as "savior," I didn't quite understand...
...She wrote down their address and invited us to visit, but her husband's eyes were cold...
...It was so important to us to have a model of social justice without revolution...
...They used to work for Chile," said the driver...
...A boy came onto the bus selling newspapers...
...It had taken some centuries for the gaucho to accomplish this, however...
...The round-faced man, whose features I had come to associate with Chileans more than Argentines, looked directly at me, dark eyes wide, not blinking once as a wash of tears spilled over...
...from there, he advised us, we should go on over the Andes to Argentina...
...I was making this trip in September 1973, and it was meant to be a skiing vacation in Chile...
...But you were there...
...Thank you," I said to Maria Elena, too embarrassed to accept the hospitality she offered...
...dollars he could get enough gasoline to take us to the ski area at Portillo...
...Evenings we spent walking the streets of Bariloche, a village as Swiss as the Swiss who had settled it, all wooden chalets and shops selling chocolates and handmade sweaters...
...Apart from the province of Buenos Aires, where the occasional pink flamingo mingles with cattle in rain-soaked fields, the land and sky seem empty for mile after interminable mile...
...She was also going to San Carlos de Bariloche, but not to ski...
...She looked angry, frustrated...
...there was a research center there, she said, where she and her husband worked...
...There was only the flow of Spanish to remind us this was Argentina...
...It's included in your fare...
...I would have loved to stay longer, soaking up its physical magnificence and air of isolation...
...Portillo's snow-covered slopes were unparalleled for scenic beauty and skiing those spring days...
...we saw the festive atmosphere, steaks being barbecued, wine flowing, no shortages here...
...Back home, I counted myself part of an articulate, educated, politically savvy elite...
...The bus driver made an announcement I didn't completely understand...
...So we took the train to Argentina...
...The savior is dead...
...You saw how the CIA has undermined him...
...A taxi driver told us that with U.S...
...Then it rained, and that was the end of skiing...
...We said we had been in Chile and told her how things were there...
...The Watergate affair was unfolding...
...I repeated in halting Spanish...
...I fell into conversation with the woman, whose name was Maria Elena...
...The soldiers, or the Americans—they have killed him...
...Yes," the boy said in Spanish...
...Some progressive Americans must have known what was happening in Chile when it was happening, but I didn't...
...Maria Elena's husband was there to meet her...
...In the evening, we caught another Mercedes bus, northward back into the pampas...
...Outside Santiago, we passed trucks parked in fields, circled in caravans...
...But travel is comfortable, because the bus is a Mercedes, staffed by smiling stewardesses who constantly offer pillows, blankets, snacks, and "cafe, te, o whiskee...
...A coup, they said over fruit juice in the bar (there was nothing else to drink), was imminent...
...By morning, we had reached the edge of the pampas and were climbing into the mountains...
...After a few days on a ranch outside Buenos Aires, we headed for San Carlos de Bariloche to ski the Argentine side of the Andes...
...Allende will be dead within a week...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
