Uncle Willie and I had a suite, and Hollo pressed our pants for our evening at the casino with a portable iron he carried in a small tin trunk.
Mollie looked very good in her evening gown of blue beads and dark silk. We ate dinner at a place called, without much imagination, the Fish Grotto. But it was very good food.
Uncle Willie ordered a special drink to protect us from dyspepsia and dysentery and dropsy. He called it “The Tourists' Protector.” It is a mixture of orange rind, brandy, rosemary, and a teaspoon of fennel seed. To this you add two cups of wild honey, and (this is important) with a cold steel knife, not silver, scrape into it the pulp of two green apples. According to Uncle Willie, the chemical action of the steel on the green apples will keep off dysentery. I only half believed this until an Army doctor told me it was a sure cure.
The medical part of the meal done with, Uncle Willie ordered dinner. He began with shrimp and a soup made of hard crabs, lobster, and okra stock and flavored with a bouquet garni, strong with thyme and bay leaf. The main dish was white bass cooked in oiled paper bags. The fish is sniffed with mushrooms, smoked sausage, Sherry-soaked water chestnuts, and bean sprouts, all flavored with a little soy sauce and molasses. I suspect the dish is originally Chinese, for Chinese and Japanese colonies arc established up and down the Argentine coast. Uncle Willie asked for Drambuie, and Mollie and I had little glasses of Kümmel.
Uncle Willie said, “Now to the gambling tables.”
We didn't do so well at the casino, but Mollie and I danced a few rounds next door to the music of a band that had an idea it was playing Dixieland. Uncle Willie reported he had just held his own at the tables, and we went back to the hotel, ready to start in the morning for the estancias at Chapadmalal and Ojo de Agua, where they breed fancy horses. I wanted to do some sketching, too.
I came awake to the smell of coffee and opened one eye to find Rollo, in a white jacket, standing over me, a silver tray in his hands.
“Hard night?” he asked.
“Not too good,” I said, sitting up.
Rollo poured the coffee, buttered the toast, and unfolded a napkin. “I had a good night at the wheel. The number eight and the red were very good to me. I won ten thousand pesos.”
“You're the rich man in the party, Rollo. Maybe I better serve you.”
Rollo held out a fat finger. On it glittered a huge yellow diamond. I was impressed. “It's blinding.”
“It's a good size, but frankly there is a huge flaw under the setting. However, it was a bargain, and I feel dressed again. Once a diamond man, always a diamond man. Your gray suit today? And may I suggest the brown tie and socks?”
I followed his suggestions, and Uncle Willie come in in his dressing gown. “Mollie phoned,” he said. “We start right after breakfast. That coffee hot, Rollo?”
Mollie was wearing a suede skirt, a black sweater, and a turban of silver cloth. “Must look like horsy people, where we are going. They like you on the estancias to conform.”
We drove along good dirt roads past flat fields, and far off the violet haze of distance danced. Steers ran in rough pastures dotted with small ranch houses. Once in a while we ran through a small town: tin-roofed houses of clay or brick, tattered dusty trees, a large village square, a big glazed-tile church, often in ruins; and we saw wonderful-looking horses, frisking and feeding. At the Rancho Larrea I got out the roll of white wrapping paper that I often use instead of a sketch book, and began to draw forms of running horses, in black lines of very black ink. Uncle Willie and Mollie sat in the shade of a tile porch and drank maté and then rum. Rollo was around the back peddling zircons to the horse hands and field crews.
A little boy named Chico came out to watch me draw a big dark stallion they called Tar Baby. He told me about the horse's history and his life in the pampas grass. The horse would always remember the pampas grass; it bloomed waxy-yellow on every hill, and all day water ran draining away under his hoofs, and the mares with their foals were frisky on the slippery ground. If he hadn't been so proud, he might have joined in their childish play too. But of course he couldn't, Chico said.
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