In many ways Uncle Willie and I were just like all the other tourists in Argentina. Always in a hurry, we saw too much, digested some of it, but left the real national mystery, the full flavor of Argentina, untouched by our swift passing. In other ways we weren't at all like other tourists; we didn't have a lot of money, we sometimes lived On the side roads, we talked to the people whom the other tourists didn't notice, and we didn't carry cameras. Every other tourist staggered from his hotel loaded down with at least two cameras, one for movies, one for snapshots, plus color meters, rolls of film, tripods, extra lenses, manuals,cloud filters, Hash attachments, bulbs, leather cases, and timers. Uncle Willie and I could no more have loaded a camera than an atomic cannon, and neither of us knew how to snap a picture that showed both the legs and the heads of the subjects.
“What a banal thing the photograph is,” said Uncle Willie. “It lacks the true feel of flesh, the proper warmth of sunshine, the smell and taste of life that only good painting can give you. They copy the tricks of painters, those camera bugs, and get nothing but damn shadows. Let Rollo do the picture-taking.”
Rollo, all three hundred black pounds of him, not only served as valet, but he owned a small Swiss “spy” camera the size and shape of a cigarette lighter. It had a lens as big as an apple seed and exposed a strip of film the size of a wide shoelace. It had one real virtue; the resulting pictures couldn't be seen without a magnifying glass. Rut Rollo went on snapping it.
Rollo, all three hundred black pounds of him, not only served as valet, but he owned a small Swiss “spy” camera the size and shape of a cigarette lighter. It had a lens as big as an apple seed and exposed a strip of film the size of a wide shoelace. It had one real virtue; the resulting pictures couldn't be seen without a magnifying glass. Rut Rollo went on snapping it.
We were rolling across vast Argentine space in Mollie’s little car, crossing the pampas to Bariloche in the Argentine-Chilean lake district. A plane could have taken us from B. A. in four and a half hours, but we would have missed the dust and heat and the far purple hills and the great green-yellow pampas and the wild riding horsemen and the thousands of cattle, soon to end up in England as tins of beef.
Argentina is a wide, wonderful land, its resources just touched. Its railroads, mines, shipping, and raw materials are still waiting to be exploited. The English control the railroads and many of the city bus and trolley lines, and pay dividends to old colonels resting at Bath and Brighton. And of course there are the Germans, who are the new lords of factories and mills in Argentina.
We had lunch with one of these Germans at Los Menucos, where we gave up the roads and loaded the car and all of us onto a train. Herr von Schiller ran a packing house, and he had a freight car on which we could transport Mollie's car, so we ate lunch with him. It was a good one.We had turtle soup with the turtle meat and hard-cooked eggs braised in Sherry, roast quail on yellow rice with slices of apples and pineapple, and barbecued beef on skewers. (It had been bathed in olive oil, lime juice, Tabasco,and dried thyme and had smoldered on the fire coals.) We drank green Chartreuse and native sparkling wine, not too bad.
The train was not air conditioned, and the blue plush scats were grimy. Mollie slept and Rollo told us of his life in Argentina on the Bahia Blanca delta as a young man, when he first came to the country.
“I didn't have too bad a time. I liked the pull of the tidal waters; the color of the geraniums that Leda,my yellow girl, grew in old cans; the pies of blueberries; our shoat fattening under the cabin floor on oak acorns.
“I was getting no place and knew it,” he went on, “but we enjoyed the rose blooms and every once in a while one of the planters went mad and axed his father or got shotgunned with the wrong woman. A strangler of a storm used to wreck our boats from time to time. Once the tax collector burned my boat and we lived on cooter stew and eggs; the big land turtle has a lor of pink-and-white meat and the eggs are good eating, even if the whites never do boil hard. I bought some traps and trapped wild pig, and possum, fat from eating pinders and persimmons, and the gray fox. I trapped and seined. I caught mudfish and eels, jacks and big-mouthed bass. Good eating. I should have been unhappy but I wasn't. The plant-jungle smell pleased me, the roar of a bull ‘gator,the sight of floating tussocks, the islands of floating trees, and I even planted some acres of yams.
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