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Dispatch 05: The Night Sky in Argentina
"I have him polish my boots every night. That’s not too much, is it?"
"No," I answered, sitting cross-legged on the bench and staring into my whisky. "I don’t think so." I swirled the glass; the ice cubes tinkled. It was 1am. I was very tired, and it was cold on the veranda of the clubhouse.
The Baron continued. "I am so glad you have come for the weekend. I was so lonely here. There have been no other polo guests since Peter left, just…"
The moon was half full, and bright enough for me to discern the outlines of the allée of great old oak trees leading to the stables, and to hint at the flat green velvet of the polo fields beyond, and the brown fields further still. And after those fields, the land carried on in one flat, dusty immensity, gathering speed as it unrolled, all the way south to the bottom of the world.
"… Martin of course. And one knows it is tiring for him to speak in English for a long time, and there was a conference here for three days of salesmen, horrible jumped-up little people who came here so that they could say there were off at their polo estancia for the weekend, when in reality they didn’t get anywhere near a horse the whole time because they were too terrified. I have not had any sort of intelligent conversation in weeks."
The Argentine night was cool and vast and silent. I thought this was why I could close my eyes and know I was here and no other place – the silence. No birds, no crickets, only the occasional feral dog’s growl or bark, which was quickly swallowed up by the hugeness. The night smelled of wet grass. I loved the silence. I had been travelling alone in Latin America since leaving Manila, and knowing no one and speaking little Spanish, I had wrapped myself into a personal silence like a heavy coat. I wore the silence around me; I could see where it ended about an arm’s length away. Beyond it, the world rattled on, people laughed and chatted, bumped into each other, asked each other questions. But not me. Tonight, the Baron had said more to me in half an hour than anyone had said to me in three days, and it tired me.
My mind jumped back almost exactly a year, to my first visit to La Martina, that mad journey. I had fled Hong Kong, fled the claustrophobia of Southeast Asia, ran to the furthest possible place from the crowded, smelly streets I called home. I now know I was actually running from Andrew, that was the reason I felt I couldn’t bear Hong Kong another second, even though we had broken up in October and it wasn’t until February that I bolted.
February is the Argentine vacation month. La Martina was quiet then, quieter even than it was now, and again there was only one other polo player there, Peter. He was a grand story-teller, was Peter, once he got into it. It had come all of a sudden. A day or two of the polite nonsense exchanged by strangers when they are thrown into close company. Then, during an evening of red wine, there was a hesitation, a breaking of an invisible barrier, like walking through a spiderweb at night. Then Peter’s secret histories began to roll out of him.
He was ex army, posted to Hong Kong. He and I had no one in common, but we shared a remembrance of places and a way of life that ceased to exist six months later when the Britannia sailed out of Victoria Harbour for the last time. Peter now had an aristocratic German wife and three children, and he lived in Germany running the forestry estate of the Baron, his mad, alcoholic brother-in-law and his mad, alcoholic wife. And so, ensconsed in the endless lands and crumbling ruins of one of the rotten old families of Europe, Peter lived out his old age in a cold place with his wife and the Baron, and the ponies, and the trees.
That last February in Argentina, Peter would try out horses to buy for the Baron during the day, and I would ride. After dark, when we sat down to dinner, Peter’s sadness would well out and out and out. Even after two weeks, I still couldn’t see the bottom of it. And I, poor sinner, thinking myself awash in my own ocean of troubles, was shown how small and placid that sea actually was. Then we returned to our respective homes on opposite sides of the world, and never spoke again.
And now, in the sort of odd twist of fate to which I’ve grown accustomed, I sit across from the infamous Baron. He gibbers at me. "How long are you staying here? I’ve been here two weeks now. I have totally given up getting up in the mornings. I tell you, it is so boring. My day begins at 3 or 4pm, and now I cannot sleep at night."
I smile, and looked at my whisky again. It smells like sickness. I stand and bow slightly to the Baron, the little bow I picked up unconsciously after a year of living in Hong Kong. "I’m sorry. The drive out from the city was very long…"
"No, no, my dearest girl! You must be exhausted! Go to sleep. I will just finish this cigarette and my drink, don’t worry about me. I will see you in the morning – yes, tomorrow I think we shall get up early and we will have a bit of stick and ball. You must try out my ponies. Goodnight –"
The next day, for the first time in weeks, the Baron gets up at seven am for the morning practice session. When we come in from the ride and sit down for breakfast, he pours enough vodka into his orange juice to turn it transparent. At lunch he regales me with a story Peter had told him of a girl who had been at the ranch the previous year, and how clumsy her first attempts at polo were. That girl was me. In the space of a moment, my view of Peter collapsed in upon itself. He was not a tragic figure, only a weak one. Midafternoon the Baron appears at my door in nothing but a towel. He was not an attractive man, and less so without clothes. I left him in no doubt that such antics were unwelcome.
The Baron did not rise before 3pm again for the rest of my three days at the ranch, and the amount of time he spent on horseback could have been measured in minutes. On the Tuesday, I shrugged my coat of silence back around me and returned to Buenos Aires. There I met a man born in a Scots-Australian religious colony in Paraguay. But that is, as they say, another story.
[February 1998, three hours south of Buenos Aires, Argentina]