A Visit to Don Otavio

 A Visit to Don Otavio

T
HE UPPER PART of Grand Central Station is large and splendid like the Baths of Caracalla.

‘Your rooms are on Isabel la Catolica,’ said Guillermo.

‘How kind of you,’ said I.

‘Pensión Hernandez.’

‘What is it like?’

‘The manager is very unkind. He would not let me have my clothes when I was arrested. But you will have no trouble.’

‘Whatever next,’ said I.

‘One cannot tell,’ said Guillermo. His mother was a Mexican lady; his father, so Guillermo says, had been a Scotchman. Guillermo looked like an alley cat, not sleek; survival only seemed to be his forte. ‘Friends will look after you.’

‘What friends?’

‘Friends. Very sweet and useful.’ His louche fly’s eyes swept the floor. ‘Don’t mention my name at the Pensión.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Much better so,’ said Guillermo.

After some years in the United States where a seat at a successful movie has to be booked six weeks in advance and hotel reservations are a matter of patience and cunning settled at the last minute by luck, one never expected to move freely again. You couldn’t get into the Reforma at Mexico City for love or money, they told one at the American Express. One did not wish to get into the Reforma, one explained. Well, the Ritz was just as hard. At that point one gave up. Hence Guillermo, hence the
Pensión Hernandez. Guillermo was lonely and serviceable and always rushed in to do the things one wanted in a way one did not want them done.

‘Shall we have a little drink?’ he said.

We were sitting in the station bar, waiting. There was a great deal of time. The bags were in the hands of porters and suddenly, after the rush of days, there was nothing more to do. We were receiving. That is people were dropping in to see us off and to buy us and each other drinks. People we had not seen for years. Arrival and Departure are the two great pivots of American social intercourse. You arrive. You present your credentials. You are instantly surrounded by some large, unfocused hopefulness. You may be famous; you may be handsome, or witty, or rich; you may even be amiable. What counts is that you are
new
. In Europe where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one’s got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit. Here, where intercourse between man and man is without degrees,
sans lendemain
, where foreign visitors are consumers’ goods, it is a matter of turnover. You are taken up, taken out, shown around, introduced, given parties for, and bang, before you can say American Resident, it’s farewell parties and steamer baskets. Your cheeks are kissed, your back is slapped, your hand is pressed; you are sent bottles and presents and flowers – you are Sailing. The great empty wheel of hospitality has come full circle.

These last days have atmosphere and intensity, there is a quantitative increase of everything, more parties, more people, drinks. And for all their slapdash bonhomie these agitations are not meaningless. The warmth, the sudden intimacies, the emotion, are not false, they are ritual. To Americans, sailing is a symbol. Of travel past and potential, of their peril and their safety, of isolation and flight. They stay and are safe; they too may go and prove themselves free. The dangerous, the coveted, the despised and admired continent of Europe lies only a few days across the sea. One’s sailing drives it home. Farewells are vicarious magic: Americans still believe in
l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs
.

Between arrival and departure – if one is tactless enough to stay –
there is a social no-man’s-land in which one is left to make one’s friends and lead one’s life. The country is large and so is the choice. One’s life and friends are rarely among the hospitable figures of the first whirling weeks. Some vanish, and, if one runs into them, are too kind to ask, ‘You still around?’ Instead they say, ‘Call me some time.’ ‘Indeed I will,’ one says, and that is that until another year. Others recede to fixtures, the unseen faces in the middle distance one meets through the winters at the same New York parties. One calls them by their Christian names, one hands each other drinks, but there is no impact.

When at last one leaves, one undergoes a social resurrection. Invitations and steamer baskets come rolling in as though one were the Sitwells and had only stayed five weeks. A partial resurrection in my case because leaving by land is not the game, and Mexico cuts little ice: the same continent, or almost.

The bar was air-cooled. Which means that first one feels cool, then one feels cold, then one begins to shiver. Then one feels warm again and rather clammy; then the air begins to taste of steel knives, one’s ears begin to hum, it becomes hard to breathe; then one breaks into a cold sweat and then it is time to leave.

We emerged into the Hall of Mosaics. It was steaming like a Chinese laundry, the heat hit us on the head like a club. Summer in the large American cities is an evil thing. It is negative, relentless and dead. It is very hot. The heat, radiated by concrete and steel, is synthetic, involuntarily man-made, another unplanned by-product of the industrial revolution. This urban heat grows nothing; it does not warm, it only torments. It hardly seems to come from the sky. It has none of the charm and strength of the sun in a hot country. It is neither part of nature nor of life, and life is not adapted to it and nature recedes. In spirit and in fact, in architecture and habits, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States remains harshly northern, a cold country scourged by heat.

Through the day a grey lid presses upon the City of New York. At sunset there is no respite. Night is an airless shaft; in the dark the temperature still rises; heat is emanating invisible from everywhere, from underfoot, from above, from the dull furnaces of saturated stone and
metal. The hottest point is reached in the very kernel of the night: each separate inhabitant lies alone, for human contact is not to be endured, on a mattress enclosed in a black hole of Calcutta till dawn goes up like a soiled curtain on the unrefreshed in littered streets and rooms.

This kind of suffering is quite pointless. It does not harden the physique, it just wears it out. Yet it goes on. Clerks dream of deep cold lakes, of a camp in the Adirondacks, a fishing shack in Maine where, the myth goes, you have to sleep under a blanket. But nobody does anything about it. Nobody knows what to do about it. There are already too many sheep in the pen.

We went underground, where the trains were champing in grey, concrete tunnels. Guillermo was still with us. Though not travelling, he carried a brown canvas bag. A porter tried to take it, Guillermo resisted. The bag clinked. He peered inside.

‘I should have brought some paper,’ he said.

I peered too. Half covered by a bath-mat, there were some tooth glasses, a quantity of hangers, loose moth-balls, a metal teapot, bulbs and a roll of blotting paper.

‘Guillermo?’

‘From your apartment,’ he said. ‘Do not worry, my dear, your landlord cannot want these.’

Guillermo runs a rabbit-warren of rooms in a condemned brownstone house in the East Thirties. This must be how he furnishes them.

The river-bound Island of Manhattan is not a junction but a cul-de-sac. Leaving New York by train is a somewhat crab-wise affair. We are bound south-west, but have to tunnel out due north. At 96th, one emerges into the upper air. The St Louis Express bowls along a kind of ramp above street level like any elevated railway. Harlem. 125th Street Station, that absurd small stop under corrugated iron near the house-tops. The upper Hundreds. Low brick houses, washing in the casements, men in undershirts sweating out the long evening in rooms. Children on the pavements below hopping in and out of chalk circles in those old old games. 205th Street. A man shaving by an open window. If one were on a
boat, one would now be going down the Hudson. There would be the boat noises and the river noises. Perhaps the
Queen Elizabeth
would be in. One would sail past wharves and docks and warehouses and read the names of liners going to Rio and to China. One would smell the ocean and one would want the World. Then one would turn the Battery and there would be the famous sky-line, just lighting up. It would be the New York of the splendid contours, not the New York of the sordid details, and one would probably be in tears.

As it was, one felt rather smug. And private. E and I had managed to get a compartment to ourselves. They are only about a dollar more than a berth in the dormitory, but hard to come by. Off at last. I got out a pint of gin, a Thermos with ice-cubes, some Angostura and from a leather case the Woolworth glasses that had long replaced the silver-bound, cut-glass mugs with which our elders travelled about a better world, and made two large pink-gins.

‘Did someone tip the boy from Bellows?’ said E.

‘I didn’t. Did you return the book to Mr Holliday?’

‘I forgot. How awful.’

‘There is nothing we can do about it now.’ What respite, what freedom! We were in someone’s anonymous and by assumption capable hands, the Great Eastern and Missouri Railroad’s. There’d be four nights of it and almost four days. Four hours upright on a seat are a bore; eight damned long, twelve frightful. A difference in degree is a difference in kind: four days on a train are an armistice with life. And there is always food. I had packed a hamper and a cardboard box. Whenever I can I bring my own provisions; it keeps one independent and agreeably employed, it is cheaper and usually much better. I had got us some tins of tunny fish, a jar of smoked roe, a hunk of salami and a hunk of provolone; some rye bread, and some black bread in Cellophane that keeps. That first night we had fresh food. A chicken, roasted that afternoon at a friend’s house, still gently warm; a few slices of that American wonder, Virginia ham; marble-sized, dark red tomatoes from the market stands on Second Avenue; watercress, a flute of bread, a square of cream cheese, a bag of cherries and a bottle of pink wine. It was called Lancer’s
Sparkling Rosé, and one ought not be put off by the name. The wine is Portuguese and delicious. A shining, limpid wine, full almost, not growing thin and mean on one in the way of many rosés. It has the further charm of being bottled in an earthenware jug, so that once cooled it stays nicely chilled for hours. I drew the cork with my French Zigzag. The neatest sound on earth.

‘Have an olive,’ I said.

With a silver clasp-knife I halved the tomatoes. A thread of oil from a phial, two crushed leaves of basil. ‘Have you seen the pepper?’

I took the wooden mill from its case. It was filled with truffle-black grains of Tellichery. I snuffed them. That pepper-mill must be the last straw. The gods could not smile on it. A friend once told me about a dachshund who used to be led about the streets of Paris on a red leash. He wore a trim red coat and in the coat was a pocket and out of the pocket peeped a handkerchief with the dachshund’s initials. It proved more than canine flesh and blood could stand. He was set upon by a dog without a collar and bitten through the neck. I often felt for that dachshund.

The journey was decided at the last moment. I was not at all prepared for Mexico. I never expected to go to Mexico. I had spent some years in the United States and was about to return to England. I had a great longing to move, to hear another language, eat new food; to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible. I longed in short to travel. Surely there was scope in the Americas, the New World that had touched the imagination of Elizabethans. Canada? One did not think of Canada. The Argentine was too new and Brazil too far. Guatemala too modern, San Salvador too limited. Honduras too British. I chose Peru.

It filled the bill and had for me the most delirious associations. Saint Rose of Lima. Peruvian architecture: rich façades, glowing and crumbling, the colour of biscuits soaked in Romanée-Conti. These must have been illustrations, but to which book? Massine in his prime, dancing the Peruvian in Gaietés Parisiennes. He came on in black ringlets and
white satin breeches bearing a parrot cage in one hand and in the other a carpet-bag with the word
PERU
embroidered on it in beads, and everybody went mad with joy. There was also a character I identified myself with for years: ‘You may not know me under this humble disguise but I am Don Alonzo d’Alcantarra, the son of Don Pedro. One day my knock shall be heard at the gates of Lima and warn the noble youth of Peru that Don Alonzo has returned to the city of his fathers!’ I had come upon this stirring masterpiece at the age of seven and for some reason, I forget whether it was grown-up intervention or missing pages, I was not able to finish it. Meanwhile Don Alonzo ‘practised absolute immobility of his facial muscles to conceal his noble purpose from the world,’ and so did I. I took this to mean not moving anything in one’s face at all, and used to sit for what seemed a long time trying not to bat an eyelid. It was very difficult and I did not succeed.

Oh yes, Peru, decidedly Peru. I set out to tour the travel agencies with energy. They showed little, but proffered what turned out to be an extremely expensive air ticket to Lima. I could not afford it. There were no boats to Chile for the next six months. Then I sported with the idea of going to Uruguay. A friend from Montevideo who loved Italy had talked and left a sense of opera and red plush, late hours and delicious food, an impression that this city bore the burden of urbanity with something of the casual grace of Rome. The friend also talked of a freighter. The freighter did not materialise. I was not tempted by Mexico then, if anything vaguely put off by the artiness of the travel literature. At the point of total discouragement, E. M. A. – joined me in my pursuit of shopping for a country. Her ardour was tempered. E’s life is history and politics; she used to appear on Radio Forums described as Traveller and Commentator. She detests travelling, or rather she has neither aptitude nor tolerance for the mechanism of actual travel in progress.