The Longest Silence (27 page)

But then I hooked another fish, a hard-running ocean-bright fish, and this one, after several wonderful leaps, ended up in Wesley’s net, a big deep-hanging silver arc. With a wide smile that confirmed my absolution, Wesley said, “A fresh one, right from the garden!”

We bounced along the river toward camp, tall ferns thrust through the gunwales to announce our fish. When we landed, Wesley shook my hand and said he’d see me in the morning. “You can’t leave us now,” he told me. “We’re well acquainted from fighting the salmon together!”

I headed back up through the banks of wild strawberries considering a nap, the river poems of Michael Drayton, considering the notion that no one owed me anything.

A
BOUT THE TIME
the Administration decided that the problem with our economy was all these welfare recipients, I decided it was a sovereign time to go trout fishing in Argentina. The long flight south was half empty, and in order to avoid the in-flight movie, I tried to read the pile of magazines I’d bought at the airport which, whatever their subject, had a movie star on the cover and inside culture, politics, and sports, in pellet form. Reaching into my “hospitality kit” past the little elastic stockings and mouthwash, I produced the eyeshade which, pulled over my head, must have made me look, like the other passengers, as though I was facing a firing squad. Contemplating the rivers that drain the Andes—the Andes!—I quickly slipped off into a pleasant sleep while my feet swelled and my body dehydrated without me, the elastic of the eyeshade embedded in my hair and the soundless film, a stylish getaway item with perky bankables, played on. On a night flight, much is left in the form of the long vapor trails that follow the aircraft in the darkness: imperfect dreams, vanished childhoods, the residue of souls. The envoy, the coke whore, and the basketball player in the Japanese league alike fly from country to country on this basis alone, sharing an armrest, taking only that portion of the overhead bins to which they are really entitled.

Some time later I tottered into the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires and in a kind of twilight zone turned on the television set and watched a
documentary about a black rock ’n’ roll band from Oakland, I think. I tuned in too late to get the name of the band but dully marveled at their apocalyptic music and hyper-athletic antics. Halfway through this thing, the band did an extended “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” with my contemporaries, the Rolling Stones. I looked on in startled gloom as a rickety and wooden Keith Richards tried to stay out of the way of these rocketing negroes. Jagger showed less mother wit in attempting to hold his own with the lead singer, who filled the air around him with chaotic energy. After singing his part of the chorus, Jagger tried to steal away in his patented “Little Red Rooster” strut, yet managed only a melancholy impression of a formaldehyde-injected yard chicken on its very last legs. I watched with subdued dread as Mick and the gang tried to find someplace on the stage to be safe from these exploding rhythm meatballs from California. I knew I was jet-lagged, but it seemed I was witnessing Whitey eat dust as the Third World thundered past. I wondered if this was behind the Administration’s fear of welfare recipients, the sense that by hoarding all the items on the Keynesian wish list, we had let Others make off with the things that actually mattered.

By the time I got to the Plaza San Martin, I had my feet under me but was in something of a cloud. Assailed by fishing memories, I sat on a park bench near the memorial to the fallen of the Falklands War, listening to a local fundamentalist harangue the crowd as he walked back and forth with his Bible open in one hand, pulling the collar of his boiled shirt away from his sweating neck with the other. I hadn’t known they had guys like him down here. Squads of vivid, provocative females were pouring into the park for a sort of evening paseo. Buenos Aires is known for this, but still it was a shock. I’d flown all night long, napped at the plaza, made a late-afternoon visit to the Basilica de Santissimo Sacramento to think about several people who are gone, and now I dazedly occupied a park bench while this bone-rattling parade of Argentine women passed before me and briefly displaced my preoccupation with sea-run brown trout at the foot of the southernmost Andes where I would be tomorrow. What sort of man would these beauties of the Southern Cross consort with? Well, though I’d been
enveloped by their colognes as I made my way down the sidewalk, smirking at their Versace knockoffs, the men were more than presentable, and no middle-aged trouter from the States was going to change the balance of power by merely showing up in the plaza. I had a better chance of snagging my waders than a comely dinner companion, and so I returned to my room and slept quietly with my fly rods until it was time to head back to the airport for the trip to Tierra del Fuego.

The Argentines have a refreshing lack of reverence for the wonders of modern transportation and wandered the aisle of the 727 with rowdy enthusiasm. We stopped at Río Gallegos, the scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s last bank robbery, then at my destination, Ciudad Río Grande. Each time the plane touched down, the Argentines leapt to their feet and, braced in the lurching aisle, flung open the overhead bins in a cascade of sweaters, wine bottles, birdcages, groceries, diapers, and Styrofoam coolers. When I got off the plane and looked around, I thought I was home in Montana as flakes of sparse snow blew across the sere landscape.

I went out to fish that night, bounding along the roads of Estancia José Menendez in a Russian Lada. At the very point I meant to remark on the similarity of this landscape to my backyard to Mike Leach, my Anglo-Argentine guide, a flight of flamingos lifted up from the pasture, an anomaly like Mike Tyson’s voice, and wheeled off to the south. I had never seen such bird life and none of it familiar: Magellan geese, ashy-headed geese, strong-flying creamy-breasted ibises, Southern fulmars and other antipodean seabirds, silver teal, the carnivorous caracaras, numerous falcons, including the aplomados I saw so rarely, big night herons. Patagonian foxes the size of cats looked on modestly from the weeds; and, stratospherically high overhead, Andean condors with their twelve-foot wingspreads trained their mystical telemetry on the ancient plain. Looking across these superb distances to the Andes beyond—a series of almost whimsically odd peaks—it was hard to avoid feeling that the greatest thing man can do for land is to stay off it.

As a sop to the visiting Yanqui, my guide gave me the latest synonyms
for “vagina,” always handy in the outback. I began to fish. What, ho! I caught a nice big sea trout and went back to the estancia for a midnight supper. Even the wild wind of Tierra del Fuego had ceased to blow. My companions were companionable and Maria José, my cheerful hostess, told me I was a fine fellow to catch a sea-run fish on my first evening. As I lit into roasts and puddings, I was too absorbed to imagine that my luck might already have run out. I was happy to be dining in the middle of the night, contemplating my siesta after the next morning’s fishing. We were out of phone and radio contact and I lolled in this vacuum of accountability.

The next morning I was fishing another stretch of the Río Grande, which has a unique quality: it is a prairie river that runs to the sea. The sloughing banks and undercut meanders would be familiar to any western angler, but the seagulls walking its banks and the mighty sea-run trout in its shadowy corners give it a thrilling strangeness. We fished it with shooting heads and the demanding T-300 lines. As yet, the wind was eerily quiet, not a hint of the forty-knot gales that make you rip your underwear trying to cast into it. I cast for four or five hours without a sign of anything and rode back for lunch and an afternoon nap. I wondered if I had appreciated that fish the night before as I should have. The water temperature had dropped into the thirties and fishing had slowed down, though a few fish had been caught elsewhere.

As I retired, several of my Argentine companions, out of the earshot of the peerless Maria José, made sly references to “La Manuela,” the local equivalent of Miss Palm. I told them of a friend so in love with La Manuela that he bought her a ring, which he showed everyone and which looked suspiciously like his high school class ring, on his own hand of course. They held up magazine photographs of Argentine bathing beauties at Punta del Este. No, no, I protested, slipping off to my room with a slim volume of Belgian love sonnets. There I stewed about the fishing for a minute before falling asleep.

A few hours later, it was again time to fish. We went to a remote stretch of the river this time, and though the wind stayed down and fish rolled along the grassy bank with heavy surges, none approached my fly. I cast inches from the bank, limiting myself to
a single false-cast and covering the water with the care of man laying the last roll of linoleum on earth. A cold, full moon rose above the Andes. “Perhaps, with this moon,” said my guide and companion Federico, “they are doing their eating in the middle of the night.” I had been casting a four-hundred-grain leadcore for five hours and should have been looking forward to my midnight supper; but I felt rather sunk.

All the jokes at the dinner table, particularly those told by a fellow who caught two fish, were stupid. The next windless day, after eight or nine hours of casting on either side of the siesta and no fish, Maria José remarked that soon my luck must change. I looked at my meal and wondered how people could eat at such a time. The others didn’t think the fishing was so bad. Actually, one did. He was having a spell and had asked God to get him out of it. More to the point, he sat down on the bank and told himself to grow up. I thought of the opening of
The Old Man and the Sea
, where the old man is “definitely salao.” I remembered a long bad spell on the Dean River in British Columbia. You just keep casting day after day until your hand swells up. That’s the only way out. If you’re a fisherman, you can’t just leave. The other hard luck case told me he just said to himself, “Look, this is crazy. It’s not the end of the world.”

By that midnight meal I was a vampire pariah of failure, flinging my tackle and waders into my room. Into the vast allure of Maria José I ventured the sentiment,
“Soy un perro infermo!”
I am a sick dog! In years past I might’ve sucked down the cordials for the pain but now had to content myself with the Belgian couplets and the rising wind to rattle my shutters.

By morning the wind had become a gale, with birds hurtling overhead and grass flattened on the wild pastures. A gaucho went past with his horse and a little dog, all three leaning into the wind. A guanaco appeared beyond a tempting bend of river, a sort of primitive creature that resembles a small camel. With his melodious whinny he seemed a veritable modern novelist. As I watched his splay-footed retreat over the land of the forgotten monster Patagon, a maledroit wobble of his neck in retreat, I thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The morning ended without a fish.

My siesta was a torment. I actually felt sick. I thought I was throwing strikes but it wasn’t working. I was now thinking only of escape, perhaps to the seafood cafes in Buenos Aires. No Belgian couplets for me. I stared at the ceiling of my room and tried to imagine what I had in mind in four decades of throwing a fly line, and counted up how I’d lied to myself about it not really mattering if you actually caught a fish. But these were such great fish, the biggest brown trout in the world. It was a tormenting paradox.

That night I fished the Polo pool with Kevin. He was a guide but first he was a fisherman. He said, “It happens when it happens.” As the eventless evening wore on he showed me the lies, the green bank, the fallen bank, the beaver lodge, the gravel bar. It was a readable run. I couldn’t daydream, couldn’t cast automatically. Each one had to be placed, and the water covered had to be continuous and steady. I released myself into my bad luck and felt a kind of liberating indifference. The moon started to come up and I watched the line straighten on the water. Mend, drift, retrieve, cast again. The full moon rose again. The line flowed across the pool, angle to angle, an easy slide.

And then it stopped. The curve in the line straightened and I hooked a fish, a big fish. The long rod bowed deeply and then the fish soared into the air, wild and rattling in the silver light of the moon, then fell back into the water. I backed up onto my bank and fought the fish downstream. Kevin got in the river with the net but couldn’t see the fish. I was trying to tell him where it was when another fish jumped out in the darkness, and Kevin started toward it until I persuaded him that my fish was coming down the bar. Kevin put a flashlight in his mouth and illuminated a circle of black water in front of him. Suddenly the fish was there, its spotted back breaking the surface, then up showering streamers of silver from the mesh of the net. I leapt like a guanaco off the riverbank and danced Kevin around the shallows. “I’m a human!” I shouted. When I held the fish in the water, the hook simply fell from its mouth. He was a big male, over eighteen pounds, the biggest trout I had ever caught, to put it mildly. I stood in the river for a long while, holding him into the current and feeling the increasing strength in a kicking tail I could barely encompass with my
grip. To the north, the Aurora Austral raised a curtain of fire in the cold sky. My trout kicked free and continued his journey to the Andes.