Tramp Royale (10 page)

Under the favorable exchange martinis cost about nine cents and a pisco sour cost six cents. The pisco sour occupies in west coast South American diet the position that vitamin tablets do in ours. Pisco is a native brandy. No proof is ever shown on the bottle but it is certainly higher in alcoholic content than is whiskey in the States. I estimate that it could stand up to vodka and give away the first two punches. I tried one pisco sour and shifted back to martinis, where I knew the territory.

At the Bolivar we gathered in the purser and the second engineer and a flier from Texas and a big gringo mining operator. When the Captain arrived with a company agent, Vi and Ticky had nine men to split up between them. But the wolves in Lima are gallant, aggressive, and optimistic; Ticky complained to me presently that a stranger present was trying to pick her up. "Every time I look up he lifts his glass to me and motions with his head for me to come over," she said indignantly.

I suggested that if she refrained from looking at him she would not know that he was looking at her. But she continued to simmer. Presently she and Vi left us to find the powder room. When she returned she again had something on her mind. "This place is impossible!"

"Why? It reminds me of the Bellevue-Stratford in Philly. Seems like a pretty nice joint."

"Hmmph! Vi and I just walked through the lobby, minding our own business. At least a dozen men tried to pick us up."

"Well! Congratulations."

"It wasn't funny."

I tried to explain to her that customs varied and that any woman without an escort right at her elbow was assumed to be open to suggestions until proved otherwise. But her attention had flitted elsewhere. "Bob, there was a little Indian girl in the powder room, the maid, the attendant. I didn't have any change and Vi didn't either, so we turned out the bottoms of our purses-"

"Strike oil? Any mousetraps?"

"Don't be funny. I found a nickel and two pennies and gave them to her, feeling apologetic. But she seemed pleased and started talking excitedly and hurried away and came back and showed us what
she
had. It was an American quarter and she had shined it up like silverware. It was rather pathetic. Give me some change, dear. I want to go back and tip her properly."

"All right. But let's figure it out. You tipped her seven cents. That's one sol forty, or the price of a cocktail. Back home, would you tip a washroom attendant seventy-five cents?"

"Why, no, I'd probably tip her a quarter."

"Then did you under-tip? Or over-tip?"

Neither one of us could figure it out. It was our first tangle with a problem which worried us all around the world: whom to tip, when to tip, and how much? How to hold up the American reputation for generosity without adding to the American reputation for being blatant and wasteful suckers? We never did work out a satisfactory formula.

The entire party decided to move on to the "Club 91" for dinner, at which point I attempted to put into operation a previously prepared plan. It had long been established that Captain Lee was the world's worst check-snitcher; it was almost impossible to buy the man a drink because he would make a long arm, grab the check, and push aside anyone who attempted to pay it.

Knowing this, we party of passengers had planned for it and I had been selected to carry it out. I started with a verbal barrage in which I informed Captain Lee that we had taken a vote and decided to stick him with the check. I was very firm about it and he was very hurt, protesting that he did not mind paying his share but he thought it was a hell of a note for the rest of us to decide to clip him-he wouldn't stand for it, no, sir.

While his attention was diverted, I had obtained the check; I handed the waiter our pooled funds.

Captain Lee caught the tail end of the maneuver. With a scream of rage and a fist full of sols he straightened up to his full seven feet and attempted to reverse the matter. I got off with a slight flesh wound, but we kept him from paying the check.

On the way to dinner he kept trying to force money on me. After a while he quit but he seemed pleased about something. Later on Mr. Tupper twitted him about losing, whereupon he said, "Oh yes? Bob, look under your coat collar."

I did so, but there was nothing there. It developed that the Captain had tucked a roll of bills, two hundred sols, under my coat collar while we were crowded into a taxi-but they were gone, had fallen out. We speculated about the expression and feeling of the taxi driver or whoever it might be that found it, then forgot it, with each side feeling that it had won a moral victory.

But the next time I try to snatch a check from Captain Lee I'll wear gloves.

Club 91 is on the top floor of a skyscraper and has a feeling much like the Top o' the Mark, with broad expanses of glass giving a panorama of the wide-flung city, the Andes, and the ocean. It is very posh and has wonderful food, an exotic cuisine in no way resembling Mexican food. Nor is it international-French cooking, it is Peruvian. I don't know what else to say about it; describing dishes and flavors which are truly novel is a waste of words. But when you go to Peru, don't limit yourself to steak; there are delightful surprises in store for you. Leave room for dessert, too. They bring them around on an oversize tea wagon and let you pick by sight instead of from a menu. I don't know whether this is a kindness or not, since by that time you cannot possibly toy with more than one and the others are lost to you forever.

Dinner in South America is not the evening meal; it is a nighttime adventure. Although we went straight back to the ship it was very late when we got aboard and I rolled into my bunk, happy with the thought that the ship was sailing and I could sleep all day tomorrow.

But I learned at seven a.m. that the ship was not sailing, that loading had not been completed, and that the Captain had ordered a taxi and a guide for us. I groaned, took Dexedrine, and decided to enjoy it, reminding myself that I had come a long way and had spent more than fifty cents for the privilege.

Our guide and driver was Señor Rodolfo Gonzales Bueno, a middle-aged Indian of great size and great dignity. Perhaps his ancestry was more Spanish than Indian; if so, the Indians came out ahead. His face reminded me of that carved stone god that stares with timeless majesty out over the water gardens in the grounds of the Pan-American Building in Washington, D.C.

We made a full day of it and I was soon glad that the ship had not sailed even though my head was beginning to ache. We saw Callao first, the harbor, the naval academy, and an enormous market made up of hundreds of little stalls, crowded and colorful. I took the precaution here of leaving Ticky's purse with Mr. Gonzales as I was not anxious to start too quickly the business of dragging plunder around the world.

Then we saw old Lima, university, government buildings, presidential palace, archbishop's palace, cathedral, all impressive and all ornate in a style no longer popular. There were so many of them that I almost felt sympathy for the tourist who came charging up the steps of our own National Capitol at Washington and said to his wife, "Okay, Marge, you take the inside and I'll take the outside and we ought to be through in twenty minutes."

But in the cathedral we saw the mummy of Pizarro the Conqueror himself. There he was, in a glass coffin, a little man who could not have been very impressive alive and who must have looked like a child to the giant Inca gods. Yet he and his "thirteen friends" by treachery and deceit and casual murder brought the mighty Inca Empire to ruin.

Now he lies with sunken eyesockets staring sightlessly up, his shriveled, darkened flesh and untidy hair on display, a sight for any tourist with two-bits to tip the attendant monk to let them stare. "Ozymandias, King of Kings-" Was it worth it, pal? Are you happy now? Or are you groaning in hell for your crimes?

Odd though it seems, although his bloody record is well known and although most of the citizens of Peru are descended from the conquered rather than the conquerors, Pizarro seems to be a popular hero.

I asked to be shown slums. This was not morbid curiosity. All countries have the homes of the rich, whether they be commissars, counts, or capitalists; their homes are all beautiful, they look pretty much alike everywhere, allowing for climate and architectural styling, and you learn very little about a country from seeing them. I always look at them for the enjoyment of seeing beautiful things, but you learn more from the slums, which are not enjoyable to see.

Lima had both shanty town slums and formal, tenement slums. The shanty towns were true international architecture, the grim and pathetic structures built by people who have nothing at all and must shelter themselves with scraps and other people's junk. They were indistinguishable from the shacks of Okies in Imperial Valley twenty years ago, from the barrios of Rio, from the shanties of Singapore's waterfront. The formal tenements were mostly one-story buildings built wall to wall in long rows with narrow alleys. They reminded me of dog kennels and were even more depressing than the much less adequate shanties, for here poverty seemed static and hopeless, a permanent way of life.

Almost next door to these warrens was a palace. It had once been a private home but now belonged to the government and was used by the army. Many of the soldiers' families lived in the nearby tenements; the contrast was sharp and bitter for papa worked in (literal) marble halls, then went home when off duty to a house more suitable for pigs than for women and children.

The palace had been built by a marquis for his "beloved"- a polite Latin expression which concedes the permanence of marriage but admits that love is something else and important in its own way. The social custom of the mistress as a formal institution in Latin America is very disconcerting to
norteamericanos,
reared in a matriarchy. Except for a very few cases, mostly in Hollywood and New York, there is no group or social class in the United States parallel to what is meant by "mistress" in Latin America, and even the exceptions are not truly parallel, for a kept woman does not have the publicly recognized, customary status of a Latin mistress.

When we use the word "mistress"-which is seldom-the reference is often in the past tense and means simply that Mr. and Mrs. Jones had their honeymoon before they held their wedding, a circumstance often factual but usually known publicly only through gossip and conjecture, or known statistically through Dr. Kinsey's tedious tables. Or "mistress" may refer to an informal biological arrangement carefully concealed and usually without any specific financial arrangements for support. Neither of these cases parallels the Latin custom. A Latin American who has a mistress usually has a wife as well and will appear in public with either one of them, but not both. Each woman has a recognized place in his life and their social spheres ordinarily do not overlap.

But a mistress is not something to hide away in a back street. Her status is limited but much more privileged than is easy for a gringo to comprehend. Some years ago in a South American capital the United States ambassador gave a big party and invited all the local heavyweights and their wives. They came but most of them brought their mistresses.

The ambassador's wife was insulted and the ambassador was outraged and it almost resulted in an open international incident. Yet the mix-up was clearly a failure to understand each other's customs, since no South American would intentionally offend his host and hostess. The word should have been passed around quietly that this party was not intended to be fun; it was simply meant to be attended ritualistically-with
wives.

The marquis' "beloved" (I don't remember either of their names and it does not matter) was apparently a woman of spirit who did not accept easily the limitations of her status. She was part Indian and from the lower classes; instead of being a well-behaved and modest mistress, respectful to her "betters," she refused to play the game according to the rules they handed her. Whether or not she objected to polygamy in itself is not known, but she certainly objected to the subordinate status accorded her by custom. She went out of her way to flaunt her birth and background under the quivering noses of the Castilian aristocracy of Lima. But her marquis refused to knuckle under to social pressure, but hung on to her, even though she was obviously "impossible" in the minds of all "right thinking" people.

He certainly did well by her. The Peruvian government, although using much of the palace for military purposes, has preserved the grounds and gardens and has maintained many of the chambers as a museum of the splendors of a by-gone day. Among other things, there is a carved marble bathtub on one of the balconies, of Imperial Roman magnificence. No one seems to know now if that was its usual position; the climate of Lima is balmy enough to have permitted her to bathe outdoors if such was her whim, and the tub would be very difficult to move. In any case there is a small swimming pool in the middle of the garden and a small summer house next to it which has a slatted screen like a Venetian blind through which the pool can be seen. The old marquis is reputed to have been a bit of a voyeur; this summer house is supposed to have been a vantage point from which he could peep at her while she was swimming. Why in Ned he did not simply pull a chair up to the edge of the pool, or better yet, pull off his duds and join her nobody knows. Maybe he got more fun out of peeking.

There is a marble bust of her in the garden. She was unquestionably a beauty, fit to occupy the palace he placed her in. Now it stands as an inspiration to all women that they, too, can live in a palace if only they will use the depilatories and deodorants advertised in all the best women's magazines.

We then drove through miles of magnificently gardened, ultra-modern-style homes to the country club. We passed several of the embassies, among them the Colombian Embassy where Señor Victor Raul Haya de la Torre was at that time still a prisoner of asylum, and still was to be so for several months to come. Mr. Haya's story is well known through the newspapers and has been fully covered in his own words in
Life
magazine (3 May 1954); we will omit details, except as they throw light on the striking differences between political life as we know it and the brand practiced south of us. Mr. Haya is the leader of the APRA party of Peru, which is left of center but not communist. He was charged with attempting a coup d'état against the government, but-and this is a South American twist hard for us to follow-the charge was brought against him by a later government, which had itself come to power by overthrowing the very government Haya was charged with attempting to overthrow.