‘A parting present,’ she said, grinning at me wickedly, ‘I could not bear to think of you travelling all that way without any food.’
‘Helmuth,’ I said, as Luna went off in search of tonic water and glasses. ‘You have a wife in a million.’
‘Maybe,’ said Helmuth gloomily, ‘but she only does this for you, Gerry. She never gives me gin when I go away. She just tells me that I drink too much.’
So, standing on the station, we toasted each other. I had just finished my drink when the guard’s whistle squealed, and the train started to move. Still clutching their drinks the others ran alongside to shake my hand, and I nearly fell out of the train kissing Edna goodbye. The train gathered speed, and I saw them in a group under the dim station lights, holding up their glasses in a last toast, before they were lost to view, and I went gloomily to my compartment, carrying the remains of the gin.
The train journey was not quite as bad as I had anticipated, although, naturally, travelling on an Argentine train with forty-odd cages of assorted livestock is no picnic. My chief fear was that during the night (or day) at some station or other, they would shunt my carriage-load of animals into a siding and forget to reattach it. This awful experience had once happened to an animal-collector friend of mine in South America, and by the time he had discovered his loss and raced back to the station in a hired car, nearly all his specimens were dead. So I was determined that, whenever we stopped, night or day, I was going to be out on the platform to make sure my precious cargo was safe. This extraordinary behaviour of leaping out of my bunk in the middle of the night puzzled my sleeping companions considerably. They were three young and charming footballers, returning from Chile where they had been playing. As soon as I explained my actions to them, however, they were full of concern at the amount of sleep I was losing, and insisted on taking turns with me during the night, which they did dutifully during the rest of the trip. To them the whole process must have appeared ludicrous in the extreme, but they treated the matter with great seriousness, and helped me considerably.
Another problem was that I could only get to my animals when the train was in a station, for their van was not connected by the corridor to the rest of the train. Here the sleeping car attendant came into his own. He would warn me ten minutes before we got to a station, and tell me how long we were going to stay there. This gave me time to wend my way down the train until I reached the animal van, and, when the train pulled up, to jump out and minister to their wants.
The three carriages I had to go through to reach the animal van were the third-class parts of the train, and on the wooden benches therein was a solid mass of humanity surrounded by babies, bottles of wine, mothers-in-law, goats, chickens, pigs, baskets of fruit, and other necessities of travel. When this gay, exuberant, garlic-breathing crowd learned the reason for my curious and constant peregrinations to the van at the back, they united in their efforts to help. As soon as the train stopped they would help me out on to the platform, find the nearest water-tap for me, send their children scuttling in all directions to buy me bananas or bread or whatever commodity was needed for the animals, and then, when I had finished my chores, they would hoist me lovingly on board the slow-moving train, and make earnest inquiries as to the puma’s health, or how the birds were standing up to the heat, and was it true that I had a parrot that said ‘hijo de puta’? Then they would offer me sweetmeats, sandwiches, glasses of wine or pots of meat, show me their babies, their goats or chickens or pigs, sing songs for me, and generally treat me as one of the family. They were so charming and kind, so friendly, that when we eventually pulled slowly into the huge, echoing station at Buenos Aires, I was almost sorry the trip was over. The animals were piled into a lorry, my hand was wrung by a hundred people, and we roared off to take the creatures, all of whom had survived the journey remarkably well, to join the rest of the collection in the huge shed in the Museum grounds.
That evening, to my horror, I discovered that a good friend of mine was giving a cocktail party to celebrate my return to Buenos Aires. I hate cocktail parties, but could think of no way of refusing this one without causing offence. So, tired though we were, Sophie and I dolled up and we went. The majority of people there I had never met, and did not particularly want to, but there was the sprinkling of old friends to make it worthwhile. I was standing quietly discussing things of mutual interest with a friend of mine when I was approached by a type that I detest. It is the typical Englishman that seems, like some awful weed, to flourish best in foreign climes. This particular one I had met before, and had not liked. Now he loomed over me, wearing, as if to irritate me still further, his old school tie. He had a face empty of expression, like a badly-made death-mask, and the supercilious, drawling voice that is supposed to prove to the world that even if you have no brains you were well brought up.
‘I hear,’ he said condescendingly, ‘that you’ve just got back from Jujuy.’
‘Yes,’ I said shortly.
‘By train?’ he inquired, with a faint look of distaste.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘What sort of trip down did you have?’ he asked.
‘Very nice … very pleasant,’ I said.
‘I suppose there was a very ordinary crowd of chaps on the train,’ he said commiseratingly. I looked at him, his dough-like face, his empty eyes, and I remembered my train companions: the burly young footballers who had helped me with the night watches; the old man who had recited Martín Fierro to me until, in self-defence, I had been forced to eat some garlic too, between the thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas; the dear old fat lady whom I had bumped into and who had fallen backwards into her basket of eggs, and who refused to let me pay for the damage because, as she explained, she had not laughed so much for years. I looked at this vapid representative of my kind, and I could not resist it.
‘Yes,’ I said sorrowfully. ‘They were a very ordinary crowd of chaps. Do you know that only a few of them wore ties, and not one of them could speak English?’
Then I left him to get myself another drink. I felt I deserved it.
The Customs of the Country
When you have a large collection of animals to transport from one end of the world to the other you cannot, as a lot of people seem to think, just hoist them aboard the nearest ship and set off with a gay wave of your hand. There is slightly more to it than this. Your first problem is to find a shipping company who will agree to carry animals. Most shipping people, when you mention the words ‘animal cargo’ to them grow pale, and get vivid mental pictures of the Captain being eviscerated on the bridge by a jaguar, the First Officer being slowly crushed in the coils of some enormous snake, while the passengers are pursued from one end of the ship to the other by a host of repulsive and deadly beasts of various species. Shipping people, on the whole, seem to be under the impression you want to travel on one of their ships for the sole purpose of releasing all the creatures which you have spent six hard months collecting.
Once, however, you have surmounted this psychological hurdle, there are still many problems. There are consultations with the Chief Steward as to how much refrigerator space you can have for your meat, fish and eggs, without starving the passengers in consequence; the Chief Officer and the Bosun have to be consulted on where and how your cages are to be stacked, and how they are to be secured for rough weather, and how many ship’s tarpaulins you can borrow. Then you pay a formal call on the Captain and, generally over a gin, you tell him (almost with tears in your eyes) you will be so little trouble aboard that he won’t even notice you are there – a statement which neither he nor you believe. But, most important of all, you generally have to have your collection ready for embarkation a good ten days or so before the ship is scheduled to leave, for a number of things may happen in some ports that will put the sailing date forward, or, more irritatingly, backward, and you have to be on the spot to receive your orders. If there is something like a series of dock strikes to delay a ship, you may be sitting round kicking
your heels for a month or more, while your animals’ appetites appear to increase in direct proportion to your dwindling finances. The end of a trip is, then, the most harrowing, frustrating, tiring and frightening part. When people ask me about the ‘dangers’ of my trips I am always tempted to say that the ‘dangers’ of the forest pale into insignificance as compared with the dangers of being stranded in a remote part of the world with a collection of a hundred and fifty animals to feed, and your money running out.
However, we had now, it seemed, surmounted all these obstacles. A ship had been procured, consultations with the people on board had been satisfactory, food for the animals had been ordered, and everything appeared to be running smoothly. It was at this precise juncture that Juanita, the baby peccary, decided to liven up life for us by catching pneumonia.
The animals, as I have said, were now in a huge shed in the Museum grounds, which had no heating. While this did not appear to worry any of the other animals unduly (although it was the beginning of the Argentine winter and getting progressively colder) Juanita decided to be different. Without so much as a preliminary cough to warn us, Juanita succumbed. In the morning she was full of beans, and devoured her food avidly; in the evening, when we went to cover the animals for the night, she looked decidedly queer. She was, for one thing, leaning against the side of her box as if for support, her eyes half-closed, her breathing rapid and rattling in her throat. Hastily I opened the door of the cage and called her. She made a tremendous effort, stood upright shakily, tottered out of the cage and collapsed into my arms. It was in the best cinematic tradition, but rather frightening. As I held her I could hear her breath wheezing and bubbling in her tiny chest, and her body lay in my arms limp and cold.
In order to husband our rapidly decreasing money supplies two friends in Buenos Aires had rallied round and allowed Sophie and me to stay in their respective flats, in order to save on hotel bills. So, while Sophie was ensconced in the flat of Blondie Maitland-Harriot, I was occupying a camp-bed in the flat of one David Jones. At the moment when I discovered Juanita’s condition David was with me. As I wrapped her up in my coat I did some rapid thinking. The animal had to have warmth, and plenty of it. But I knew we could not provide it in that great tin barn, even if we lit a bonfire like the Great Fire of London. Blondie already had a sick parrot of mine meditatively chewing the wallpaper off the bathroom in her flat, and I felt it was really carrying friendship too far to ask if I could introduce a peccary as well into her beautifully appointed flat. David had now returned at the double from the Land-Rover whence he had gone to get a blanket to wrap the pig in. In one hand he was clasping a half-bottle of brandy.
‘This any good?’ he inquired, as I swaddled Juanita in the blanket.
‘Yes, wonderful. Look, heat a drop of milk on the spirit stove and mix a teaspoonful of brandy with it, will you?’
While David did this, Juanita, almost invisible in her cocoon of blanket and coat, coughed alarmingly. Eventually, the brandy and milk were ready, and I managed to get two spoonfuls down her throat, though it was a hard job, for she was almost unconscious.
‘Anything else we can do?’ said David hopefully, for, like me, he had grown tremendously fond of the little pig.
‘Yes, she’s got to have a whacking great shot of penicillin and as much warmth and fresh air as she can get.’
I looked at him hopefully.
‘Let’s take her back to the flat,’ said David, as I had hoped he would. We wasted no more time. The Land-Rover sped through the rain-glistening streets at a dangerous pace, and how we arrived at the flat intact was a miracle. While I hurried upstairs with Juanita, David rushed round to Blondie’s flat, for there Sophie had our medicine chest with the penicillin and the hypodermic syringes.
I laid the by now completely unconscious Juanita on David’s sofa, and, although the flat was warm with the central heating, I turned on the electric fire as well, and then opened all the windows that would not create draughts. David was back in an incredibly short space of time, and rapidly we boiled the hypodermic and then I gave Juanita the biggest dose of penicillin I dared. It was, almost, kill or cure, for I had never used penicillin on a peccary before, and for all I knew they might be allergic to it. Then, for an hour, we sat and watched her. At the end of that time I persuaded myself that her breathing was a little easier, but she was still unconscious and I knew she was a very long way from recovery.
‘Look,’ said David, when I had listened to Juanita’s chest for the fourteen-hundredth time, ‘are we doing any good, just sitting here looking at her?’
‘No,’ I said reluctantly, ‘I don’t think we’ll really see any change for about three or four hours, if then. She’s right out at the moment, but I think the brandy has a certain amount to do with that.’
‘Well,’ said David practically, ‘let’s go and get something to eat at Olly’s. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. We needn’t be more than three-quarters of an hour.’
‘O.K.,’ I said reluctantly, ‘I suppose you’re right.’
So, having made sure that Juanita was comfortable and that the electric fire could not set fire to her blankets, we drove down to Olly’s Music Bar in 25 de Mayo, which is a street that runs along what used to be the old waterfront of Buenos Aires. It is a street lined with tiny clubs, some of which have the most delightful names like ‘My Desire’, ‘The Blue Moon Hall of Beauties’, and, perhaps slightly more mysteriously, ‘Joe’s Terrific Display’.
It was not the sort of street a respectable man would be seen in, but I had long ceased to worry about respectability. With my various friends we had visited most of these tiny, dark, smoky bars, and drunk drinks of minute size and colossal price, and watched the female ‘hostesses’ at their age-old work. But, of all the bars, the one we liked best was Olly’s Music Bar, and we always made this our port of call. There were many reasons for liking Olly’s. Firstly, was the walnut-wrinkled Olly himself and his lovely wife. Secondly, Olly not only gave you fair measure in your glass, but frequently stood you a drink himself. Thirdly, his bar was well-lit, so that you could actually see your companions; in the other bars you would have had to be a bat or an owl to observe clearly. Fourthly, his hostesses were not allowed to irritate you by constantly suggesting you bought them drinks, and fifthly, there was a brother and sister with a guitar who sang and played delightfully. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I have seen the hostesses at Olly’s, when their night’s work was done, kiss Olly and his wife goodnight as tenderly as if they had been the girls’ parents.
So David and I made our way down the stairs into Olly’s, and were greeted with delight by Olly and his wife. The reason for our depression being explained the whole bar was full of commiseration; Olly stood us both a large vodka, and the hostesses gathered round to tell us how they were sure Juanita would get well, and generally tried to cheer us up. But, as we stood there eating hot sausages and sandwiches and consuming vodka, not even the gay carnavalitos the brother and sister played and sang specially for us could cure my depression. I felt sure that Juanita was going to die, and I had grown absurdly fond of the little creature. Eventually, when we had eaten and drunk, we said goodbye and climbed the steps that led to the road.
‘Come tomorrow and tell us how the animal is,’ called Olly.
‘Si, si,’ said the hostesses, like a Greek chorus, ‘come tomorrow and tell us how the pobrecíta is.’
By the time we had got back to David’s flat I was convinced that we should find Juanita dead. When we went into the living-room I gazed at the pile of blankets on the sofa, and had to force myself to go and look. I lifted one corner of the blanket gently and a twinkling dark eye gazed up at me lovingly, while a pink plunger-shaped nose wiffled, and a faint, very faint, grunt of pleasure came from the invalid.
‘Good God, she’s better,’ said David incredulously.
‘A bit,’ I said cautiously. ‘She’s not out of danger yet, but I think there’s a bit of hope.’
; As if to second this Juanita gave another grunt.
In order to make sure that Juanita did not kick off her blanket during the night and make her condition worse I took her to bed with me on the sofa. She lay very quietly across my chest and slept deeply. Though her breathing was still wheezy it had lost that awful rasping sound which you could hear with each breath she took to begin with. I was awoken the following morning by a cold, rubbery nose being pushed into my eye, and hearing Juanita’s wheezy grunts of greeting. I unwrapped her and saw she was a different animal. Her eyes were bright, her temperature was normal, her breathing was still wheezy, but much more even, and, best of all, she even stood up for a brief, wobbly moment. From then she never looked back. She got better by leaps and bounds, but the better she felt the worse patient she made. As soon as she could walk without falling over every two steps, she insisted on spending the day trotting about the room, and was most indignant because I made her wear a small blanket, safety-pinned under her chin, like a cloak. She ate like a horse, and we showered delicacies on her. But it was during the nights that I found her particularly trying. She thought this business of sleeping with me a terrific idea, and, flattering though this was, I did not agree. We seemed to have different ideas about the purposes for which one went to bed. I went in order to sleep, while Juanita thought it was the best time of the day for a glorious romp. A baby peccary’s tusks and hooves are extremely sharp, and their noses are hard, rubbery and moist, and to have all these three weapons applied to one’s anatomy when one is trying to drift off into a peaceful sleep is trying, to put it mildly. Sometimes she would do a sort of porcine tango with her sharp hooves along my stomach and chest, and at other times she would simply chase her tail round and round, until I began to feel like the unfortunate victim in The Pit and the Pendulum. She would occasionally break off her little dance in order to come and stick her wet nose into my eye, to see how I was enjoying it. At other times she would become obsessed with the idea that I had, concealed about my person somewhere, a rare delicacy. It may have been truffles for all I know, but whatever it was she could make a thorough search with nose, tusks and hooves, grunting shrilly and peevishly when she couldn’t find anything. Round about three a.m. she would sink into a deep, untroubled sleep. Then, at five-thirty, she would take a quick gallop up and down my body to make sure I woke up in good shape. This lasted for four soul-searing nights, until I felt she was sufficiently recovered, and then I banished her to a box at night, to her intense and vocal indignation.