Domestic arrangements for guerrillas

The night bus brought me from Buenos Aires to Cordoba. The buses are to be admired, and in a country where the flights are expensive and the trains, apparently, almost completely non-functional, that’s a good thing. The terminal was a bit like an airport plus diesel fumes, with departure lounges, coin-operated TVs, security checks and X-rays for the bags. I didn’t get the X-ray treatment, so Cordoba is presumably terrorist-free at the moment. The bus was a sleek double decker with seats that reclined almost horizontal and a board that came up to support your legs so it really is almost like being in a bed. All this with the cheapest ticket, $25 to go 700km. I must try ‘ejecutivo’ class next time – it has to be truly luxuriant. My travelling companion was yet another fluent English speaker, a criminal lawyer from Cordoba just returning from a trip to Europe. We talked for an hour, after which she more or less passed out, having flown from Madrid the previous night and having been in Spain, Germany and Belgium in the previous week. And I thought it was only me that attempted such madness. That left me with the screening of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, which I watched for a while (the Argies take their foreign films with subtitles – another thing to like about them) until someone asked for the sound to be turned down. I didn’t object. I woke up as we pulled into Cordoba bang on time at 8am, and having made a date to meet Fernanda on Sunday (today), headed off to find somewhere to sleep some more.

Cordoba is the second largest city, with 1.5 million, 10 per cent of whom are students at its nine universities, but after BA it feels like a village. It also feels like South America, unlike BA which was more or less like Europe. There are squat eighteenth century churches with peeling pink paint and rotund belfries decorated with cornices and scrolls, and low ceilinged cantinas with whitewashed walls. There’s much less of the beaux arts and art nouveau, and more of the neoclassical and mission architecture. It also feels quite a bit safer.The city was capital of Argentina before BA came along, and boasts the oldest university on the continent, dating from 1621.

Yesterday I took a ride out to Alta Gracia, about an hour away, the boyhood home of Che Guevara. You can visit the house where he lived, more or less, from 1932 to 1943. It’s a modest but pleasant bungalow in a tranquil little town on the edge of the sierras, and I can’t imagine any place less conducive to revolutionary fervour, although the museum helpfully mentions that there were rich and poor in the town, and that the young Ernesto sometimes liked to play cowboys and Indians with his friends. There wasn’t a whole lot more by way of explanation, but there were a few telling details. The Guevaras moved there when he was four in the hope that it would be good for his pronounced asthma. It was – he apparently was a keen golfer and football player, and when he finished school went on a 4000km bike ride around Argentina. But in a video one of his schoolfriends theorises that Che’s asthma was brought on by his parents’ arguments, and there is a sad reminiscence by the family’s maid, who remembers sitting up with Che during his attacks - he read Zola and Verne and Anatole France as he struggled to breathe - because his parents slept all day and were out all night. They lived in four different places in Alta Gracia before moving to Cordoba, after which Che went to BA to study medicine. And then he started on his travels, which more or less never stopped. There is one photo of him before he left Cuba, sitting on a sofa in his fatigues with his wife and four young children, looking thoroughly miserable. Shortly afterwards he headed for the Congo in a ridiculous disguise to serve as a military adviser. The man clearly could not abide domesticity. There is another photo where he looks much happier, lying in a camp bed, smoking a cigar and reading Goethe. By the time he was killed in a schoolhouse in Bolivia (there is a tile from its roof in the museum), I suspect he had come to the end of the line. Like Michael Jackson, there was only one place left for him to go. Other than this there is another museum, the house of the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (never heard of him but apparently he’s significant) and a World Heritage-listed Jesuit estancia which was a perfectly kempt little idyll of clipped lawns, scrubbed cells and period furniture. Not bad for a town of 10,000.

I won’t go on about Buenos Aires too much as that seems long ago now. But a couple of highlights included a visit to the annual agricultural show at La Rural, which included several of the biggest bulls I’ve ever seen, which were entirely white and amenable to being paraded around the showground. I noticed that the press photographers had all been given red vests, whether in evil intent or not I do not know. One day I went out to Tigre with Ana, the owner of the guest house, and Monika and Katerina, the Austro-German students who were also staying there, a very mature and thoughtful pair. Tigre is a town on the edge of a Delta on the River Plata, and we roared out there in Ana’s ancient VW wagon. I commented on the number of old Ford Falcons on the road, and she told me that it was a popular model until it was used as a police car during the dictatorship. The police used to drive round with dissidents in the boot until they suffocated. Urgh. Tigre is beautiful – there are hundreds of forested islands in the delta, which is named after some kind of small puma which used to frequent it. We didn’t take a boat trip, there wasn’t time, but wandered around the town, which has a feeling of moneyed leisure about it. There is a profusion of rowing clubs, including an English one which looks like an Oxford college, and an Italian one which looks like a Venice palazzo. Everyone’s favourite, though, was the art museum, which has been converted from an early twentieth century casino, built in the style of a chateau.

I’ve just noticed that I’m sitting here in my t-shirt, which is a good sign. Cordoba is sunny and pleasant during the day, and chilly at night. It doesn’t have the piercing wind of BA,which comes straight off the river. My next stop is Salta, close to a thousand kilometres north of here, which is supposed to be warm in spite of being in the foothills of the Andes.

A quick word on the restaurants here before I go. The waitrons believe in the back-to-basics school of service. The first thing they will ask you after you’ve sat down is what you want. If you ask for a menu one will be produced, but it seems to be regarded as a bit of an unnecessary affectation. Last night I asked for a beer and was not asked what kind – a Budweiser was produced and it was up to me to insist on something local. When it comes to paying the bill, you just ask the waiter how much and they will tell you. You hand over the cash and they hand over the change. Finito. Not that any of this bothers me in the slightest, in fact I appreciate the minimum of time wasting on the way to delivering the meal, which is inevitably wonderful. If in doubt (which I usually am when presented with the menu) I order a steak. This is produced, unadorned, on a plate which is usually barely big enough to contain it. No garnish, no sauce, nothing. The meat is always so tender and so perfectly seasoned and marinated that it doesn’t need anything – not even salt and pepper. The other staple is pizza, which is a little thick and cheese-laden for my taste, but I force it down. I had one the other night which I could barely finish (though finish it I did) for four dollars. And then there are the cake shops… but enough.