The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [29]
“What do you mean?”
“The water’s too shallow. They used to have to leave the big boats really far out and bring the stuff in in little boats pulled by mules, totally inefficient. Then they invited this engineer guy Bateman over from England—I mean, really, why couldn’t these guys think for themselves?—but the yellow fever epidemic hit and he chickened out. Those morons. Well, at least they finally decided to make it look half decent.”
I looked at her. “You have a lot of information in your head.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you poorly instructed foreigners are always so impressed with us Argentines knowing a thing or two.”
We sipped our drinks.
“Sometimes I feel like you’re colonizing my brain,” I said.
She looked at me. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s as if you’re trying to control me, in some sort of post-colonial gesture of revenge. And you’re doing a good job.”
She laughed. “I guess you’re not as dumb as you look.”
Later we were walking back to the city. Between the two places, the polished renovated port and the city, was another of those uncertain zones, deserted, maybe a remnant of the seedy port—the pavement was crumbling, grass grew up in tufts. Through it ran a gleaming set of train tracks.
As we were nearing, a cargo train passed, just a few wagons, carrying what looked like coal. Or was it just bricks and rubble? It stopped, then was going very slowly. A young man looked out. All we could see was his dark face. He saw us.
“Hey,” he yelled softly. “Hey, girls, come along.”
We looked at each other, stalled. Should we go? We began to run toward him. I was ahead, nearing the train wagon. I almost leaped. “Wait,” Leonarda called. I stopped.
Part II
nine
Argentine Lucio Mansilla wrote about his days in Paris in 1851: “The Marquise, who was ‘charming’ and who undoubtedly found me appetizing, well, I was very pretty at the age of eighteen, invited me to dinner and organized a party to show me off. When the meal was over, there was a reception and after the introductions I heard ‘the beautiful ladies’ saying: ‘How handsome he must look with his feathers.’ Of course in hearing this compliment, I preened, ‘je posais,’ an expression that doesn’t translate well, but at the same time I said inside myself,‘What beasts these French are!’”
The foreigners in Buenos Aires invite the upper-tier Argentines to theme parties, tea parties or Thursday-night wine parties. These are foreigners with money. They have tasteful apartments, on Arroyo, in Recoleta. The Argentines go, playing their role, as upper-tier Argentines, Third World aristocrats. They pose, they’re amusing, and utterly amenable, mixing with the foreigners, speaking different languages. Unless you were watching closely and were suspicious—and most foreigners aren’t—you would never catch the glances shot between them. But already, among the Argentines, in the paneled elevator downward, the mockery begins.
While the foreigner, much as he wants to be liked, also feels somewhere deep inside that he’s really done the Argentines a favor, by being here in this country at all, and then associating with them, inviting them to his home, the Argentine is overly conscious of the foreigner’s absurdity. Feeling, despite himself and solely for the amorphous quality of being foreign, that the foreigner is superior, he at the same time finds the foreigner vulgar, ignorant, poorly instructed, even lacking physical harmony. The woman’s head is too big. The German has the rabbit features of the inbred. A few satiric comments exchanged, the Argentines walk away down the evening street with their beauty intact, this natural beauty that springs up effortlessly, mysteriously, generation after generation, according