The Writer and the World (57 page)

And there was Dodge’s interest in ocean property. “All my life I wanted to own ocean property. There’s no ocean in Nebraska. Does that mean anything to you? No ocean in Oklahoma. There’s an Atlantic Ocean, there’s a Pacific Ocean. In between there’s no ocean. In my commercial life anyone that’s owned ocean property had it made.”

There was a stripped cannery to be seen, the last. We drove there in his Cadillac.

“It’s air-conditioned,” he said, as I fumbled with the car window.

It was almost dark in the cannery building; the corrugated-iron roof looked higher inside. Small motors with fresh grey paint on their casings covered half the concrete floor. On the other side, no longer in sequence, under polythene, were the big, complicated machines. Moving lightly, he undraped, touched, felt, explained. Here, still looking new after twenty idle years, were the “tractor-treads” into which the girls—now scattered, and always women—dropped the sardines one by one, for hours; here was the sardine gut-sucker; here were metal arms so finely balanced that only full cans would depress them to that track which led to the capping machine.

“There’s about eighty thousand dollars here,” Dodge said. “I live this machinery. Machinery isn’t difficult if you
live
it.”

It was time for a drink. Dodge himself, after many years of whisky, eighteen to twenty shots a day, now drinks only orange juice and Seven-Up. We went to the Outrigger. It was on the sea side of a converted cannery, past gift-shops whose walls dripped pink bougainvillaea. Three gas jets on tall metal poles flared at the entrance. A spotlight picked out rocks in the sea. We entered a carpeted green grotto, of Polynesian atmosphere, with a waterfall, and stepped out into openness: the old cannery pier, carpeted, re-timbered and glassed-in. We were on water, in the middle of the bay, the lights of Seaside and Monterey curving far to the right. After the desolation of the Row, the beauty of rock and water was abrupt. It was the future.

“The square-foot value of the property will be many times greater than when Steinbeck was here,” Dodge said. He pointed to where a basket-like metal frame rose out of the sea. “The old hopper. That’s
where they unloaded the fish. They were pumped in through a pipe into the cannery.”

From the high-rise, resort future of Cannery Row Dodge has withdrawn. For two million dollars, paid in cash, he and his associates have sold out to a San Francisco millionaire. “He is seventy-five, but he has a different idea of his life than I have of mine.” Dodge feels he has had a full business life; even while on the Row he went back into fruit, where he had failed thirty years before, and “made a lot there, a lot.” Dodge, who has no children of his own, is interested now in educating the children of his relatives and friends. He would like to support a hospital or some kind of research; but he is concerned to make his money work. “You don’t get the true value of your dollar with a foundation. You are just paying the salaries of the top men.”

Later, driving down the Row back to the centre of Monterey, he slowed down beside an empty, fenced-in lot. “Frank Raiter’s place. A real Cannery Row character. Over eighty, worth several millions. His cannery burned down two years ago. But every morning he comes here and sits in his—not a Cadillac, the one next to a Cadillac, I forget—and reads the
Wall Street Journal
for a couple of hours.”

The Row bent and straightened again. It was just here that Doc Ricketts died in 1948—the scene under glass in Ring’s café. Dodge talked about Steinbeck. He never met him; he spoke to him once, on the transatlantic telephone, to get permission to use his name for the Steinbeck Theatre.

“He hurt California terribly. I like
Tortilla Flat
, I like
Cannery Row.
I know those paisanos without knowing them, if you know what I mean. But he wrote
The Grapes of Wrath.
I’ve no background of being able to say this book’s better than that one, but it hurt me to read
The Grapes.
It wasn’t factual enough. You know what an Okie is? They moved here in
hordes.
Thousands. Thousands a
day.
I was making five to six dollars an hour, packing fruit. When they came they worked for fifteen cents, twenty cents. Fifty cents a day. Any amount a day. And I was out of a job. We had problems in 1932. They came and compounded our problems. But Steinbeck wrote
The Grapes.
It’s something that people look at us as, as Californians. And he sold a lot of books. You can’t assess the damage.”

1970

O
UTLINE
it like a story by Borges.

The dictator is overthrown and more than half the people rejoice. The dictator had filled the jails and emptied the treasury. Like many dictators, he hadn’t begun badly. He had wanted to make his country great. But he wasn’t himself a great man; and perhaps the country couldn’t be made great. Seventeen years pass. The country is still without great men; the treasury is still empty; and the people are on the verge of despair. They begin to remember that the dictator had a vision of the country’s greatness, and that he was a strong man; they begin to remember that he had given much to the poor. The dictator is in exile. The people begin to agitate for his return. The dictator is now very old. But the people also remember the dictator’s wife. She loved the poor and hated the rich, and she was young and beautiful. So she has remained, because she died young, in the middle of the dictatorship. And, miraculously, her body has not decomposed.

“That,” Borges said, “is a story I could
never
write.”

But at seventy-six, and after seventeen years of proscription and exile, Juan Perón, from the Madrid suburb known as the Iron Gate, dictates peace terms to the military regime of Argentina. In 1943, as an army colonel preaching a fierce nationalism, Perón became a power in Argentina; and from 1946 to 1955, through two election victories, he ruled as dictator. His wife Eva held no official position, but she ruled with Perón until 1952. In that year she died. She was expensively embalmed, and now her corpse is with Perón at the Iron Gate.

In 1956, just one year after his overthrow by the army, Perón wrote from Panama, “My anxiety was that some clever man would have taken
over.” Now, after eight presidents, six of them military men, Argentina is in a state of crisis that no Argentine can fully explain. The mighty country, as big as India and with a population of twenty-three million, rich in cattle and grain, Patagonian oil, and all the mineral wealth of the Andes, inexplicably drifts. Everyone is disaffected. And suddenly nearly everyone is Peronist. Not only the workers, on whom in the early days Perón showered largesse, but Marxists and even the middle-class young, whose parents remember Perón as a tyrant, torturer and thief.

The peso has gone to hell: from 5 to the dollar in 1947, to 16 in 1949, 250 in 1966, 400 in 1970, 420 in June last year, 960 in April this year, 1,100 in May. Inflation, which has been running at a steady 25 per cent since the Perón days, has now jumped to 60 per cent. The banks are offering 24 per cent interest. Inflation, when it reaches this stage of takeoff, is good only for the fire insurance business. Premiums rise and claims fall. When prices gallop away week by week, fires somehow do not often get started.

For everyone else it is a nightmare. It is almost impossible to put together capital; and even then, if you are thinking of buying a flat, a delay of a week can cost you two or three hundred U.S. dollars (many business people prefer to deal in dollars). Salaries, prices, the exchange rate: everyone talks money, everyone who can afford it buys dollars on the black market. And soon even the visitor is touched by the hysteria. In two months a hotel room rises from 7,000 pesos to 9,000, a tin of tobacco from 630 to 820. Money has to be changed in small amounts; the market has to be watched. The peso drops one day to 1,250 to the dollar. Is this a freak, or the beginning of a new decline? To hesitate that day was to lose: the peso bounced back to 1,100. “You begin to feel,” says Norman Thomas di Giovanni, the translator of Borges, who has come to the end of his three-year stint in Buenos Aires, “that you are spending the best years of your life at the money changer’s. I go there some afternoons the way other people go shopping. Just to see what’s being offered.”

The blanket wage raises that the government decrees from time to time—15 per cent in May, and another 15 per cent promised soon—cannot keep pace with prices. “We’ve got to the stage,” the ambassador’s wife says, “when we can calculate the time between the increase in wages and the increase in prices.” People take a second job and sometimes a third. Everyone is obsessed with the need to make more money and at the same time to spend quickly. People gamble. Even in the conservative Andean town of Mendoza the casino is full; the patrons are mainly
workpeople, whose average monthly wage is the equivalent of fifty dollars. The queues that form all over Buenos Aires on a Thursday are of people waiting to hand in their football-pool coupons. The announcement of the pool results is a weekly national event.

A spectacular win of some 330 million pesos by a Paraguayan labourer dissipated a political crisis in mid-April. There had been riots in Mendoza, and the army had been put to flight. Then, in the following week, a guerrilla group in Buenos Aires killed the Fiat manager whom they had kidnapped ten days earlier. On the same day, in the nearby industrial town of Rosario, guerrillas ambushed and killed General Sánchez, commander of the Second Army Corps, who had some reputation as a torturer. Blood called for blood: there were elements in the armed forces that wanted then to break off the negotiations with Perón and scotch the elections promised next year. But the Paraguayan’s fortune lightened all conversation, revived optimism and calmed nerves. The little crisis passed.

The guerrillas still raid and rob and blow up; they still occasionally kidnap and occasionally kill. The guerrillas are young and middle class. Some are Peronist, some are communist. After all the bank raids the various organizations are rich. In Córdoba last year, according to my information, a student who joined the Peronist Montoneros was paid the equivalent of 70 dollars a month; lawyers were retained at 350 dollars. “You could detect the young Montoneros by their motorcars, their aggressiveness, their flashiness. James Dean types. Very glamorous.” Another independent witness says of the guerrillas he has met in Buenos Aires: “They’re anti-American. But one of them held a high job in an American company. They have split personalities; some of them really don’t know who they are. They see themselves as a kind of comic-book hero. Clark Kent in the office by day, Superman at night, with a gun.”

The film-maker says:

The guerrillas look for their inspiration to the north. From Paris of 1968 there is the dream of students and workers uniting to defeat the enemies of “the people.” The guerrillas have simplified the problems of Argentina. Like the campus and salon revolutionaries of the north, they have identified the enemy: the police. And so the social-intellectual diversions of the north are transformed, in the less intellectually stable south, into horrible reality. Dozens of policemen have been killed. And the police reply to terror with terror. They, too, kidnap and kill; they torture, concentrating on the genitals. A prisoner of the police jumps out of a window:
La Prensa
gives it a couple of inches. People are arrested and then, officially, “released”; sometimes they reappear, sometimes they don’t. A burned-out van is discovered in a street one morning. Inside there are two charred corpses: men who had been hustled out of their homes two days before. “In what kind of country are we living?” one of the widows asks. But the next day she is calmer; she retracts the accusation against the police. Someone has “visited” her.

“Friends of friends bring me these stories of atrocities,” Norman di Giovanni says, “and it makes you sick. Yet no one here seems to be amazed by what’s going on.” “My wife’s cousin was a
guerrillero,”
the provincial businessman says at lunch. “He killed a policeman in Rosario. Then eight months ago, he disappeared.
Está muerto.
He’s dead.” He has no more to say about it; and we talk of other matters.

On some evenings the jackbooted soldiers in black leather jackets patrol the pedestrian shopping street called Florida with their Alsatians:
the dogs’ tails close to their legs, their shoulders hunched, their ears thrown back. The police Chevrolets prowl the neon-lit streets unceasingly. There are policemen with machine guns everywhere. And there are the mounted police in slate grey; and the blue-helmeted anti-guerrilla motorcycle brigade; and those young men in well-cut suits who appear suddenly, plainclothesmen, jumping out of unmarked cars. Add the army’s AMX tanks and Alouette helicopters. It is an impressive apparatus, and it works.