Dear Mrs Wilkinson, I said, there must be some mistake, my birthday was February 9th 1931, and not the date you mention in your letter. Moreover, I was born in Holland and spent my early years growing up in Rotterdam, in other words in a republic outside your jurisdiction; sometimes my mother would take me on a walk to the harbour and we would stand at the end of one of the long piers looking out over the slate grey water and watch the traffic of ships coming and going. We do not mistakes, Mrs Wilkinson replied in her next letter to me, The market never lies.
The train from Platform 7 had departed some time ago, it might even have been days before because it is hard to tell on long journeys which can so readily disorientate one’s memory, but I certainly recall Bug and I are sitting in the same compartment in a railway carriage that is rocking so much it feels like an ocean liner in a tempest, and he is telling me the upsetting story of his exchange of letters, and how he has come to be deported. My chest was weak even then, I told her in another letter, Bug continues, And that surely I was eligible for a Disability Allowance. But Mrs Wilkinson was implacable. You must go to Platform 7 and join the Milwaukee service, she wrote back, We make no exceptions.
I don’t like the idea of Milwaukee, Bug moans.
Perhaps I can help you, a man sat beside me in the corner of the compartment says. I confess we had not noticed him before this moment, and neither, I suppose, had Bug or he might have been more discrete with his story telling, but then on further consideration him being a ‘Nestbeschmurzer’, probably not. We turn to look at the man. He is very old, bald headed with a grey moustache and expressionless face. He is conservatively dressed in a dark blue jacket and striped tie, and he wears thick rimmed tinted glasses. Oh no, I think, Police chief, Latino, ex-army chief, we are in deep trouble.
Allow me to introduce myself, the older man speaks slowly with an old-fashioned courtesy trying to stand up in the swaying carriage and shake us both by the hand, My name is Saturday, but please call me Ernesto. How do you do. How do you, we both reply. To live without an idea, Ernesto continues, As seems imperative in today’s world. Yes, I confess to you gentlemen, I lost my faith a long time ago. In living with an idea I mean. With communism in my case. I spent two years at Lenin’s International School in Moscow, you know. It broke me. It is a long time ago now. He paused, but none of us are able to find any words. Yes, it is a very long time to live without an idea. And now there is also death without an idea. On that I am something of an expert too.
Somewhere, despite the Decline Effect, I am hearing another voice in my ear, more like an echo or a disembodied radio announcement, ‘He also presided over the CONADEP commission that investigated the fate of the desparecidos during the Dirty War of the 1970s’.
Project Disappeared, I blurt out. Exactly, Ernesto man nods his head, Proyectos Desparacidos. And, if I may be so bold as to advise you gentlemen, Milwaukee is a very bad idea. The old man leans forward, his voice lowers to an almost breathless whisper, and over the next ten minutes he explains the route of our train, how a stop always has to be made at the main Retiro station of Buenos Ayres for the purposes of refueling, and, while the carriages remains sealed and locked during the stop, that a small bribe to the guard will ensure a door will be unlocked, and thereafter how friends will be found only a short walk beyond the adjacent Terminal de Omnibus and that horses for our escape will be made available.
And then, he says, We see all around us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty blue colour where the crystal dome of the sky rests on the level green world. Our green world too, as well as yours. One of your English countrymen wrote that line, a friend of your poet Edward Thomas even. You see, he says after another short pause while we look at each other in mystified silence, Not everything is listed in the railway timetables.
But I am still troubled. The true identity of Mrs (“There is no alternative”) Wilkinson remains to be revealed, I think to myself.