The Whispering Land

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Buenos Aires, decked out for spring, was looking her[2] best. The tall and elegant buildings seemed to gleam like icebergs in the sun, and the broad avenues were lined with jacaranda trees[3] covered with a mist of mauve blue flowers, or palo borracho,[4] with their strange bottle-shaped trunks and their spindly branches starred with yellow and white flowers. The spring-like atmosphere seemed to have infected the pedestrians, who fled across the road through the traffic with even less caution than usual, while the drivers of the trams, buses and cars vied with each other in the time-honoured Buenos Aires game of seeing how close they could get to each other at the maximum speed without actually crashing.

Not having a suicidal streak[5] in me, I had refused to drive in the city, and so we swept on our death-defying way in the Land-Rover[6] with Josefina at the wheel. Short, with curly auburn hair and big brown eyes, Josefina had a smile like a searchlight that could paralyse even the most unsusceptible male at twenty paces. By my side sat Mercedes, tall, slim, blonde and blue-eyed; she habitually wore an expression as though butter would not melt in her mouth, and this successfully concealed an iron will and grim, bulldog-like tenacity of purpose. These two girls were part of my private army of feminine pulchritude[7] that I used in dealing with officialdom in the Argentine.[8] At that precise moment we were heading towards the massive building that looked like a cross between the Parthenon and the Reichstag[9] in whose massive interior lurked the most formidable enemy of sanity and liberty in Argentina: the Aduana, or Customs.

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