WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18
I am in a fishing port. I want to eat fish. The best restaurant has been taken over by elderly couples form Buenos Aires on a bus tour of Patagonia. A table will be available at 10.30.
I wait in the hotel and talk with the manager. She is a reminder of the schoolteachers who told me of the US invasion of Panama. She has the same soft voice as she tells me of the young soldiers sent to the Malvinas. Poor boys, how they suffered. Most were from the north. They had never experienced cold and they had neither suitable clothes nor adequate food.
I reply that I recall reading of British officers’ anger at discovering the condition of the Argentine soldiers and their contempt for Argentine army officers, many of whom abandoned their men.
I walk back down the cliff road to the restaurant. Wind grabs at my jacket. I imagine the ancient Argentine battleship, Belgrano, torpedoed. For how many minutes could a sailor survive in the freezing sea?
I feel a hypocrite as I enter the warmth of the restaurant.
The two bus drivers and the tour guide for the oldies invite me to their table. We chat of road conditions and distances and the countries we have visited. Later they drop me back at the hotel in the double-decker coach. I lie in bed and think of the vile headlines in England’s popular press. A good Argie was a dead Argie. And what of all those Brits who, over generations, have settled in Argentina?