It was September last, when Don Pablo Antofagasta gave his annual three-day fiesta primavera to welcome in the spring, that Mr. John Longworth first appeared among us. We don’t have much society out here, unless we take the long and killing drive into Punta Arenas, a city of 110,000 souls, and we look forward with keen anticipation to such entertainments — and not only the adults, but the children too. The landowners from several of the estancias, even the most far-flung, gather annually for Don Pablo’s extravaganza and they bring their children and some of the house servants as well (and even, as in the case of Don Benedicto Braun, their dogs and horses). None of this presents a problem for Don Pablo, one of the wealthiest and most generous among us. As we say, the size of his purse is exceeded only by the size of his heart.
I arrived on the Thursday preceding the big weekend, flying over the pampas in the Piper Super Cub with my daughter, Paloma, to get a jump on the others and have a quiet night sitting by the fire with Don Pablo and his eighty-year-old Iberian jerez. Isabela, Bob Fernando Jr. and the rest of the family would be making the twelve-hour drive over washboard roads and tortured gullies the following morning, and frankly, my kidneys can no longer stand that sort of pounding. I still ride — horseback, that is — but I leave the Suburban and the Range Rover to Isabela and to Bob Fernando Jr. At any rate, the flight was a joy, soaring on the back of the implacable wind that rakes our country day and night, and I taxied right up to the big house on the airstrip Don Pablo scrupulously maintains.
Don Pablo emerged from the house to greet us even before the prop had stopped spinning, as eager for our company as we were for his. (Paloma has always been his favorite, and she’s grown into a tall, straight-backed girl of eighteen with intelligent eyes and a mane of hair so thick and luxuriant it almost seems unnatural, and I don’t mind saying how proud I am of her.) My old friend strode across the struggling lawn in boots and puttees and one of those plaid flannel shirts he mail-orders from Boston, Teresa and two of the children in tow. It took me half a moment to shut down the engine and stow away my aeronautical sunglasses for the return flight, and when I looked up again, a fourth figure had appeared at Don Pablo’s side, matching him stride for stride.
“Cómo estás, mi amigo estimado?” Don Pablo cried, taking my hand and embracing me, and then he turned to Paloma to kiss her cheek and exclaim on her beauty and how she’d grown. Then it was my turn to embrace Teresa and the children and press some sweets into the little ones’ hands. Finally, I looked up into an untethered North American face, red hair and a red mustache and six feet six inches of raw bone and sinew ending in a little bony afterthought of a head no bigger than a tropical coconut and weighted down by a nose to end all noses. This nose was an affliction and nothing less, a tool for probing and rooting, and I instinctively looked away from it as I took the man’s knotty gangling hand in my own and heard Don Pablo pronounce, “Mr. John Longworth, a scientist from North America who has come to us to study our exemplary skies.”
“Mucho gusto en conocerle,” he said, and his Spanish was very good indeed, but for the North American twang and his maddening tendency to over-pronounce the consonants till you felt as if he were battering both sides of your head with a wet root. He was dressed in a fashion I can only call bizarre, all cultural differences aside, his hands gloved, his frame draped in an ankle-length London Fog trenchcoat and his disproportionately small head dwarfed by a pair of wraparound sunglasses and a deerstalker cap. His nose, cheeks and hard horny chin were nearly fluorescent with what I later learned was sunblock, applied in layers.
“A pleasure,” I assured him, stretching the truth for the sake of politesse, after which he made his introductions to my daughter with a sort of slobbering formality, and we all went in to dinner.
THERE WAS, as I soon discovered, to be one topic of conversation and one topic only throughout the meal — indeed, throughout the entire three days of the fiesta, whenever and wherever Mr. John Longworth was able to insinuate himself, and he seemed to have an almost supernatural ability to appear everywhere at once, as ubiquitous as a cockroach. And what was this penetrating and all-devouring topic? The sky. Or rather the hole he perceived in the sky over Magallanes, Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic, a hole that would admit all the poisons of the universe and ultimately lead to the destruction of man and nature. He talked of algae and krill, of acid rain and carbon dioxide and storms that would sweep the earth with a fury unknown since creation. I took him for an enthusiast at best, but deep down I wondered what asylum he’d escaped from and when they’d be coming to reclaim him.
He began over the soup course, addressing the table at large as if he were standing at a podium and interrupting Don Pablo and me in a reminiscence of a salmon-fishing excursion to the Penitente River undertaken in our youth. “None of you,” he said, battering us with those consonants, “especially someone with such fair skin as Paloma here or Señora Antofagasta, should leave the house this time of year without the maximum of protection. We’re talking ultraviolet-B, radiation that increases by as much as one thousand percent over Punta Arenas in the spring because of the hole in the ozone layer.”
Paloma, a perspicacious girl educated by the nuns in Santiago and on her way to the university in the fall, gave him a deadpan look. “But, Mr. Longworth,” she said, her voice as clear as a bell and without a trace of intimidation or awe, “if what you say is true, we’ll have to give up our string bikinis.”
I couldn’t help myself — I laughed aloud and Don Pablo joined me. Tierra del Fuego is hardly the place for sunbathers — or bikinis either. But John Longworth didn’t seem to appreciate my daughter’s satiric intent, nor was he to be deterred. “If you were to go out there now, right outside this window, for one hour unprotected under the sun, that is, without clothing — or, er, in a bikini, I mean — I can guarantee you that your skin would blister and that those blisters could and would constitute the incipient stages of melanoma, not to mention the damage to your eyes and immune system.”
“Such beautiful eyes,” Don Pablo observed with his customary gallantry. “And is Paloma to incarcerate them behind dark glasses, and my wife too?”
“If you don’t want to see them go blind,” he retorted without pausing to draw breath.
The thought, as we say, brought my kettle to a boiclass="underline" who was this insufferable person with his stabbing nose and deformed head to lecture us? And on what authority? “I’m sorry, señor,” I said, “but I’ve heard some far-fetched pronouncements of doom in my time, and this one takes the cake. Millenarian hysteria is what I say it is. Proof, sir. What proof do you offer?”
I realized immediately that I’d made a serious miscalculation. I could see it in the man’s pale leaping eyes, in the way his brow contracted and that ponderous instrument of his nose began to sniff at the air as if he were a bloodhound off after a scent. For the next hour and a half, or until I retreated to my room, begging indigestion, I was carpet-bombed with statistics, chemical analyses, papers, studies, obscure terms and obscurer texts, until all I could think was that the end of the planet would be a relief if only because it would put an end to the incessant, nagging, pontificating, consonant-battering voice of the first-class bore across the table from me.