Chapter IV — Colin Costello

When Colin Costello really made his entrance into my life it was both summer in the River Plate estuary and the height of the post-Christmas holidays, when Montevideo was filling up with Argentine and Brazilian summer vacationers. And I say “height” even if it hardly seems the right word to use in association with a muggy season that was progressively managing to give me a torpidly humid sense of sinking down there, at the other end of the world, especially with almost nothing to do now that my lectures were over.

Montevideo as a city, despite the beaches and, of course, the gambling, still retained all of its year-round, noisy, public transportation, workaday character, so it was beyond me why so many would be coming there for holidays, unless it was because it was so much worse at that time in their own huge, hot cities, like Buenos Aires or Sao Paolo, where few but maybe dock workers would have much to do with the sea. Though I could see, I supposed, that it did have the virtue of being more accessible for them than the elegant and, of course, much higher-rent Punta del Este, about a hundred kilometers away.

I was living in a little house which featured a lemon- treed, walled-in garden in back, patrolled by a matrimonial couple of almost invisible but extremely territorial stalking birds, normally silent, of the heron family, known as terus—after the godawful repeated outcry they send up if they feel their nesting grounds are being invaded.

It was in that garden that Colin took to visiting me.

Actually, I’d first begun noticing him back during my lectures, thinking that, because of his blond, gringo-like surface, he just might be a stranded, milk-fed American too, if it hadn’t been for his most un-American student coat-and-striped tie formality, with a dark blue blazer, grey slacks and black, wing-tipped leather shoes in the oppressively muggy heat. It was a formality he retained even more strictly than my Uruguayan students, with their own lyceum-graduate look, though I myself lectured in an open shirt. And he also had, for an American, a most exotically military way of standing gravely upright at the far back of the lecture room, against the tall, large windows, practically like a Marine guard at parade rest, looking very yellow-haired and blue-eyed and faintly pink-skinned up there in all his seriousness, with the light from the windows angling down on him, as he gave my classes far more reverence, in my opinion, than they deserved.

During these particular lectures, to make a point about certain American social ideals, I was using, for a change, a short novel, Melville’s Billy Budd which pleased my students, since they really were more inclined to literature than to history and political science in the first place. At least from a gringo like me. And one day, several minutes before I was going to start, down the gradings came this large, blond, formal figure to introduce himself. Appreciatively shook my hand. Smiled warmly. And it was confirmed that he was not an American at all, of course, but local, never been out of the River Plate region, and with an Irish name, too. Costello. Colin Costello. And not anywhere near as stiff as he had looked from far away with his coat and tie in the heat, but the opposite, making for a very pleasant contrast.

Having introduced himself, however, instead of sitting down at the front as I half expected, after another Latin handshake he insisted on returning to his post at the far back again, up the empty gradings (what other students I had sat in the first four rows) from where he would hear my lecture on Billy Budd standing as grave and military as ever, in his parade rest.

Whereupon, looming up there with his yellow hair and pale-pink Irish skin in all that space against the windows against the sky, and with his revealed Irish name, as I lectured away he came to take on for me something of the look of a comic stained-glass guardian angel--like maybe a recently Christianized Celtic one, out of the Book of Kells--who seemed to be under the mistaken impression, judging from his serious military bearing, that in what I had come to communicate he was guarding something holy from on high, though he was, I was pretty sure, misinformed.

Still, despite all that coat-and-tie formality of his, which back home I’d never expect but from the most extremely conservative students bordering on the morbid, we got to chat more and more after classes, where he again became his contrasting, warmer self.

It turned out Colin was trying to make his way to an advanced local degree in English, hence his appearance at my classes, before developing his further pattern of dropping in on me at my place for a beer after work at a pharmacy. That was how he made his living, having previously been a medical student in Buenos Aires. On his way to his mother’s, is what he told me, herself a teacher of English who’d been born Emilia Sabatini in the inland Argentine province of Córdoba, and who now made her living running an English language kindergarten called Miss Young’s .After its founder. An Englishwoman who’d decided to return to Buenos Aires, leaving the business to Colin’s widowed mother. For Buenos Aires was where Colin and his mother had come from just a few years before, due to some “problems” he’d had back there.

He didn’t go into much detail about them in the early visits (that would come later, God knows) except to allow in his curious and sometimes forced Anglo-Argentine accent (we spoke in English) that they’d started with “my damn bad luck of getting on police lists. All too easy to do, of course,” he said, “but, anyway…” he then added with a cheerful smile, “our family had always been of quite low standing among the English back in old B.A. So you see, we didn’t have to exactly give up the old plantation or anything like that. Uh…the field hands didn’t weep and howl and tear their clothes as we left, for example. Actually, I just closed the door to our flat after my mother said for me to have one last look around, see if we’d left anything, and I left it unlocked, so it really was rather quiet.”

Indeed, the late Mr. Costello had been second generation, worked in the initially British-owned railroads. Got nowhere, certainly never rising to become part of the Cricket Club set, or Hurlingham’s, or of any place else where the “higher ranking English pied noirs,” as Colin called them, “gathered to shit on those below.” As it happened, the Costellos already had a long pattern of melancholy migrations, first from Ireland to Liverpool, England, and then with the railroads to the New World, where they never found the streets paved with gold, or even wheat or beef. Unlike many other English who had. Amassing fortunes. And, according to Colin, despite their living in Argentina for generation after generation, forever speaking Spanish with English accents and referring to England as “home.”

In principle I had nothing against becoming friendly with him, but I did see limits, because though he generally seemed an adult enough guy for twenty-seven (his age, which, by the way, surprised me, because he’d looked so young at the back of my lecture room, practically undergraduate), the more I got to know him, the more my adult sense of him could suddenly revert and he would seem like an excitable twenty-one-year-old ideologue again. Especially if he got into sounding off with the standard local student’s anti-U.S. demonology. Not that he was especially tiresome about it. Actually, rather low-keyed on that point, all things considered. Of course, my sense of him as being essentially a kid was also fed, once he was regularly closer than the far back of my lecture room, by how well I could see he barely needed to shave his rosy-cheeked face. Which included an unconvincing blond, British brush cut moustache that did not always camouflage that adolescent, even recently convinced, stained-glass-angel aura of his, which, if Colin was being particularly sincere or enthusiastic about some issue or other, would suddenly be ratified by a pair of blue eyes that had a way of lighting up ingenuously, like a couple of luminous kid’s playing marbles.

Whenever that happened, I would nod respectfully and be sure to look down so he would not see me smiling about his great kid earnestness, to avoid his possible indignation. Something he never did seem to produce in my presence, by the way, generally having a diffident, jokey, off-handed manner to cover over his sincerities.

And I guess I should admit too, despite my vanity as a teacher, that once he started visiting me personally, he began to stop showing up at my classes. But not from a lack of interest in American culture. On the contrary. Because despite his anti-U.S. politics, Colin could suddenly start breathing brightly with a remarkably utopian enthusiasm for American literature as I’d never expect back home. (And concerning that word, “American,” I said he wasn’t one, but he would have denied it fiercely. In fact, he did one night actually get piqued on that point, a bit hurt and disappointed in me even for having said he wasn’t, though he of course tried to hide it with his usual smile and a fake stentorian declaration of “That’s the trouble with you Yanks! You think you are the only Americans. But we’re Americans too, maybe even more so!”

(“Why more so?” I asked, not bothering to protest I was not exactly a Yankee.

(“Because, Jack,” he then proclaimed, and laughed, “haven’t you heard? The Future of the Continent belongs to us, old boy, not to you Imperialists…uh, but as we will be, of course. Naturally. Not as we are at present.”)

So, his position gave him a very exotic, partisan perspective on what I called American literature which made him capable of passionately telling me such things as, “Absolutely the purest, most authentic American literature of our New World, you know. Back with Hawthorne and Melville anyway. Truly magical and mythical back then. Real magical realism, touching earth, heaven and hell all at one time. Uh…but lost its way after that, I think,” he would add, “when your novels became realist and European, with Howells and Dreiser and people like that. Actually, when your writing became so disgustingly First World and white, imperialist I suppose. But Hawthorne and Melville were the first to make a truly great New World literature, Jack, Yankees or not, and that is why I love them so, old boy!” Whereupon, for sure, those rounded blue eyes of Colin’s would be seen glowing enthusiastically and translucently in his beaming, kid’s face, astride his nodding nose and right above his scraggly blond kid’s moustache.

He was also, I’d soon find, much given to half-jokingly using set phrases and cliches that came out of political pamphlets I hadn’t read, involving “The New Socialist Man” and “The New Continent” and “Down With The Phony Humanism Of Liberal Europe” (that seemed to mean the cult of divisive, competitive individualism all the way from the Renaissance to the present) to go along, naturally, with the standard anti-USA stuff.

And there was even something there about the “Pseudo-Revoluionism Of The Russian Imperialist Opportunists,” though less stressed, who were dismissed by Colin with, “Who, of course, really aren’t subversive at all, you know…just pretending to be,” to which I’d said, “As, I take it, you are?” which was instantly met with a mock-incensed, “Of course!” practically as if I’d questioned the patriotism of a Rotarian back home. “See here, Jack. What do you think!” and then he’d laugh. Modestly. For the word “subversive,” I would find, was an unquestionable moral positive as it sure was not in the common parlance of intellectuals back home (where Sen. Joe McCarthy’s shadow was still sensed, I guess). Which meant that Colin introduced me to a kind of upside-down Latin American political rhetoric I didn’t quite follow at first, not yet being familiar with the language of the heady days of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, when it turns out there was also some university-type talk, south of the Rio Grande, about “creating a New Man in the New World,” even a New Race, out of the mixture of all the colors on their continent (to fight off us descendants of the white Colonel Custer), which I had certainly never come across before in my circles. My American, Anglophone, circles, of course, no matter how Liberal they were.

And it was the night of the day I received Rebecca’s letter telling me she was coming, that Colin started to seriously confide in me. Not yet fully, with all the details, of course. That would have been stupidly dangerous of him, or even more so. But he was beginning to talk about his real, pressing concerns, which I did not catch onto.

Just as I was obtusely missing that he was actually gambling his very hide that I would not run nervously to the phone to call the police with my suspicions about him as soon as he said good night. Maybe even call Herb Morrison, my Naval squash partner, little as we normally had to talk about.