Slothrop finds he has enough spare change for coffee. He goes sits inside, choosing a seat that’ll face the entrance. Fifteen minutes and he’s getting the spy-sign from a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit a couple tables away. Another front-facer. On his table is an old newspaper that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar political cartoon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white… no it’s a baby, with a label on its diaper sez LA REVOLUCIÓN … oh, they’re all claiming the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians bickering like a bunch of putative mothers, and somehow this cartoon here is supposed to be some kind of a touchstone, this fella in the green suit, who turns out to be an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, is looking for a reaction… the key passage is at the very end of the line where the great Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones is saying, “Now I’m going to tell you, in verse, how I conceived her free from the stain of Original Sin… .” It is the Uriburu revolution of 1930. The paper is fifteen years old. There is no telling what Squalidozzi is expecting from Slothrop, but what he gets is pure ignorance. This seems to be acceptable, and presently the Argentine has loosened up enough to confide that he and a dozen colleagues, among them the international eccentric Graciela Imago Portales, hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across the Atlantic now, to seek political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War’s over there… .

“You say Germany? You gone goofy? It’s a mess there, Jackson!”

“Not nearly the mess we left back home,” the sad Argentine replies. Long lines have appeared next to his mouth, lines learned from living next to thousands of horses, watching too many doomed colts and sunsets south of Rivadavia, where the true South begins… . “It’s been a mess since the colonels took over. Now, with Perón on his way… our last hope was Acción Argentina,” what’s he talking about, Jesus I’m hungry, “… suppressed it a month after the coup… now everybody waits. Attending the street actions out of habit. No real hope. We decided to move before Perón got another portfolio. War, most likely. He already has the descamisados, this will give him the Army too you see… it’s only a matter of time… we could have gone to Uruguay, waited him out—it’s a tradition. But perhaps he will be in for a long time. Montevideo is swarming with failed exiles, and failed hopes… .”

“Yeah, but Germany—that’s the last place you want to go.”

“Pero ché, no sós argentino… .” A long look away, down the engineered scars of Swiss avenues, looking for the South he left. Not the same Argentine, Slothrop, that that Bob Eberle’s seen toasts to Tangerine raised in ev-ry bar across, now… . Squalidozzi wants to say: We of all magical precipitates out of Europe’s groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses… . We tried to exterminate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we got—but even into the smokiest labyrinths, the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard and gate, the land has never let us forget… . But what he asks aloud is: “Here—you look hungry. Have you eaten? I was about to go to supper. Would you do me the honor?”