In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop’s starving.

“In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity… that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky… .”

“But-but bobwire,” Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin’ away, “that’s progress—you, you can’t have open range forever, you can’t just stand in the way of progress—” yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who’s springing for his meal.

Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or twice. “In ordinary times,” he wants to explain, “the center always wins. Its power grows with time, and that can’t be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times… this War—this incredible War—just for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that’s prevailed in Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it.”

“Sure. For how long?”

“It won’t last. Of course not. But for a few months… perhaps there’ll be peace by the autumn—discúlpeme, the spring, I still haven’t got used to your hemisphere—for a moment of spring, perhaps… .”

“Yeah but—what’re you gonna do, take over land and try to hold it? They’ll run you right off, podner.”

“No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open. We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone, our hope is limitless.” Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast glance, not at the door, but up at the ceiling— “So is our danger.”

The U-boat right now is cruising around somewhere off of Spain, staying submerged for much of the day, spending nights on the surface to charge batteries, sneaking in now and then to refuel. Squalidozzi won’t go into the fueling arrangements in much detail, but there are apparently connections of many years’ standing with the Republican underground—a community of grace, a gift of persistence… . Squalidozzi is in Zürich now contacting governments that might be willing, for any number of reasons, to assist his anarchism-in-exile. He must get a message to Geneva by tomorrow: from there word is relayed to Spain and the submarine. But there are Peronist agents here in Zürich. He is being watched. He can’t risk betraying the contact in Geneva.