With More in the Heart

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 10

With More in the Heart

LEFT Rancho La Rosa several times: to go north to Canada, where I could work legally and put myself a few dollars on the right side, and finally to return to New Zealand. It was never an easy place to leave, but, as El Profesor used to remark in several languages, it is necessary to leave in order to come back. Besides being a first-class cliché, I think this remark came quite deeply from El _Profesor’s own experience. He had been born in a fluid frontier zone of the Balkans, where you had to think twice on waking each morning to _ recall whether you were AustroHungarian, Transylvanian or Russian at that particular moment. He grew up speaking three or four languages and reached out hungrily for

more. Leaving in order to come back ' was going on all round him. He could communicate with most of these slippery transients, who were not foreigners to him as all strangers are to isolated people like New Zealanders. Probably ‘he didn’t have much idea of what | foreigner means until he himself started to travel widely and meet islanders and other solitaries whose first reaction to a stranger is to heave half a brick. Even then his coming and going made up such a large list of places and his life _ was lived with such a variety of people ‘that foreign-ness as of one race to angh eee ne other was unfamiliar to him. He met a lot of differing individuals and adapted to them, or not. Nation, flag, pride of birthplace, national superiority were foreign conceptions, and a look of simple amazement came over his face when he heard or read of racial drum beating. "TI am a biologist and archaeologist," he would say, shaking his huge dome of a head, "and perhaps philosopher. I do not understand this thing. Blood is all alike. Only environment and experience are different. Ve all have choice: some choose to live according to natural laws, and thus develop, and some do not. Every nation have those who choose rightly and those who do not. Hitler did receive many people into becoming emotional about this. Let us not deceive ourselves," So El Profesor carried with him an atmosphere of practical, undemonstrative internationalism. It helped, of course, that he could talk with most people in their language, and that the past was open to his mind in the same sweeping way that it is open to Toynbee. Yet his internationalism was calmly emotional, rather than cultivated. He could be impatient with sloth, but not Mexican sloth; with stubbornness,

| but not German stubbornness; with prejudice, but not British prejudice, Senator Mac-Carty, as he called him, filled him with baffled amazement, He did not know why Joe wanted to do the things he did, or why he had a free hand to do them for so long.

He observed the symptoms of the disease in some of the American guests at La Rosa, noted them, and occasionally discussed them in private, if the person concerned had made no secret of his views. "Communists under every bed," he remarked, illustrating the views of one zealot. "They take over the country. Only the Senator can save us. Vat a circus! Yet in every other way this man is normal. Is a strange, lonely symptom." If La Rosa was an enclave of internationalism in a Mexico not long woken to nationalism, it was also a relaxing sort of plunge for puritan Anglo-Saxons to take. While I was there I saw several frigid English liquidating superfluous icebergs from their personalities, and I know I reacted favourably towards the emotional climate. I was rather startled to hear the difference between two tape recordings I made there of poetry readings, one early in my residence and the other not long before I left. The accent was much the same, a touch of Pig Island in the y word endings, but the second voice was warmer and more flexible, more willing than the first to share the poet’s state- ment of emotional experience. Why a New Zealander should have to go as far as Mexico to find an agreeable emotional climate, I don’t know, We seem to have a hereditary block against absorbing Polynesian gaiety, of which EI! Profesor, who had spent time round Tahiti, always spoke with affection. Again, I found myself on the point of becoming dangerously fluent, of being able to talk receptive American guests into various border crossing subterfuges, or fellow workers into making fools of themselves in a knockabout comedy turn. I was too busy to sit down and consider how I had changed, but on the

Pacific crossing after I'd left, and I met a few Australians, it seemed clear that after four years, if there was not more in my head, there was a stronger current of humanity flowing through the heart.

G. leF.

Y.