In Patagonia Read online

  Table of Contents

  IN PATAGONIA

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  In Patagonia

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Some Sources

  IN PATAGONIA

  Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940, and was the author of In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines , and Utz. The last three he considered works of fiction. His other books are What Am I Doing Here, Anatomy of Restlessness, and Far Journeys, a collection of his photographs that also includes selections from his travel notebooks. Chatwin died outside Nice, France, on January 17, 1989.

  Nicholas Shakespeare wrote a biography of Bruce Chatwin that was published in 2000. He is also the author of The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; The High Flyer, for which he was nominated one of Granta’s Best of Young British novelists in 1993; and The Dancer Upstairs.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1977

  First published in the United States of America by Summit Books,

  a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1979

  Published in Penguin Books 1988

  This edition with an introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare published 2003

  Copyright © Bruce Chatwin, 1977

  Sections 73, 75, 86 Copyright © Monica Barnett, 1977

  Introduction copyright © Nicholas Shakespeare, 2003

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Chatwin Bruce, 1942-1989

  In Patagonia.

  Reprint. Originally published : New York : Summit Books, CI977. 1. Patagonia (Argentina and Chile)—Description and travel. 2. Chatwin, Bruce, 1942-1989—Journeys—Patagonia (Argentina and Chile). I. Title. [F2936.C47 1988] 918.2’70464 87-38485

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50314-0

  3

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  In Patagonia: an introduction,

  by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In December 1974, the 34-year-old Bruce Chatwin departed Buenos Aires on the night bus south, beginning a journey that would transform a truant journalist to one of the most stylish and original writers of the late twentieth century. That same year, almost to the day, I left school to work as a cowhand in the Buenos Aires province. To the south, the plains spread on and on into Patagonia.

  I was seventeen and, of course, it scored me. With my head full of all that empty space, I returned ten months later to tiny, congested England. I instantly forgot the flies, the saddle sores, the boredom. I was desperate to go back.

  Six years later, I created an opportunity and traveled through Rio Negro and Chubut to Tierra del Fuego. The military junta had erected signs beside the roads—“To know Patagonia is a duty”—but no one was taking notice. Patagonia, in the estimation of one Buenos Aires writer, was “just emptiness—a back alley where different cultures swirled about and rather a boring place.”

  One morning, in a gesture soon to be repeated by a generation of backpackers, I was waiting for a bus in the dusty scrubland west of Trelew when I dug out a book I’d brought with me, a paperback edition that today bears the creases and marginalia of three visits to Patagonia.

  I’d never heard of the author, but his was the only contemporary book I could find about my destination. I opened the first page and I read the first paragraph and that, really, was that.

  Patagonia is not a precise region on the map. It is a vast, vague territory that encompasses 900,000 square kilometers of Argentina and Chile. The area is most effectively defined by its soil. You know you are in Patagonia when you see rodados patagonicos, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and jarilla, the low bush that is its dominant flora. Patagonia may also be described by its climate. The wind th
at blows with terrific force from October to March—in Chatwin’s expression, “stripping men to the raw”—made Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s plane fly backward instead of forward.

  Travelers from Darwin onward have noted how this bleakness seizes the imagination. Patagonia’s nothingness forces the mind in on itself. In the museum of Trelew I’d found the diary of a stern Welsh pioneer. John Murray Thomas, trekking inland in July 1877, wrote in his fading pencil: “Last night dreamt of Harriett that we were in the bedroom. Had a nice kiss. Hardly a night passes but that I see her in my dreams.”

  In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally. Tom Jones worked as British Consul in Punta Arenas. In his 1961 memoir A Patagonian Panorama, he wrote: “Whether it is the dreary and crude climate of Patagonia or the lonely life in the camp after the day’s work or remorse after a bout of hard drinking, I cannot say, but I have known, some very intimately, well over 20 people who have committed suicide.”

  The first sheep farmers arrived from the Falkland Islands in the late 1860s. The temptation among their descendants to cling to the culture their forebears left behind remains fierce. Patagonia spans two nations; a good many of its inhabitants pass a life likewise divided, one often spent replicating the environment they have escaped. The remoter the valley, the more faithful the re-creation of an original homeland. In Gaiman, the Welsh preserve their language and their hymns. In Rio Pico, the Germans plant lupins and cherry trees. In Sarmiento, the Boers continue to dry biltong (of guanaco). As Chatwin wrote in his journal, “The further one gets from the great centres of civilisation, the more prevalent become the fanciful reconstructions of the world of Madame du Barry.”

  Barren for the most part, Patagonia is a land of extreme fertility in one respect. To travel through it, as Chatwin soon discovered, is “the most jaw-dropping experience because everywhere you’d turn up, there, sure enough, was this somewhat eccentric personality who had this fantastic story. At every place I came to it wasn’t a question of hunting for the story, it was a question of the story coming at you.... I also think the wind had something possibly to do with it.”

  Like the Galapagos, Patagonia has scarcely advanced from its early maps showing blue unicorns, red centaurs, elephantbearing condors, and giants. It still likes to think of itself as a land of giants. “Not those giants referred to by Hernando de Magellanes,” wrote Tom Jones, “but those men and women, many of them British, who made this vast, bleak and windswept land, prosperous and habitable for civilised people.” Even today, it remains scattered both with dinosaur bones and living relics who dwell sixty kilometers from the nearest pavement and talk of “leagues” and “chappies” and “t’other side.” Everyone seems seven foot high, an oddball. Dreams proliferate. (This may explain why Ted Turner and Sylvester Stallone have bought properties there.) “Patagonia is different from anywhere else,” says Teresita Braun-Menéndez, of the family that did most to open up the territory in the nineteenth century. “That loneliness, that grandiosity. Anything can happen.”

  Like many people, I experienced its effect in heightened colors when reading In Patagonia. I’d read Hudson and Darwin and Lucas Bridges, but none had validated my Patagonia as Chatwin had.

  In crowded London, I sought the author out. My pretext was to get the telephone number of the Frenchman who would be King of Patagonia. Really, I wanted to meet Chatwin.

  In those days I kept a diary. On January 19, 1982, I wrote: “The morning with Bruce Chatwin, after eventually locating his Eaton Place bedsit: a bicycle against the wall and Flaubert on the floor. He was younger than I imagined, rather like a Polish refugee: baggy trousered, emaciated, grey blonde and blueeyed, sharp-featured and razor-worded. He has just delivered a manuscript—a novel about a square mile near Clyro where 2 families fight, without exposure to the modern world, through 2 world wars. He talks like a bird, very funny, very boyish and very well read. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how the most fraudulent people often have a very good eye for the genuine article?’”

  His book had conjured a loose-limbed ascetic at one with the desert around Trelew, a silent man whose longest sentence was “I see.” In fact, he told me later, “I’m at my happiest having a good old yakking conversation.” Only afterward did I meet the lady in Puerto Natales who confessed, “Don Bruce, he talked a lot, bastante .” Or, in Alice Springs, an anthropologist who complained: “He murdered people with talk.” He didn’t stop yakking from the moment I entered his tiny attic flat. Within minutes, he’d provided a telephone number for the King of Patagonia and Araucania, a pipe smoker with glaucoma who ran the Free Faculty of Law in the Faubourg Poissonière. He also gave me numbers for the King of Crete, the heir to the Aztec throne—and a guitarist in Boston who believed he was god.

  In return he wanted to know about Argentina.

  One of Chatwin’s literary gifts was to make readers feel involved in his fantasies. He could exercise the same power in the flesh. His first editor, Francis Wyndham, said of him: “He made you participate in what, in that moment, did not seem to be a fantasy. One was included in it, even though he did all the talking.” Chatwin was particularly adept at extracting from perfect strangers their best stories and making extravagant connections. This is what happened at our first meeting.

  Swiftly he drew from me how, as an adolescent living in Buenos Aires, I read aloud to the blind Borges; how our house in Martinez was guarded by ex-SAS bodyguards who stored their grenades in my youngest brother’s desk; and a story I’d picked up in Salta, about a figure called Guemes, a hero of Argentina’s independence who had lent his colors to the famous gaucho poncho. Black for the death of Guemes, red for the blood of his soldiers.

  It was the Guemes story that held Chatwin—and taught me at firsthand his talent for persuading others to view the world as he did.

  Guemes, I had learned—indeed, I’d worn the same poncho—was an hispanicization of the Scottish Wemyss: the colors were possibly those of a Wemyss tartan. Chatwin’s blue eyes widened and with hands waving he explained how he was at that moment at work on a theory about the color red. Did I know that Garibaldi, while fighting for neighboring Uruguay’s independence, had filched a consignment of these ponchos from a warehouse in Montevideo and, on the ship back to Italy, had scissored them into the uniforms for his “red-shirts”—and so inspired the red flags flying over the barricades of revolutionary Europe and ultimately the Kremlin?

  I didn’t, but I left his flat taking very seriously the link between a Scots tartan and the red flag of Socialism.

  There was a further reason to be excited. He promised to accompany me on a pilgrimage to Southampton to see the tomb of the Argentine dictator General Rosas, who’d died in exile as a milk farmer in Hampshire and who, in power, had worn Guemes’s poncho as a uniform for his colorados, a terrifying gaucho cavalry.

  We met two or three times a year after that. Our pilgrimage to Rosas’s tomb would crop up in conversation, but Southampton was just down the road. It could wait; we could go there any time. Meanwhile, Chatwin was off to Australia, India, China. I felt glad to be able to pin him down just once, to appear on a BBC television program about South American literature with Vargas Llosa and Borges. He disliked giving interviews and it would be one of his few television appearances. As I waited to escort Borges into the studio, Chatwin started enthusing uninhibitedly. “He’s just a genius; you can’t go anywhere without taking your Borges. It’s like packing your toothbrush.” To which Borges, standing next to me, muttered: “How unhygienic.”

  Chatwin died before we could make it to Rosas’s tomb. Soon afterward, Rosas’s bones were transported with tremendous fanfare back to Buenos Aires and reburied in the Recoleta cemetery. In 1992, I visited the new grave with Chatwin’s widow, Elizabeth, before heading south with her in his footsteps. I thought he would have enjoyed the latest story to circulate about Rosas, that his original grave in Southampton
had been destroyed in the blitz, killing a few stray cattle. The bones in the ornamented Buenos Aires tomb belonged most likely to a bomb-blasted cow.

  Bruce Chatwin was always attracted to border countries: to places on the rim of the world, sandwiched ambiguously between cultures, neither one thing nor another. In South Africa, I met a poet who said that Chatwin wrote as if he was in exile from a country that didn’t exist. “He was in exile from everywhere,” says his wife, Elizabeth. And he was on the run again when he boarded the bus in Buenos Aires.

  He’d resigned from the auctioneer’s Sotheby’s to study archaeology at Edinburgh University, had left Edinburgh prematurely to write a book on nomads, and had put aside the manuscript in a mood of despair to work as a journalist at the Sunday Times magazine. In November 1974 he’d arrived in New York with $3,500 of expense money in his pocket to research a story on the Guggenheim family when “on the spur of the moment” he made a break for it.

  The following month a letter arrived on his editor’s desk in London postmarked Lima: “I have done what I threatened / I suddenly got fed up with N.Y. and ran away to South America / I have been staying with a cousin in Lima for the past week and am going tonight to Buenos Aires. I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia / I am doing a story there for myself, something I have always wanted to write up.”

  The story, he went on, “could be marvellous, but I’ll have to do it in my own way.” Provisionally entitled “A Piece of Brontosaurus,” it related to a treasured object from his childhood: a wedding gift sent to his grandmother in Birmingham from her cousin at the end of the world. The opening paragraph gives the flavor:In my grandmother’s dining room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.