In Patagonia Read online

  At half past nine the bus stopped at the small town where I hoped to find Bill Philips. His grandfather was a pioneer in Patagonia and he still had cousins there. The town was a grid of one-storey brick houses and shops with an overhanging cornice. In the square was a municipal garden and a bronze bust of General San Martin, the Liberator. The streets around the garden were asphalted but the wind blew in sideways and coated the flowers and the bronze with white dust.

  Two farmers had parked their pick-ups outside the bar and were drinking vino rosado. An old man huddled over his maté kettle. Behind the bar were pictures of Isabelita and Juan Perón, he wearing a blue and white sash and looking old and degenerate; another of Evita and Juan, much younger then and more dangerous; and a third of General Rosas, with sideburns and a downcurved mouth. The iconography of Peronism is extremely complicated.

  An old woman gave me a leathery sandwich and coffee. Naturally, she said, I could leave my bag while I tried to find Señor Philips.

  ‘It is far to Señor Philips. He lives up in the sierra.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Eight leagues. But you may find him. Often he comes to town in the morning.’

  I asked around but no one had seen the gringo Philips that morning. I found a taxi and haggled over the price. The driver was a thin, cheerful type, Italian I guessed. He seemed to enjoy bargaining and went off to buy gasoline. I looked General San Martin over and humped my bag on to the sidewalk. The taxi drove up and the Italian jumped out excitedly and said:

  ‘I’ve seen the gringo Philips. There, walking this way.’

  He didn’t mind losing the fare and refused to be paid. I was beginning to like the country.

  A shortish, thick-set man in khaki bags was coming down the street. He had a cheerful boyish face, and a tuft of hair stood up on the back of his head.

  ‘Bill Philips?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘Come on home,’ he said, grinning.

  We drove out of town in his old pick-up. The door on the passenger side had jammed and we had to pile out at a rusty shack to let in a wrinkled, sandy-haired Basque, who did odd jobs on the farm and was a bit simple. The road sliced through flat cattle country. Black Aberdeen Angus clustered round the windpumps. The fences were in perfect shape. Every five miles or so we passed the pretentious gates of a big estancia.

  ‘Millionaire country down here,’ Bill said. ‘I’m up in the sheep zone. I can do a few Jerseys, but we don’t get the grass or water for a big herd. One bad drought and I’d be wiped clean.’

  Bill turned off the main road towards some pale rocky hills. The clouds and mist were breaking up. Beyond the hills I saw a chain of mountains, the same silvery grey as the clouds. The sun caught their flanks and they seemed to be shining.

  ‘Are you here because of Darwin, or to see us?’ Bill asked.

  ‘To see you. But Darwin?’

  ‘He was here. You can see the Sierra Ventana, showing up now, far left. Darwin went up it on his way to Buenos Aires. Haven’t done it myself. Too much work on a new farm.’

  The road climbed and gave out into a bumpy track. Bill opened a gate by a farmhouse and a dog streaked towards us. He nipped back into the cab and the dog crouched, hatefully baring its gums.

  ‘My neighbours are Italian,’ Bill said. ‘The Its have got the whole region buttoned up. All came from one village in the Marches forty years back. All ardent Perónistas and not to be trusted. They have a simple philosophy: breed like flies, bellyache about land reform later. They all started off with good-sized lots, but they go on splitting them up. You see that house building over there?’

  The track had risen sharply and the whole country was spread out behind, a basin of fields ringed by rocky hills and lit by flashing shafts of sunlight. All the farmhouses were set in clumps of poplars, except the new one, a plain block of white, bare of trees.

  ‘There’s a family who’ve just split up. Old man dies. Two sons quarrel. Elder son gets best land and builds new house. Younger son active in local politics. Wants to lay fingers on gringo’s best sheep-pasture. I’ve got just enough to keep going without frills. And we were Argentine citizens when this lot were holed up in their bloody Italian village.’

  ‘Here’s the house coming up now,’ he said.

  We stopped to let out the Basque, who walked down the hill. The house was a prefabricated cottage of two rooms, stuck on a bare hillside, with big windows and a wonderful view.

  ‘Don’t mind Anne-Marie,’ Bill said. ‘She gets a bit jumpy when we have visitors. Works herself into a state. Seems to think visitors mean housework. Not the domesticated type. But don’t take any notice. She loves having visitors really.’

  ‘Darling, we’ve got a visitor,’ he called.

  I heard her say, ‘Have we?’ and the bedroom door slammed shut. Bill looked unhappy. He patted the dog and we talked about dogs. I looked at his bookshelf and saw he had all the best books. He had been reading Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches and we talked about Turgenev.

  A boy in blue trousers and a freshly laundered shirt poked his head round the door. He looked at the visitor apprehensively and sucked his thumb.

  ‘Nicky, come and say hullo,’ Bill said.

  Nicky ran back into the bedroom and the door shut again. Finally, Anne-Marie did come out and shake hands. She was edgy and formal. She couldn’t think what had possessed her father to suggest I come.

  ‘We’re in chaos here,’ she said.

  She had a bright open smile when she smiled. She was thin and healthy and had black hair cropped short and a clear tanned skin. I liked her tremendously, but she kept talking about ‘us provincials’. She had worked in London and New York. She knew the way things ought to be and apologized for the way they were. ‘If only we’d known you were coming we’d have. ...’

  It didn’t matter, I said. Nothing mattered. But I could see it did matter to her.

  ‘We shall need more meat for lunch,’ she said, ‘now we’ve got a visitor. Why don’t you both take Nicky down to the farm and I’ll clean up.’

  Bill and I waited for Nicky to change out of the clothes he’d put on for my benefit. In the first field we saw some brown birds with long tails and crests.

  ‘What’s that bird, Nicky?’ Bill asked.

  ‘Ouraka.’

  ‘Ugliest bird in the book,’ said Bill.

  ‘And that’s tero-teros,’ Nicky said.

  A pair of black and white plovers got up and circled above us, shrieking that the enemy was about.

  ‘And that’s the ugliest damned noise. Hates man, that bird. Absolutely hates man.’

  The track cut through a patch of bristly grass and came up to some farm buildings in a hollow out of the wind. A wiry kid called Dino ran out of the concrete house and played with Nicky in the yard shouting. There was a sheep-dip full of slimy green liquid, and Bill had to call them away from it.

  ‘Bad business,’ he said. ‘Two months ago, neighbour’s child drowned in the gringo’s sheep-dip. Parents drunk after Sunday lunch. Thank God the mother’s pregnant again—for the ninth time!’

  The boy’s father came out, doffed his cap to Bill and Bill asked him to kill a sheep. We looked round the farm, at the Jerseys, some new rams and a McCormick tractor.

  ‘And you can imagine what that bloody thing cost with our exchange rate. Can’t afford another thing. Do you know what we pray for down here? Pray for sadistically? Bad winter in Europe. Makes the price of wool go up.’

  We walked up to the orchard where Dino’s father had strung the carcass to an apple tree and his dog was eating the purple bunch of intestines in the grass. He took his knife to the neck and the head came away in his hand. The carcass swung on the branch. He steadied it and cut off a leg, which he handed to Bill.

  Halfway back to the house, Nicky asked if he could hold the visitor’s hand.

  ‘I can’t think what you’ve done to Nicky,’ Anne-Marie said when we got back.
‘Usually he hates visitors.’

  5

  IN THE evening Bill drove me down to Bahia Blanca. On the way we went to see a Scot about a bull.

  Sonny Urquhart’s farm was out on the flat land, about three miles back from the road. It had passed from father to son for four generations, since the time of the Indian raids. We had to open four wire gates along the track. The night was silent but for the teros. We made for a hump of black cypresses with a light shining among them.

  The Scot called the dogs off and led the way down a narrow green corridor into a tall, darker green room lit by a single bulb. Round the fire were some Victorian easy chairs with flat wooden armrests. Damp whisky glasses had bitten rings into the french polish. Hung high on the walls were prints of willowy gentlemen and ladies in crinolines.

  Sonny Urquhart was a hard stringy man with blond hair swept back and parted in the centre. He had moles on his face and a big Adam’s apple. The back of his neck was criss-crossed with lines from working hatless in the sun. His eyes were watery blue, and rather bloodshot.

  He finished his business with Bill about the bull. And Bill talked about farm prices and land reform and Sonny shook or nodded his head. He sat on a firestool and sipped his whisky. Of Scotland he preserved a certain pride of blood and a dim memory of kilts and pipes, but those were the festivities of another generation.

  His aunt and uncle had come down from Buenos Aires to look after him. The aunt was pleased we had come. She had been baking and brought in a cake, iced with pink sugar and fluffy inside. She cut huge slices and served them on delicate china plates with silver forks. We had eaten earlier but we couldn’t refuse. She cut a slice for Sonny.

  ‘You know I don’t eat cake,’ he said.

  Sonny had a sister who was a nurse in Buenos Aires. When their mother died she came back home but she quarrelled with Sonny’s peon. He was half-Indian and he slept in the house. She hated his knife. She hated the way he used it at table. She knew the peon was bad for Sonny. They drank most nights. Sometimes they drank all night and slept through the next day. She tried to change the house, to make it more cheerful, but Sonny said: ‘The house stays the way it was.’

  One night they were both drunk, and the peon insulted her. She panicked and locked herself in her room. She felt something bad was going to happen and went back to her old job.

  Sonny and the peon fought after she’d gone. The neighbours said it could have been much worse. The aunt and uncle came down then, but they couldn’t take the farm either. Fortunately they had savings enough to buy a bungalow in a Buenos Aires suburb, in a nice neighbourhood, mind you, with other English people.

  They chattered on and Sonny sipped his whisky. He wanted the peon back. You could tell from what he did not say that he wanted the peon back.

  6

  BAHÍA BLANCA is the last big place before the Patagonian desert. Bill dropped me at the hotel near the bus station. The bar-room was green and brightly lit and full of men playing cards. A country boy stood by the bar. He was shaky on his feet but he kept his head up like a gaucho. He was a nice-looking boy with curly black hair and he really was very drunk. The owner’s wife showed me a hot airless room, painted purple, with two beds in it. The room had no window and the door gave out on to a glassed-in courtyard. It was very cheap and the woman said nothing about having to share.

  I was half asleep when the country boy reeled in, flung himself on the other bed and groaned and sat up and was sick. He was sick on and off for an hour and then he snored. I did not sleep that night for the smell of the sick and the snoring.

  So next day, as we drove through the desert, I sleepily watched the rags of silver cloud spinning across the sky, and the sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps and rising in terraces and the white dust streaming off the saltpans, and, on the horizon, land and sky dissolving into an absence of colour.

  Patagonia begins on the Rio Negro. At mid-day the bus crossed an iron bridge over the river and stopped outside a bar. An Indian woman got off with her son. She had filled up two seats with her bulk. She chewed garlic and wore real gold jangly earrings and a hard white hat pinned over her braids. A look of abstract horror passed over the boy’s face as she manoeuvred herself and her parcels on to the street.

  The permanent houses of the village were of brick with black stove pipes and a tangle of electric wires above. Where the brick houses gave out, the shacks of the Indians began. These were patched out of packing cases, sheet plastic and sacking.

  A single man was walking up the street, his brown felt hat pulled low over his face. He was carrying a sack and walking into the white dustclouds, out into the country. Some children sheltered in a doorway and tormented a lamb. From one hut came the noise of the radio and sizzling fat. A lumpy arm appeared and threw a dog a bone. The dog took it and slunk off.

  The Indians were migrant workers from Southern Chile. They were Araucanian Indians. A hundred years ago the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead. Their boys’ education consisted of hockey, horsemanship, liquor, insolence and sexual athletics, and for three centuries they scared the Spaniards out of their wits. In the sixteenth century Alonso de Ercilla wrote an epic in their honour and called it the Araucana. Voltaire read it and through him the Araucanians became candidates for the Noble Savage (tough version). The Araucanians are still very tough and would be a lot tougher if they gave up drink.

  Outside the village there were irrigated plantations of maize and squash, and orchards of cherries and apricots. Along the line of the river, the willows were all blown about and showing their silvery undersides. The Indians had been cutting withies and there were fresh white cuts and the smell of sap. The river was swollen with snowmelt from the Andes, fast-running and rustling the reeds. Purple swallows were chasing bugs. When they flew above the cliff, the wind caught them and keeled them over in a fluttering reversal and they dropped again low over the river.

  The cliff rose sheer above a ferry-landing. I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

  The Patagonian. desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. Unalike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience. Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible. In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these ‘arid wastes’ had taken such firm possession of his mind.

  In the 1860s W. H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin’s question, and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.

  About the time of Hudson’s visit, the Rio Negro was the northern frontier of an unusual kingdom which still maintains a court in exile in Paris.

  7

  ON A drizzling; November afternoon, His Royal Highness Prince Philippe of Araucania and Patagonia gave me an audience at his public relations firm on the Faubourg Poissonière. To get there I had to pass the Marxist daily L’Humanité, a cinema showing ‘Pinocchio’, and a shop that sold fox and skunk skins from Patagonia. Also present was the Court Historian, a young and portly Argentine of French descent with royal buttons on his blazer.


  The Prince was a short man in a brown tweed suit who sucked at a briar pipe that curled down his chin. He had just come back from East Berlin on business and disdainfully waved about a copy of Pravda. He showed me a long manuscript in search of a publisher; a photo of two Araucanian citizens holding up their tricolour, the Blue, White and Green; a court order allowing M. Philippe Boiry to use his royal title on a French passport; a letter from the Consul of El Salvador in Houston recognizing him as a head of state in exile; and his correspondence with Presidents Perón and Eisenhower (whom he had decorated) and with Prince Montezuma, the pretender to the Aztec throne.

  In parting he gave me copies of the Cahiers des Hautes-Etudes Araucaniennes, among them Comte Léon M. de Moulin-Peuillet’s study, The Royal Succession of Araucania and the Order of Memphis and Misrāim (Egyptian Rite).

  ‘Every time I try something,’ the Prince said, ’I gain a little.’

  8

  IN THE spring of 1859 the lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens closed his grey-shuttered office in the Rue Hiéras in Périgueux, looked back at the byzantine profile of the cathedral, and left for England, clutching the valise that held the 25,000 francs he had withdrawn from his family’s joint account, thus accelerating their ruin.

  He was the eighth son of peasant farmers who lived in a collapsing gentilhommière at the hamlet of La Chèze near the hamlet of Las Fount. He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die), a bachelor and a freemason, who, with a bit of cheating, had traced his descent from a Gallo-Roman senator and added a de to his name. He had moonstruck eyes and flowing black hair and beard. He dressed as a dandy, held himself excessively erect and acted with the unreasoning courage of the visionary.

  Through Voltaire he had come on Ercilla’s epic of wooden stanzas and learned of the untamed tribes of the Chilean South:Robust and beardless,