In Patagonia Read online

  Bodies rippling and muscular,

  Hard limbs, nerves of steel,

  Agile, brazen, cheerful,

  Spirited, valiant, daring,

  Toughened by work, patient

  Of mortal cold, hunger and heat.

  Murat was a stable boy and he was King of Naples. Bernadotte was a lawyer’s clerk from Pau and he was King of Sweden. And Orélie-Antoine got it into his head that the Araucanians would elect him king of a young and vigorous nation.

  He boarded an English merchantman, rounded the Horn in mid-winter, and landed at Coquimbo, on the desert shore of Chile, where he lodged with a fellow mason. He soon learned that the Araucanians were heading for their last stand against the Republic, began an encouraging correspondence with their Cacique, Mañil, and in October crossed the River Bio-Bio, the frontier of his designated kingdom.

  An interpreter and two Frenchmen went along—MM. Lachaise and Desfontaines, his Minister for Foreign Affairs and Secretary of State for Justice, phantom functionaries, named after La Chèze and Las Fount and contained within the person of His Majesty.

  Orélie-Antoine and his two invisible ministers battled through an underscrub of scarlet flowers and fell in with a young horseman. The boy told him Mañil was dead and led the way to his successor, Quilapán. The Frenchman was delighted to hear that the word ‘Republic’ was as odious to the Indian as to himself. But there was one new fact he did not know: before dying the Cacique Mañil prophesied that eternal delusion of the Amerindian: the end of war and slavery would coincide with the coming of a bearded white stranger.

  The Araucanians’ welcome encouraged Orélie-Antoine to proclaim a constitutional monarchy with a succession to be established within his own family. He signed the document with his spidery royal signature, endorsed it with the bolder hand of M. Desfontaines, and sent copies to the Chilean President and the Santiago newspapers. Three days later, a horseman, exhausted by two crossings of the Cordillera, brought fresh news: the Patagonians also accepted the kingdom. Orélie-Antoine signed another paper, annexing the whole of South America from Latitude 42° to the Horn.

  Staggered by the magnitude of his act, the king retired to a boarding house in Valparaiso and busied himself with the Constitution, the Armed Forces, the steamship line to Bordeaux and the National Anthem (composed by a Sr Guillermo Frick of Valdivia). He wrote an open letter to his home newspaper Le Périgord advertising ‘La Nouvelle France’ as a fertile land bursting with minerals, which would compensate for the loss of Louisiana, and Canada, but didn’t mention it was full of warrior Indians. Another newspaper, Le Temps, jibed that ‘La Nouvelle France’ inspired about as much confidence as M. de Tounens his former clients.

  Nine months later, penniless and stung by indifference, he returned to Araucania with a horse, a mule and a servant called Rosales. (When hiring this individual he made the common tourist’s mistake of confusing fifteen for fifty pesos.) At the first village his subjects were drunk, but they revived and passed word for the tribes to muster. The king spoke of Natural and International Law; the Indians replied with vivas. He stood within a circle of naked horsemen, in a brown poncho, with a white fillet round his head, saluting with stiff Napoleonic gestures. He unfurled the Tricolour, crying, ‘Long live the Unity of the Tribes! Under a single chief! Under a single flag!’

  The king was now dreaming of an army of thirty thousand warriors and of imposing his frontier by force. War cries echoed through the forest and the itinerant hooch-sellers scuttled for civilization. Across the river, the white colonists saw smoke signals and signalled their own fears to the military. Meanwhile Rosales scribbled a note to his wife (which she alone could decipher) telling of his plan to kidnap the French adventurer.

  Orélie-Antoine moved through the settlements without escort. Stopping one day for lunch, he sat by a riverbank, lost in reverie, ignoring a party of armed men he saw talking to Rosales in the trees. A weight pressed on his shoulders. Hands clamped round his arms. More hands stripped him of his possessions.

  The Chilean carabineers forced the king to ride to the provincial capital of Los Angeles and hauled him before the Governor, a patrician landowner, Don Cornelio Saavedra.

  ‘Do you speak French?’ the prisoner demanded. He began by asserting his royal rights and ended by offering to return to the bosom of his family.

  Saavedra appreciated that Orélie-Antoine could want nothing better. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I am having you tried as a common criminal to discourage others who may imitate your example.’

  The jail in Los Angeles was dark and damp. His warders waved lanterns in his face as he slept. He caught dysentery. He writhed on a sodden straw mattress and saw the spectre of the garrotte. In one lucid interval he composed the order of succession: ‘We, Orélie-Antoine Ier, bachelor, by the Grace of God and the National Will, Sovereign etc. etc.... ’ The throne would pass to his old father, at that season gathering in his walnuts—then to his brothers and their issue.

  And then his hair fell out and with it went the will to rule.

  Orélie-Antoine renounced the throne (under duress) and M. Cazotte, the French Consul, managed to get him out of prison and shipped him home aboard a French warship. He was put on short rations but the cadets asked him over to dine at their table.

  Exiled in Paris, his hair grew back longer and blacker than before, and his appetite for rule swelled to megalomaniac proportions. ‘Louis XI after Péronne,’ he concluded his memoirs, ‘François Ier after Pavia were no less Kings of France than before.’ And yet his career followed that of other dislocated monarchs; the picaresque attempts to return; the solemn ceremonial in shabby hotels; the bestowal of titles as the price of a meal ticket (at one point his Court Chamberlain was Antoine Jimenez de la Rosa, Duc de Saint-Valentin, Member of the University of Smyrna and other scientific institutions etc.); a certain success in attracting parvenu financiers and anciens combattants de guerre; and an unwavering conviction that the hierarchic principle of God is incarnate in a King.

  He tried to get back three times. Three times he appeared on the Rio Negro and set off up-river to cross the Cordillera. All three times he was thwarted and sent packing to France, once through Indian treachery, next through the vigilance of an Argentine governor (who saw through his disguise of short hair, dark glasses and the pseudonym of M. Jean Prat). The third attempt is open to different interpretations: either the gauchos’ unrelieved diet of meat caused an intestinal blockage, or some freemasons poisoned him for renouncing his vows. The fact is, in 1877 he appeared half-dead on the operating theatre of a Buenos Aires hospital. A Messageries-Maritimes steamer landed him at Bordeaux. He went to Tourtoirac, to the house of his nephew Jean, a butcher. For one painful year he worked as the village lamplighter, and then he died, on September tt)th 1878.

  The later history of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia belongs rather to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America. In default of a successor from the Tounens family, a M. Gustave Achille Laviarde interposed himself and reigned as Achille Ier. He was a native of Rheims where his mother ran a wash-house known locally as ‘The Castle of Green Frogs’. He was a Bonapartist, a freemason, an ‘actionnaire’ of Möet and Chandon, an expert on barrage balloons (which he somewhat resembled) and an acquaintance of Verlaine. He financed his receptions with his commercial enterprise known as the Royal Society of the Constellation of the South, never removed his court from Paris, but did open consulates in Mauritius, Haiti, Nicaragua and Port-Vendres. When he made overtures to the Vatican, a Chilean prelate said: ‘This kingdom exists only in the minds of drunken idiots.’

  The third king, Dr Antoine Cros (Antoine II) had been physician to the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil and died at Asnières after reigning a year and a half. He was an amateur lithographer in the style of Hieronymus Bosch and brother of Charles Cros, the inventor and poet of Le Coffret de Santal.

  Dr Cros’s daughter succeeded and passed the crown to her son, M. Jacques Bernard. For a second
time a monarch of Araucania went behind bars, for services to the Pétain Government.

  M. Philippe Boiry, his successor, reigns modestly with the title of hereditary prince and has restored the house at La Chèze for use as a holiday home.

  I asked him if he knew Kipling’s story The Man who would be King.

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s odd that Kipling’s heroes, Peachey and Dravot, should also have been freemasons?’

  ‘Purely a coincidence,’ the Prince said.

  9

  I LEFT the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn.

  A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement, and from Parliament’s ban on Welsh in schools. Their leaders had combed the earth for a stretch of open country uncontaminated by Englishmen. They chose Patagonia for its absolute remoteness and foul climate; they did not want to get rich.

  The Argentine Government gave them land along the Chubut River. From Madryn it was a march of forty miles over the thorn desert. And when they did reach the valley, they had the impression that God, and not the Government, had given them the land.

  Port Madryn was a town of shabby concrete buildings, tin bungalows, tin warehouses and a wind-flattened garden. There was a cemetery of black cypresses and shiny black marble tombstones. The Calle Saint-Exupéry was a reminder that the storm in Vol de Nuit was somewhere in these parts.

  I walked along the esplanade and looked out at the even line of cliffs spreading round the bay. The cliffs were a lighter grey than the grey of the sea and sky. The beach was grey and littered with dead penguins. Halfway along was a concrete monument in memory of the Welsh. It looked like the entrance to a bunker. Let into its sides were bronze reliefs representing Barbarism and Civilization. Barbarism showed a group of Tehuelche Indians, naked, with slabby back muscles in the Soviet style. The Welsh were on the side of Civilization—greybeards, young men with scythes, and big-breasted girls with babies.

  At dinner the waiter wore white gloves and served a lump of burnt lamb that bounced on the plate. Spread over the restaurant wall was an immense canvas of gauchos herding cattle into an orange sunset. An old-fashioned blonde gave up on the lamb and sat painting her nails. An Indian came in drunk and drank through three jugs of wine. His eyes were glittering slits in the red leather shield of his face. The jugs were of green plastic in the shape of penguins.

  10

  I TOOK the night bus on to the Chubut Valley. By next morning I was in the village of Gaimán, the centre of Welsh Patagonia today. The valley was about five miles wide, a net of irrigated fields and poplar windbreaks, set between the white cliffs of the barranca—a Nile Valley in miniature.

  The older houses in Gaimán were of red brick, with sash windows and neat vegetable gardens and ivy trained to grow over the porches. The name of one house was Nith-y-dryw, the Wren’s Nest. Inside, the rooms were whitewashed and had brown painted doors, polished brass handles and grandfather clocks. The colonists came with few possessions but they clung to their family clocks.

  Mrs Jones’s teashop lay at the far end of the village where the bridge crossed over to the Bethel. Her plums were ripe and her garden full of roses.

  ‘I can’t move, my dear,’ she called through. ‘You’ll have to come and talk to me in the kitchen.’

  She was a squat old lady in her eighties. She sat propped up at a scrubbed deal table filling lemon-curd tarts.

  ‘I can’t move an inch, my darling. I’m crippled. I’ve had arthritis since the flood and have to be carried everywhere.’

  Mrs Jones pointed to the line where the floodwater came, above the blue-painted dado, on the kitchen wall.

  ‘Stuck in here I was, with the water up to my neck.’

  She came out nearly sixty years ago from Bangor in North Wales. She had not left the valley since. She remembered a family I knew in Bangor and said: ‘Fancy, it’s a small world.’

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Not to look at me now you won’t. But I was a beauty in my day.’ And she talked about a laddie from Manchester and his bouquet of flowers and the quarrel and the parting and the ship.

  ‘And how are the morals back home?’ she asked. ‘Down?’

  ‘Down.’

  ‘And they’re down here too. All this killing. You can’t tell where it’ll end.’

  Mrs Jones’s grandson helped run the teashop. He ate too much cake for his own good. He called his grandmother ‘Granny’ but otherwise he did not speak English or Welsh.

  I slept in the Draigoch Guest House. It was owned by Italians who played Neapolitan songs on the juke box late into the night.

  11

  IN THE morning I. walked to Bethesda along a white road lined with poplars. A farmer was walking in my direction and he took me to call on his brother Alun Powell. We turned up a track into a farmyard shaded by willows. A Welsh sheepdog barked and then licked our faces. There was a low mudbrick house with sash windows and a tin roof, and in the yard a horsedrawn buggy and some old machinery.

  Alun Powell was a small man, crinkled by the sun and wind. His wife had shiny cheeks and was always laughing. Their living room was blue and had a Welsh dresser with postcards from Wales on it. Mrs Powell’s first cousin had left Patagonia and gone back home to Wales.

  ‘He has done well,’ she said. ‘He’s now the Archdruid.’

  Their grandfather came out from Caernarvon but she couldn’t say where that was. Caernarvon wasn’t marked on her map of Wales.

  ‘You can’t expect much,’ she said, ‘when it’s printed on a tea-towel.’

  I pointed out where Caernarvon should be. She had always wanted to know.

  The Powells had a boy called Eddy and a girl. They had five cows, a small herd of sheep, a field of potatoes, squashes, maize and sunflowers; and a vegetable garden, an orchard and a spinney. They had a mare in foal, hens, ducks, and the dog. Behind the spinney was a row of pigsties. One pig had scab and we doused it with medicament.

  The day was hot. Mrs Powell said: ‘It’s better to talk than work. Let’s have an asado.’ She went to the barn and set a table with a red and white check cloth. Eddy lit the fire and his father went to an underground larder. He cut a side of mutton from a hanging carcass, stripped off the fat and gave it to the dog. He fixed the meat to an asador, which is an iron spit in the shape of a cross, and stuck it in the ground slanting over the fire. Later we ate the asado with a sauce called salmuera, made of vinegar, garlic, chillies and oregano.

  ‘It takes the fattiness off the meat,’ Mrs Powell said.

  We drank thin vino rosado and Alun Powell talked about the herbs that grew in the desert.

  ‘You can cure every kind of sickness with them,’ he said. His grandparents learned them from the Indians. But it had all changed now.

  ‘Not even the birds are the same. The ouraka came down from Buenos Aires thirty years back. That just shows you. Things change with the birds, just as they do with us.’

  The wine made us drowsy. After lunch Eddy gave me his room for a siesta. The walls were whitewashed. There was a white painted bed and a grey chest for clothes. The only other things in the room were spurs and stirrups arranged symmetrically on a shelf.

  12

  IN GAIMÁN the schoolmaster’s wife introduced me to the pianist. He was a thin nervous boy with a drained face and eyes that watered in the wind. His hands were strong and red. The ladies of the Welsh choir had adopted him and taught him their songs. He had taken piano lessons and now he was leaving for Buenos Aires to study at the Conservatoire.

  Anselmo lived with his parents behind their grocery shop. The mother made the pasta herself. She was a big German woman and she cried a lot. She cried when her Italian husband lost his temper and she cried at the thought of Anselmo going away. She had spent all her savings on the piano and now he was going away. The husband wouldn’t
have the piano played when he was in the house. And now the piano would be silent and her tears would water the pasta. Secretly, however, she was pleased about him going. Already she saw the white tie and heard the standing ovation.

  Over the Christmas holiday Anselmo’s parents went to the seaside with his elder brother, leaving him alone to practise. The brother was a garage mechanic, married to a solid Indian girl, who stared at people as if they were mad.

  Anselmo had a passion for the culture of Europe, the authentic, blinkered passion of the exile. When his father stopped him playing he would lock himself in his room and read sheet music or the lives of great composers from a musical encyclopædia. He was learning to play Liszt and asked complicated questions about Villa d’Este and the friendship with Wagner. I couldn’t help him.

  The Welsh showered him with attentions. The leading soprano had sent him a fruit cake for Christmas. And the tenor, the young farmer he’d accompanied at the Eisteddfod, had sent a plate painted with a penguin, a sea-lion and an ostrich. He was very pleased with these presents.

  ‘It is for what I do for them,’ he said. ‘And now I will play the Pathétique. Yes?’

  The room was bare, in the German way, white with lace curtains. Outside the wind kicked up dust clouds in the street and tilted the poplars. Anselmo went to a cupboard and took out a small white plaster bust of Beethoven. He put it on the piano and began.

  The playing was remarkable. I could not imagine a finer Pathétique further South. When he finished he said: ‘Now I play Chopin. Yes?’ and he replaced the bust of Beethoven with one of Chopin. ‘Do you wish waltzes or mazurkas?’

  ‘Mazurkas.’

  ‘I shall play my best favourite. It is the last music Chopin is writing.’

  And he played the mazurka that Chopin dictated on his deathbed. The wind whistled in the street and the music ghosted from the piano as leaves over a headstone and you could imagine you were in the presence of genius.