In Patagonia Page 6

  13

  CHRISTMAS DAY began badly when Mr Caradog Williams, the station master for twenty years, went to the Old Bethel and got out the cauldron to boil water for the children’s teaparty. He happened to look in the river and saw the corpse of a naked man, all bloated up and caught against the trunk of a fallen willow. It was not a Welshman.

  ‘Probably a tourist,’ the policeman said.

  Anselmo and I went to spend the day with the Davies family on their farm, Ty-Ysaf, one of the original hundred-acre lots. The Davieses were cousins of the Powells but better off. The farm supported six people, not counting the Chilean peon: Mrs Davies Senior, her son Ivor, his wife and their two boys, and Ivor’s bachelor brother Euan.

  Old Mrs Davies lived in the big house of five rooms. She was a shrunken old lady with the nicest smile and her hair worn up in braids. You could tell she was very tough underneath. In the afternoons she sat on the east porch, out of the wind, and watched the hollyhocks and peonies changing day by day. The living-room hadn’t changed since she came here as a young bride in 1913. The pink walls were the same. The two Sheffield-plate trays—they were wedding presents—were on the mantelpiece, and the two pottery pug-dogs. On either side of the dresser were tinted photographs of her husband’s parents, who came out from Ffestiniog. They had always hung there and they’d hang there when she’d gone.

  Old Mr Davies passed on last year. He was eighty-three. But she always had Euan for company. He was a brawny man with hazel eyes and dark red hair and a cheerful, freckled face.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Davies said. ‘Euan hasn’t married yet, but he sings instead. He’s a wonderful tenor. He made them all cry at the Eisteddfod when he carried off the prize. Anselmo was the accompanist and they made a fine pair. Oh, how that boy plays the piano. I’m so pleased Euan gave him the nice plate for Christmas. The poor thing looks so lost and lonely and it’s no fun living in Chubut if your family doesn’t help.

  ‘Yes. Euan must get married one day, but who to? There’s a shortage of young ladies and she has to be the right one. Suppose she quarrelled with the others? Suppose the farm couldn’t support two families? They’d have to split and that would be terrible. One lot would have to go away and start somewhere else.’

  Mrs Davies hoped that would not happen as long as she were alive.

  Ivor Davies lived with his family in the smaller mudbrick house of three rooms. He was a tall upright man, balding, with eyes set well back into the skull. He was a religious man himself, and on his dresser were pamphlets from the Welsh Bible Society. Ivor Davies could not believe the world was as bad as everyone said.

  Ivor and Euan did all the work on the farm. The hardest work was digging out the irrigation ditches. The peon hardly did a thing. He had lived in the tool shed for five years. He planted his own patch of beans and did enough odd jobs to keep him in maté and sugar. He never went back to Chile and they wondered if he’d killed a man.

  Mrs Ivor Davies was an Italian woman of the happiest disposition. Both her parents were Genoese. She had black hair and blue eyes and a rose-pink complexion you somehow didn’t associate with the climate. She kept saying how beautiful everything was—‘Qué linda familia!’ even if the children were ugly. ‘Qué lindo dia!’ if it poured with rain. Whatever was not beautiful she made it seem so. She thought the Welsh community especially beautiful. She spoke Welsh and sang in Welsh. But, as an Italian, she couldn’t make the boys Welsh. They were bored with the community and wanted to go to the States.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ said Gwynneth Morgan, who was a fine Celtic woman with golden hair tied in a bun. ‘When Welshmen marry foreigners, they lose the tradition.’ Gwynneth Morgan was unmarried. She wanted to keep the valley Welsh, the way it was. ‘But it’s all going to pieces,’ she said.

  For Mrs Ivor Davies was dreaming of Italy, and of Venice in particular. She had once seen Venice and the Bridge of Sighs. And when she said the word sospiri, she said it so loudly and insistently that you knew she was pining for Italy. Chubut was so very far from Venice and Venice was far more beautiful than anything else she knew.

  After tea we all went to the hymn-singing at Bryn-Crwn Chapel. Ivor took his wife and mother in the pick-up, and the rest of us went in the Dodge. Ivor’s father bought the Dodge in the 1920s and it hadn’t broken down yet, but machinery was better then than now.

  Bryn-Crwn Chapel was built in 1896 and sat in the middle of a field. Six Welshmen in dark suits and flat caps stood in line against the red brick wall. Inside the annexe the women were laying the table for tea.

  Anselmo played the harmonium and the wind howled and the rain beat on the windows and the teros screamed. The Welsh sang John Wesley’s hymns and the sad songs of God’s promise to Cymry, the high-pitched trebles and sopranos, and the old men growling at the back. There was old Mr Hubert Lloyd-Jones, who could hardly walk; and Mrs Lloyd-Jones in a straw-flowered hat; and Mrs Cledwyn Hughes, the one they call Fattie; and Nan Hammond and Dai Morgan. All the Davies and Powell families were present, even Oscar Powell ‘the wild boy’, who wore a T-shirt with Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in red letters around a Welsh dragon.

  The service ended. The old people chatted and the children played hide-and-seek among the pews. Then we all trooped in to tea. It was the second tea of the day, but Christmas was a day of teas. The women poured tea from black pottery teapots. Mrs Davies had brought a pizza and the Welsh tried a little of that. Anselmo was talking and laughing with Euan. They were close friends. He was full of vitality, but it was a borrowed vitality, for the Welshmen cheered up all who saw their bright and weatherbeaten faces.

  14

  ANSELMO TOLD me to go and see the poet. ‘The Maestro,’ he said.

  The poet lived along a lonely stretch of river, in overgrown orchards of apricots, alone in a two-roomed hut. He had been a teacher of literature in Buenos Aires. He came down to Patagonia forty years back and stayed.

  I knocked on the door and he woke. It was drizzling and while he dressed I sheltered under the porch and watched his colony of pet toads.

  His fingers gripped my arm. He fixed me with an intense and luminous stare.

  ‘Patagonia!’ he cried. ‘She is a hard mistress. She casts her spell. An enchantress! She folds you in her arms and never lets go.’

  The rain drummed on the tin roof. For the next two hours he was my Patagonia.

  The room was dark and dusty. At the back, shelves made of planks and packing cases bent under the weight of books, mineral specimens, Indian artefacts and fossil oysters. On the walls were a cuckoo clock, a lithograph of Pampas Indians, and another of the Gaucho Martin Fierro.

  ‘The Indians rode better than the gauchos,’ he said. ‘Brown limbs! Naked on horseback! Their children learned to ride before they walked. They were one with their horses. Ah! Mi Indio !’

  His desk was littered with broken almond shells and his favourite books; Ovid’s Tristia, The Georgics, Walden, Pigafetta’s Voyage of Magellan, Leaves of Grass, The Poem of Martin Fierro, The Purple Land and Blake’s Songs of Innocence, of which he was especially fond.

  Smacking it free of dust, he gave me a copy of his Canto on the Last Flooding of the Chubut River, privately printed in Trelew, which combined, in Alexandrines, his vision of the Deluge and a paean of praise for the engineers of the new dam. He had published two volumes of poetry in his life, Voices of the Earth and Rolling Stones, the last named after the layer of glacier-rolled pebbles that cover the Patagonian pampas. The scope of his verse was cosmic; technically it was astonishing. He managed to squeeze the extinction of the dinosaurs into rhymed couplets using Spanish and Linnaean Latin.

  He gave me a sticky apéritif of his own manufacture, sat me in a chair, and read, with gestures and clattering of false teeth, weighty stanzas that described the geological transformations of Patagonia.

  I asked him what he was writing at present. He cackled humorously.

  ‘My production is limited. As T. S. Eliot once said
: “The poem can wait.” ’

  It stopped raining and I came to leave. Bees hummed around the poet’s hives. His apricots were ripening the colour of a pale sun. Clouds of thistledown drifted across the view and in a field there were some fleecy white sheep.

  15

  WAVING TO the poet, I walked towards the road that goes westwards up the Chubut River and on to the Cordillera. A truck stopped with three men in the cab. They were going to get a load of hay from the mountains. All night I bounced in the back, and at dawn, covered in dust, I watched the sun strike the Ice-caps and saw the high slopes, far off, streaked white with snow and black with forests of southern beech.

  As we drove into Esquel, a bush fire was burning on one of the tight brown hills that hemmed in the town. I ate at a green restaurant on the main street. A zinc counter ran the length of the room. At one end a glass vitrine displayed steaks and kidneys and racks of lamb and sausages. The wine was acid and came in pottery penguins. There were hard black hats at every table. The gauchos wore boots creased like concertinas and black bombachas. (Bombachas are baggy pants, once French ex-army surplus from Zouave regiments in the Crimean War.)

  A man with bloodshot eyes left his friends and came over.

  ‘Can I speak with you, Señor?’

  ‘Sit down and have a glass.’

  ‘You are English?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I know my people,’ he said. ‘Same blood as my employer.’

  ‘Why not Welsh?’

  ‘I know Welsh from English and you are English.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He was very pleased and shouted over to his friends: ‘You see, I know my people.’

  The man directed me to the stud farm of an Englishman about twenty miles into the country. ‘A tipo macanudo,’ he said, a good fellow, the perfect English gentleman.

  Jim Ponsonby’s place was a hill farm, with winter grazing in the valley and summer pasture on the mountain. There were Hereford bulls in his meadow and among them yellow-fronted ibises, big birds with bright pink feet that made a melancholy honking sound.

  The house was low and white and stood in a planting of silver birches. A Spanish woman came to the door.

  ‘My husband’s helping the patrón with the rams,’ she said. ‘They’re choosing rams for the show. You’ll find them in the shearing shed.’

  He was, certainly, the perfect English gentleman, of middle height, with thick grey hair and a close-clipped moustache. His eyes were a particularly cold shade of blue. His face was netted with a regular pattern of burst blood vessels and his stomach showed signs of indulgence in food and drink. His dress was the result of meticulous planning: the Norfolk jacket in brown herring-bone tweed, the hardwood buttons, the open-necked khaki shirt, the worsted trousers, tortoiseshell bifocals and spitand-polished shoes.

  He was making notes in his stud book. His man Antonio was got up in full gaucho rig, with a knife or facón thrust diagonally across the small of his back. He was parading a group of Australian Merinos before his employer.

  The rams panted under the weight of their own fleece and virility, mouthing a little alfalfa with the resignation of obese invalids on a diet. The best animals wore a cotton oversheet to protect them from dirt. Antonio had to undress them, and the Englishman would plunge his hand in and splay out his fingers, laying bare five inches of creamy yellow fleece.

  ‘And what part of the old country d’you come from?’ he asked.

  ‘Gloucestershire.’

  ‘Gloucestershire, eh! Gloucestershire! In the North, what?’

  ‘In the West.’

  ‘Damn me, so it is. The West. Yes. Our place was in Chippenham. Probably never heard of it. That’s in Wiltshire.’

  ‘About fifteen miles from me.’

  ‘Probably a different Chippenham. And how is the old country getting along?’ He changed the subject to avoid our geographical conversation. ‘Thing’s aren’t going too well, are they? Damned shame!’

  16

  I SLEPT in the peons’ quarters. The night was cold. They gave me a cot bed and a black winter poncho as a coverlet. Apart from these ponchos, their maté equipment and their knives, the peons were free of possessions.

  In the morning there was a heavy dew on the white clover. I walked down the track to the Welsh village of Trevelin, the Place of the Mill. Far below in the valley, tin roofs were glinting. I saw the mill, an ordinary Victorian mill, but on the edge of the village were some strange timber buildings with roofs sloping at all angles. Coming up close I saw that one was a water-tower. A banner floated from it, reading ‘Instituto Bahai’.

  A black face popped over the bank.

  ‘¿Qué tal?’

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘Come in.’

  The Bahai Institute of Trevelin consisted of one short, very black and very muscular negro from Bolivia and six ex-students from the University of Teheran, only one of whom was present.

  ‘All men,’ the Bolivian sniggered. ‘All very religious.’

  He was making a makeshift spinner from a tin can and wanted to go fishing in the lake. The Persian was dousing himself in the shower.

  The Persians had come to Patagonia as missionaries for their world religion. They had plenty of money and had stuffed the place with the trappings of middle-class Teheran—wine-red Bokhara rugs, fancy cushions, brass trays, and cigarette boxes painted with scenes from the Shahnama.

  The Persian, whose name was Ali, swanned out of the shower in a sarong. Black hairs rippled over his unhealthy white body. He had enormous syrupy eyes and a drooping moustache. He sank back on a pile of cushions, ordered the negro to do the washing up and discussed the world situation.

  ‘Persia is a very poor country,’ he said.

  ‘Persia is a bloody rich country,’ I said.

  ‘Persia could be a rich country but the Americans have robbed her wealth.’ Ali smiled showing a set of swollen gums.

  He offered to show me over the Institute. In their library the books were all Bahai literature. I noted down two titles—The Wrath of God and Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahai Ullah. There was also a Guide to Better Writing.

  ‘Which religion have you?’ Ali asked. ‘Christian?’

  ‘I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.’

  The negro was delighted to hear this. He wanted to walk to the lake and go fishing.

  ‘How you like my friend?’ asked Ali.

  ‘I like him. He’s a nice friend.’

  ‘He is my friend.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘He is my very good friend.‘ He pushed his face up to mine. ‘And this is our room.’ He opened a door. There was a doublebed with a stuffed doll perched on the pillow. On the wall, strung up on a leather thong, was a big steel machete, which Ali waved in my face.

  ‘Ha! I kill the ungodly.’

  ‘Put that thing down.’

  ‘English is infidel.’

  ‘I said put that thing down.’

  ‘I only joke,’ he said and strung the machete back on its hook. ‘Is very dangerous here. Argentine is very dangerous people. I have revolver also.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  Ali then showed me the garden and admired it. The Bahais had set their hand to sculpture and garden furniture, and the Bolivian had made a crazy-paving path.

  ‘And now you must go,’ Ali said. ‘I am tired yet and we must sleep.’

  The Bolivian did not want me to go. It was a lovely day. He did want to go fishing. Going to bed that morning was the last thing he wanted to do.

  17

  MILTON EVANS was the principal resident of Trevelin and son of its founder. He was a round moustachioed gentleman of sixty-one, who prided himself on his English. His favourite expression was ‘Gimme another horse piss!’ And his daughter, who did not speak English, would bring a beer and he’d say, ‘Aah! Horse piss!�
� and drain the bottle.

  His father, John Evans, came out on the Mimosa as a baby. He was the first of his generation to ride like an Indian. Not for him the inflexible round of field-work, chapel and tea. He settled up-country in the Cordillera, made money and built the mill. Once established he took his family to Wales on a year’s visit. Milton went to school in Ffestiniog and had a long story about fishing from a bridge.

  He directed me to the grave of his father’s horse. Inside a white fence was a boulder set in a plantation of marigolds and Christmas trees. The inscription read:HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF MY HORSE EL-MALACARA WHICH SAVED MY LIFE FROM THE INDIANS ON THE 14TH OF MARCH 1883 ON MY RETURN FROM THE CORDILLERA.

  At the beginning of that month, John Evans, with three companions, Hughes, Parry and Davies, rode west up the Chubut Valley. There was an old legend of a city and a new rumour of gold. They stayed in the tents of a friendly Cacique and saw the grass country beginning and the peaks of the Cordillera, but having no food they decided to return. The horses’ hooves splintered on sharp stones and set them limping. They were thirty-six hours in the saddle. Parry and Hughes hung their heads and let the reins go limp. But Evans was tougher and shot two hares, so the four did eat that night.

  Next afternoon they were crossing a valley of blinding white dust and heard the thud of hooves behind. John Evans spurred El-Malacara clear of the Indian lances, but, looking back, saw Parry and Hughes fall and Davies clinging to the saddle with a spear in his side. The horse outpaced the Indians’, but stopped dead before a gulch, where the desert floor split wide. With the Indians on him, Evans spurred again and El-Malacara took a clean jump of twenty feet, sheer over the precipice, slid down the screes and made the farther side. The Indians, who recognized a brave man, did not attempt to follow.

  Forty hours later, Evans rode into the Welsh colony and reported the deaths to the leader Lewis Jones.