In Patagonia (13 page)

She had been making pastry and the grey dough clung to her hands. Her blood-red nails were cracked and chipped.

‘J'aime bien la cuisine,'
she said.
‘C'est une des seules choses que je peux faire maintenant.'

Her French was halting and slow. Her face lit up as she remembered the idioms of her childhood. She took up a coloured photograph of her city and began to recall the names of quays, streets, parks, fountains, and avenues. Together we strolled around pre-war Geneva.

Long ago she sang in operettas and cafés concerts. She came to Argentina, the land of opportunity and the tango in the early 1930s. She showed me copies of her own song,
Novia Pàlida, The Pale Bride.
The tempo was slow waltz. On the green cover was her picture, taken in 1932, leaning over the white rail of a ship, in a sailor suit with a wide white collar, smiling a diffident smile.

At some negative turning point she had married a moon-faced Swede. They joined two failures in one and drifted towards the end of the world. Caught by chance in this eddy, they built the perfect cottage of his native Malmö, with its intelligent windows and vertical battens painted red with iron-oxide.

The Swede died fifteen years ago and she had never left Rio Pico. Their son was a trucker. He wore chequered shirts and a red handkerchief at the neck, but when he relaxed, his face collapsed in Nordic sadness.

Her two rooms led one into the other. A pair of plastic curtains divided the space. She had painted them in trompe l'oeil to resemble the crimson velvet of theatre draperies, tied back with tassels of gold.

‘I can still paint a little,' she said.

She had covered every inch of wall with murals, some in paint, some in coloured crayons.

A yellow sun rolled over the pampa and into the room. It played over the sails of yachts drifting on a summer's day; on cafés hung with Japanese lanterns; on the Château de Chillon, mountain chalets and the Île des Peupliers.

She had carved little wooden faces of angels, painted them with rosy cheeks and set them round the cornice. On one wall was a small picture in oils, a sunny landscape cleft by a black gulch. At the bottom were skulls and bones and, above, hung a ricketty bridge. Halfway across stood a little girl with a white frightened face and red hair streaming in the wind. She was tottering to fall but a golden angel hovered above and offered her his hand.

‘I like this painting,' she said. ‘It is my guardian angel. My Angel, who has always saved me.'

A copy of
The Pale Bride
lay open on the music stand of the piano. Black gaps yawned where the ivory had come off. I noticed that not all her fingernails were painted. Some were red. Some she had left blank. Perhaps she did not have enough nailpaint to complete both hands.

I left the soprano and went to call on the Germans:

T
HE WIND blew the smell of rain down the valley ahead of the rain itself, the smell of wet earth and aromatic plants. The old woman pulled in her washing and fetched the cane chairs off the terrace. The old man, Anton Hahn, put on boots and a waterproof and went into the garden to check that all the catchments were clear. The peon came over from the barn with an empty bottle and the woman filled it with apple
chicha.
He was drunk already. Two red oxen stood yoked to a cart, bracing themselves for the storm.

The old man walked round his vegetable garden and his flower garden bright with annuals. Having seen that they would get the full benefit of the rain, he came inside the house. Apart from its metal roof nothing distinguished it from the houses of a South German village, the half-timbering infilled with white plaster, the grey shutters, the wicket fence, scrubbed floors, painted panelling, the chandelier of antler tines and lithographs of the Rhineland.

Anton Hahn took off his tweed cap and hung it on an antler. He took off his boots and canvas gaiters and put on rope-soled slippers. His head was flat on top and his face creased and red. A little girl with a pigtail came into the kitchen.

‘Do you wish your pipe,
Onkel?'

‘Bitte.'
And she brought a big meerschaum and filled it with tobacco from a blue and white jar.

The old man poured himself a tankard of
chicha.
As the rain slammed on the roof, he talked about the Colonia Nueva Alemania. His uncles settled here in 1905 and he had followed after the Great War.

‘What could I do? The Fatherland was in a bad condition. Before the war, no family could have enough sons. One was a soldier. One was a carpenter, and two stayed on the farm. But after 1918 Germany was full of refugees from the Bolsheviks. Even the villages were full.'

His brother lived on the family farm on the borders of Bavaria and Wurttemberg. They wrote letters once a month but had not met since 1923.

‘The war was the biggest mistake in history,' Anton Hahn said. He was obsessed by the war. ‘Two peoples of the Superior Race ruining each other. Together England and Germany could have ruled the world. Now even Patagonia is returning to the
indigenas.
This is a pity.'

He went on lamenting the decline of the West and, at one point, dropped the name Ludwig.

‘Mad Ludwig?'

‘The King? Mad? You call the King mad? In my house? No!'

I had to think fast.

‘Some people call him mad,' I said, ‘but, of course, he was a great genius.'

Anton Hahn was hard to pacify. He stood up and lifted his tankard.

‘You will join me,' he said.

I stood.

‘To the King I To the last genius of Europe! With him died the greatness of my race!'

The old man offered me dinner, but I refused, having eaten with the soprano two hours before.

‘You will not leave my house until you have eaten with us. After that you may go where you will.'

So I ate his ham and pickles and sun-coloured eggs and drank his apple
chicha
which went to my head. Then I asked him about Wilson and Evans.

‘They were gentlemen,' he said. ‘They were friends of my family and my uncles buried them. My cousin knows the story.'

The old woman was tall and thin and her yellowing skin fell from her face in folds. Her hair was white and cut in a fringe across her eyebrows.

‘Yes. I remember Wilson and Evans. I had four years at the time.'

It was a hot, windless day in early summer. The Frontier Police, eighty of them, had been hunting the outlaws up and down the Cordillera. The Police were criminals themselves, mostly Paraguayos; you had to be white or Christian to join. Everyone in Rio Pico liked the North Americans. Her mother, Dona Guillermina, dressed Wilson's hand, right here in the kitchen. They could easily have gone over into Chile. How could they know the Indian would betray them?

‘I remember them bringing in the bodies,' she said. ‘The
Fronterizas
brought them down on an ox-cart. They were here, outside the gate. They had swelled up in the heat and the smell was terrible. My mother sent me to my room so I shouldn't see. Then the officer cut the heads off and came up the steps, here, carrying them by the hair. And he asked my mother for preserving alcohol. You see, this
Agencia
in New York was paying five thousand dollars a head. They wanted to send the heads up there and get the money. This made my father very angry. He shouted them to give over the heads and the bodies and he buried them.'

The storm was passing. Columns of grey water fell on the far side of the valley. Along the length of the apple orchard was a line of blue lupins. Wherever there were Germans there were blue lupins.

By the corral a rough wood cross stuck out of a small mound. The arching stems of a pampas rose sprung up as if fertilized by the bodies. I watched a grey harrier soaring and diving, and the sweep of grass and the thunderheads turning crimson.

The old man had come out and was standing behind me.

‘No one would want to drop an atom bomb on Patagonia,' he said.

W
HO WERE Wilson and Evans?

Anything is possible in the murk of outlaw history, but there are a few clues:

On January 29th 1910, Police Commissioner Milton Roberts wrote to Pinkerton's in New York with descriptions of Llwyd ApIwan's murderers. Evans was about 35. Height 5ft 7in. Thick set. Colour of hair red but probably false. Wilson was younger, about 25. Height around 5ft 11in. Slight build. Fair hair. Tanned. Nose short and straight. Walks with the right foot turned out. (Remember also that Wilson was the crack shot, not Evans.)

Roberts added that Wilson had been a companion of Duffy (Harvey Logan), in Patagonia and in Montana where they had done a train robbery. This can only be the Wagner Train Hold-up on June 3rd 1901. The composition of the gang was: Harvey Logan, Butch Cassidy, Harry Longabaugh, Ben Kilpatrick ‘The Tall Texan', with O. C. Hanks and Jim Thornhill in charge of horses.

Roberts's letter assumes that Evans and Wilson and Ryan and Place were four separate individuals. But his descriptions tally exactly with those for Cassidy and the Kid, except in the matter of age. This is not an insuperable problem. The Welsh policeman never saw the outlaws face to face. And I found, in Patagonia, that people had the habit of underestimating age by ten to fifteen years.

Yet the grave at Rio Pico is impossible to square with Lula Betenson's account of her brother's return unless the following is true: Butch Cassidy is said to have told friends in Utah that the Sundance Kid was gunned down in South America, but that he escaped and travelled with an Indian boy on a kind of Huck Finn idyll. Recently I had a letter from Señor Francisco Juárez in Buenos Aires, which appeared to support this conjecture. He went to Rio Pico after my visit and was told that Evans had got away from the
Fronterizas,
and that the man buried beside Wilson was an English member of the gang.

I
LEFT Rio Pico and came to a Scottish sheep-station. The notice on the gate read ‘Estancia Lochinver—1.444 kilometres'. The gate was in excellent trim. On the post was a painted topknot in the form of a thistle.

I walked the 1.444 kilometres and reached a house of corrugated iron, with twin gables and a high pitched roof, built in a style more suitable for granite. The Scotsman stood on the steps, a big, gristly man with white hair and black eyebrows. He had been rounding up sheep all day. Three thousand animals grazed in his paddock. He was expecting the shearers in the morning.

‘But ye can't trust 'em to come when they say. Ye can't even talk to people in this country. Ye can't tell 'em they did a bad job or they'll pack and leave. Ye tell 'em anything's wrong and they'll cut the beasts to ribbons. Aye, it's a butchery, not a shearing that they do.'

His father had been a crofter on the island of Lewis and came out when the big sheep companies were opening up. The family did well, bought land, learned a little Spanish, and kept Scotland in their hearts.

He wore the kilt and piped at Caledonian Balls. He had one set of pipes sent from Scotland and another he made himself in the long Patagonian winter. In the house there were views of Scotland, photographs of the British Royal Family, and Karsh's picture of Winston Churchill.

‘And ye know who he was, don't ye?'

A tin of Mackintosh's toffees was placed reverently under the Queen.

His wife had been stone deaf since her car collided with a train. She had not learned to lip-read and you had to scribble questions on a pad. He was her second husband and they had been married twenty years. She liked the refinements of English life. She liked using a silver toast-rack. She liked nice linen and fresh chintzes and polished brass. She did not like Patagonia. She hated the winter and missed having flowers.

‘I've a terrible time getting things to grow. Lupins do well, but my carnations never survive the cold, and mostly I make do with annuals—godetias, clarkias, larkspurs and marigolds—but you can never tell how they're going to do. This year the sweet peas are a disaster, and I do so love them for vases. Flowers do improve the home, I think.'

‘Aagh!' he muttered. ‘I care none for her damn flowers.'

‘What's that you said, dear? He's overworked, you know. Bad heart! He shouldn't be riding round the camp all day.
I'm
the one who should be rounding up sheep. He
hates
horses. When I lived in Buenos Aires I always loved to ride.'

‘Bah! She knows bugger all about it. She rides round some fancy estancia and thinks she can round up sheep.'

‘What are you saying, dear?'

‘She's right in one thing, though. I never liked the horse. But ye can't get anyone to ride for ye now. This was a fine country once. Ye paid 'em and they worked. Now I've got the boy and he'll be off any minute, and I've got the old peon, but he's eighty-three and I have to strap him to his horse.'

The Scotsman had lived forty years in the valley. He had the reputation of being very tight-fisted. One year, when the price of wool was up, he and his wife went to Scotland. They stayed in first-class hotels and were a week on Lewis. There he became familiar with the things his mother spoke of—gulls, herring boats, heather, peat—and he had felt the call.

Now he wanted to leave Patagonia and retire to Lewis. She wanted to leave, but not necessarily to Lewis. She was in better health than he. He did not know how to get out. The price of wool was falling and the Perónistas were after the land.

Next morning we stood outside the house and looked along the line of telegraph poles, watching for the shearers' truck. In place of a lawn was a flat expanse of packed dirt, and, in the middle, a wire-netting cage.