In Patagonia (33 page)

‘Now I tell you story about Mr Greer: Goes up to B.A. and lunches at his club, Hurlingham or some such place. Dining-room is full but he asks two English gentlemen: “Please can I sit at your table?” “Certainly,” Englishman says. “I must introduce myself,” he says. “My name is Leslie Greer, General manager of the
Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego.”
“And I,” this Englishman says,
“I
am GOD. And this here is my friend and colleague Jesus Christ.” '

I asked him about the miner Albert Konrad:

‘I have seen Albert Konrad with my eyes. Ja! I remember him in 1920s coming through here with mules. You must know, this Albert Konrad was most unpopular in Chile for selling out the mylodon. So he went over the border to live in Rio de las Vueltas. So he was coming down to Punta Arenas with mules. And my father said: “Hey! Albert. What have you got on those mules? Stones?” “Stones no,” he said. “Those stones are gold.” But they were stones, ordinary stones.'

Sometime in the 1930s a gaucho riding down Rio de las Vueltas passed Konrad's cabin and heard a door creaking on its hinge. The German was slumped over his Mauser. He had been dead all winter. The inside of the cabin was bursting with grey stones.

I
WALKED the four miles from Puerto Consuelo to the Cave. It was raining but the sun dipped under the clouds and sparkled on the bushes. The cave-mouth gaped, four hundred feet wide, into a cliff of grey conglomerate. Hunks had tumbled to the floor and were piled about the entrance.

The inside was dry as the desert. The ceiling was shaggy with white stalactites and the sides glittered with salt encrustation. Animal tongues had licked the back wall smooth. The straight wall of rocks dividing the cave had fallen from a fissure in the roof. By the entrance was a small shrine to the Virgin.

I tried to picture the cave with sloths in it, but I could not erase the fanged monster I associate with a blacked-out bedroom in wartime England. The floor was covered with turds, sloth turds, outsize black leathery turds, full of ill-digested grass, that looked as if they had been shat last week.

I groped in the holes left by Albert Konrad's dynamiting, looking for another piece of skin. I found nothing.

‘Well,' I thought, ‘if there's no skin, at least there's a load of shit.'

And then, poking out of a section, I saw some strands of the coarse reddish hair I knew so well. I eased them out, slid them into an envelope and sat down, immensely pleased. I had accomplished the object of this ridiculous journey. And then I heard voices, women's voices, voices singing: ‘María . . . María . . . María . . . '

Now I too had gone mad.

I peered over the fallen rocks and saw seven black figures facing the shrine of the Virgin.

The Sisters of Santa Maria Auxiliadora were out on another of their unusual excursions. The Mother Superior smiled and said: ‘Aren't you afraid in here by yourself?'

I had intended to sleep in the cave but thought better of it, and the nuns gave me a lift to one of the old estancias of the
Explotadora
:

H
E WAS going to die. His eyelids were swollen and so heavy he had to strain to stop them falling and covering his eyes. His nose was thin as a beak and his breath came in thick fetid bursts. His coughs retched through the corridors. The other men moved off when they heard him coming.

He took from his wallet a crumpled photograph of himself, on leave from military service, long ago, in a palm-filled garden in Valparaiso. The boy in the photo was unrecognizable in the man: the cocky smile, the wasp-waisted jacket and Oxford bags, and the sleek black hair shining in the sun.

He had worked twenty years on the estancia and now he was going to die. He remembered Mr Sandars, the manager, who died and was buried at sea. He did not like Mr Sandars. He was a hard man, a despotic man, but the place had gone down since. It was bad under the Marxists and it was worse under the Junta. He spluttered between coughs.

‘The workers,' he said, ‘have had to pay for this Marxist Movement, but I do not think it will last.'

I left him to die and went down to Punta Arenas to catch the ship.

T
HE HOTEL Residencial Ritz was a building of white concrete straddling half a block between the naval officers' club and the beach. The management prided itself on its spotless white damask tablecloths.

The ladies' lingerie salesman from Santiago paced up and down the hall of the hotel before the curfew lifted at five. If he had gone for his walk earlier, the guards might have shot him. He came back to breakfast with his pocket full of stones. The walls of the dining-room were a hard blue. The floor was covered with blue plastic tiles, and the tablecloths floated above it like chunks of ice.

The salesman sat down, emptied his pockets and began to play with the stones, talking to them and laughing. He ordered coffee and toast from the fat, snuffle-nosed Chilote girl who worked in the kitchen. He was a big, unhealthy man. Folds of flesh stood out on the back of his neck. He wore a beige tweed suit and a hand-knitted sweater with a roll collar.

He looked in my direction and smiled, showing a set of swollen pink gums. Then he withdrew the smile, looked down and played again with the stones.

‘What glorious rosy hues the clouds have this morning!'

He had broken the silence, suddenly, in a burst.

‘Permit me to ask you a question, Sir? What is the cause of this phenomenon? The cold rising, I have heard it said.'

‘Perhaps,' I said.

‘I have been walking on the beach and have gazed at the forms which the Creator has painted in the sky. I have seen the Chariot of Fire transformed into the arching neck of a swan. Beautiful! The hand of the Creator! One should either paint or photograph his work. But I am not a painter and I do not possess a camera.'

The girl fetched his breakfast. He cleared a space among the stones for his cup and plate.

‘Are you perhaps acquainted, Sir,' he continued, ‘with something of
la poesía mundial
?'

‘Some,' I said.

His forehead puckered with concentration and he declaimed slow, ponderous stanzas. At the end of each he clenched his fist and set it slowly on the table. The girl had been standing with the coffee pot. She put it down, buried her face in her apron and ran laughing for the kitchen.

‘What was that?'

‘I don't know.'

‘The
Solitudes
of Góngora,' he said and began again, straining to extract the last shred of emotion from the lines, moving his hands sideways and splaying his fingers.

Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde . . .
'

‘Lorca,' I suggested.

‘Federico Garcia Lorca,' he whispered, as if exhausted by prayer.
‘The Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.
You are my friend. I see you are not wholly ignorant of our Hispanic literature. Now what's this?'

He jerked his head back and shouted more poetry.

‘I don't know.'

‘The Venezualan National Anthem.'

I saw him later in the day, slump-shouldered in the drizzle, plodding the streets with his black-and-white check cap and case of lingerie samples. Models, in pink corsets and brassieres, stared from shop-windows with vacant blue plastic eyes. The underwear shops were owned by Hindus.

In the night the noise of his crepe soles kept me awake again. He went out at five, but I heard him come back several times. At breakfast I passed the kitchen door and saw the girls helpless with giggles.

He was standing among the tablecloths, his bristly face fixed in a hopeless smile. On every table and at every place was an arrangement of stones.

‘These are my friends,' he said in a hoarse, emotional voice. ‘Look! Here is a whale. Wonderful! The confirmation of God's genius. A whale with a harpoon in its side. Here is the mouth and here the tail.'

‘And this?'

‘The head of a prehistoric animal. And here a monkey.'

‘This?'

‘Another prehistoric animal, probably a dinosaur. And this,' he pointed to a pitted yellowish lump, ‘the head of primitive man. The eyes. You see? Here the nose. And the jaw, here. Look, even the low forehead, token of inferior intelligence.'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘And this,' he picked up a round grey pebble, ‘this is my favourite. Turned one way, a porpoise. Upside down, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Wonderful! The imprint of God upon a humble stone!'

The Manager of the Ritz did not like being woken before nine. But other clients wanted breakfast and the tables had to be cleared. In the course of the morning, I dropped some things back to my room. They had taken him to hospital.

‘Es
loco,' the manager said. ‘He is mad.'

T
HERE is a man in Punta Arenas, dreams pine forests, hums Lieder, wakes each morning and sees the black strait. He drives to a factory that smells of the sea. All about him are scarlet crabs, crawling, then steaming. He hears the shells crack and the claws breaking, sees the sweet white flesh packed firm in metal cans. He is an efficient man, with some previous experience of the production line. Does he remember that other smell, of burning? And that other sound, of low voices singing? And the piles of hair cast away as the claws of crabs?

Walter Rauff is credited with the invention and administration of the Mobile Gas Truck.

A
FTER WAITING a week for the ship we heard her siren sounding from behind the gymnasium (which was a concrete copy of the Parthenon) and, down at the dock, saw the stevedores manhandling crates instead of loafing round the steamship company, flat black caps against a pink wall. The whole of that week, the booking clerk had shrugged when we asked where the ship was, shrugged and picked the wen on his forehead, the ship could have gone down for all he knew or cared. But now he was scribbling out tickets, sweating, gesticulating, and barking orders. Then we filed through the green customs shed, along the rusty plates of the steamer, to the gang-plank, where the Chilotes queued up with the faces of men who had waited four hundred years.

The ship was once the S.S.
Ville de Haiphong.
The third class had the quality of an Asiatic jail and the closing bulkheads looked more for keeping back coolies than floodwater. The Chilotes bunked down in the big communal cabin with its floor scabbed with squashed roaches, smelling of mussel stew before and after they had sicked it up. The fans in the first class had been disconnected, and in the panelled saloon we drank with the personnel of a kaolin mine, whom the ship would drop, one midnight, on their white womanless island in the middle of the sea. As we eased out of port a Chilean businessman played
La Mer
on a white piano missing many of its keys.

The Captain was a chic type with unshakeable confidence in his rivets. He got better food than we did, and we saw the sly expression on the steward's face as he took the carnations off our table and served pigs' trotters and the ship started pitching and banging into three-cornered waves.

In the morning, black petrels were slicing the swells and, through the mist, we saw chutes of water coming off the cliffs. The ladies' lingerie salesman from Santiago had got out of hospital and was pacing the foredeck, chewing his lip and muttering poetry. There was a boy from the Falklands with a seal-skin hat and strange sharp teeth. “Bout time the Argentines took us over,' he said. ‘We're so bloody inbred.' And he laughed and pulled from his pocket a stone. ‘Look what he gave me, a bloody stone!' As we came out into the Pacific, the businessman was still playing
La Mer
. Perhaps it was the only thing he could play.

George Gaylord Simpson,
Attending Marvels,
New York, 1934; and the same author's papers published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York. For the history of the mylodon, I also used a collection of documents and newspaper clippings collected by Mr Tim Currant of the British Museum (Natural History).

 

W. H. Hudson,
Idle Days in Patagonia,
London, 1893.

 

Orélie-Antoine de Tounens,
Son avènement au trône et sa captivité au Chili,
Paris, 1865.

Armando Braun Menéndez,
El Reino de Araucanía y Patagonia
, Buenos Aires, 5th ed., 1967.

Leo Magne,
L'extraordinaire aventure d'Antoine de Tounens,
Paris, 1950.

 

John E. Bauer, ‘The Welsh in Patagonia', in
Hispanic American Review,
vol. 34, no. 4, 1954.

An account of a visit to John Evans at Trevelin appears in A. F. Tschiffeley's other book,
This Way Southward,
New York, 1940.

 

Alan Swallow, ed.,
The Wild Bunch,
Denver, 1966.

Lula Parker Betenson,
Butch Cassidy My Brother,
Provo, Utah, 1975.

Butch Cassidy's letter to Mrs Davis is in the Utah State Historical Society and reprinted with their permission. I could not have written this section without the help of Kerry Ross Boren, outlaw historian of Manila, Utah.

 

Asencio Abeijón,
Memorias de un Carrero Patagónico,
2 vols, 1973—5, Buenos Aires.