Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  But first he had to fly to Lima to find out more about Milward.

  Monica, a former journalist, had started to put together Milward’s sea stories with the idea of publication. She allowed Chatwin to make rough notes, but insisted that he did not remove the 258-page journal of her father’s life from the house. Chatwin’s misunderstanding about what material he was permitted to use would have repercussions.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Lima | Peru | 12 December 1974

  Hello,

  I like my cousins enormously. Monica Barnett is exactly like Aunt Grace to look at. The diary of Charlie Milward is fantastic, even if it could never be printed in its present form. The story of the wreck, of Louis de Rougemont, of Indian massacres, of life at sea on the Cape Horners is exactly like something out of Conrad. Am going to Buenos Aires tonight, and will give an address of some of Monica’s friends when I get there.

  Lima is dreary because covered with a grey blanket of cloud. It is not a good time to go into the sierra until late March at the earliest, as the rains are just about to begin and the roads get washed away. But late March early April is the absolute best, with spring flowers etc. The Barnetts have offered to lend us their camper, which sleeps five in comfort and that would be wonderful if you think Gertrude could stand the jolts. It is 3000 km to Cuzco from here, and the most interesting places will all be on dirt roads. We can see nearer the time.

  We went up to 12,000 feet the other day on the central highway and it had the same bracing effect as Afghanistan. But I do not think there is anything of the hilarity.

  XXXXXX

  B

  P.S. Do find out if your uncle Willie and/or your grandfather sank the ‘Maine’ as they are alleged to have done in Hugh Thomas’ Cuba.391

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Hotel Lancaster | Buenos Aires | Argentina | [December 1974]

  Dearest E,

  Buenos Aires is utterly bizarre a combination of Paris and Madrid shorn of historical depth, with hallucinating avenidas flanked with lime trees, where not even the humblest housewife need forego the architectural aspirations of Marie Antoinette. I have been mixing with Anglo-Argentines who have lost command of English and all knowledge of home and with some of the crustier Argentines who speak it far better than I do. Wonderful houses like Meridian House392 but still thriving with boiseries, Louis XV and paté en croute. There is always the vague feeling that the high-flown French or English conversation may be interrupted by guerrillas, but no-one seems unphased by it.

  Please be on the look out for my best friend here – a young writer called Jorge Ramon-Torres Zavaleta,393 who is absolutely enchanting and of a culture and sensitivity that has died out in Europe. He has written short stories that were plagiarised by Borges. He is travelling – for the first time – outside Argentina to the U.S. in Jan (?20th) for 3 weeks with one in N.Y and probably with 2 friends.394 He probably can’t take much cash out, even if he comes from the Martinez de Hoz family who are the biggest blood-stock breeders in the country. I said that if he was stuck he could probably stay in the apt, but he will in any case be writing to you.

  Did I tell you in my last letter that we have the Barnetts’ camper in Peru to go up to Lake Titicaca if Gertrude’s back can stand it. Uncomfortable but probably not more so than the hotels and we would have much more fun. The size of a biggish caravan. They are going to England in Jan and will go to Stratford.

  Not much fun in London with bombs in my lunchtime pub on the King’s Road,395 thank you.

  Off tonight to Patagonia.

  XXXX

  Bruce

  Address for urgent contact is Hotel Lancaster.

  In the third week of January, marooned in the small village of Baja Caracolles, Chatwin wrote to his wife. He was stranded in the middle of nowhere, but he had arrived.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Baja Caracolles | Prov. de Santa Cruz | Argentina | 21 January 1975

  Dearest E

  I have begun letters I don’t know how many times and then abandoned them. Now I am stuck, for 3 days at least, because the justice of the peace, to whom I confided some of my things, has run off with the key.

  Writing this in the archetypal Patagonian scene, a boliche or roadman’s hotel at a cross-roads of insignificant importance with roads leading all directions apparently to nowhere. A long mint green bar with blue green walls and a picture of a glacier, the view from the window a line of lombardy poplars tilted about 20 degrees from the wind and beyond the rolling grey pampas (the grass is bleached yellow but it has black roots, like a dyed blonde) with clouds rushing across it and a howling wind.

  On no previous journey am I conscious of having done more. Patagonia is as I expected but more so, inspiring violent outbursts of love and hate. Physically it is magnificent, a series of graded steps or barrancas which are the cliff lines of prehistoric seas and unusually full of fossilised oyster shells 10ʺ diam. In the east you suddenly confront the great wall of the cordillera with bright turquoise lakes (some are milky white and others a pale jade green) with unbelievable colours to the rocks (in the pre-cordillera). Sometimes it seems that the Almighty has been playing at making Neapolitan ice-cream. Imagine climbing (as I did) a cliff face 2000 feet high alternatively striped vanilla, strawberry and pistachio in bands of 100 feet or more. Imagine an upland lake where the rock face on one side is bright purple, the other bright green, with cracked orange mud and a white rim. You have to be a geologist to appreciate it. Then I know of no place that you are more aware of prehistoric animals. They sometimes seem more alive than the living. Everybody talks of pleisiosaurus, or ichtyosaurus. I met an old gentleman who was born in Lithuania who found a dinosaur the other day and didn’t think much of it. He thought much more of the fact he had a pilot’s license, at the age of 85 being probably the oldest solo flyer in the world. When he was younger he tried to be a bird man.

  I have been caught in the lost beast fervour and 2 days ago scaled an appalling cliff to the bed of an ancient lake . . . and there discovered to my inexpressible delight a collection of fragments of the carapace of the glyptodon. The glyptodon has if anything replaced the mylodon in my affections – there are about 6 whole ones in the Museum of La Plata – an enormous armadillo up to 9-10 feet long, each scale of its armour looking like a Japanese chrysanthemum. The entertaining fact about my discovery, and one that no archaeologist will believe, is that in the middle of one scatter of bones were 2 obsidian knives quite definitely man-made. Now Man is often thought to have done away with the Glyptodon, but there is no evidence of his having done so.

  Not an Indian in sight. Sometimes you see a hawkish profile that seems to be a Tehuelche i.e. old Patagonian, but the colonisers did a very thorough job, and this gives the whole land its haunted quality.

  Animal life is not extraordinary, except for the guanaco which I love. The young are called chulengos and have the finest fur, a sort of mangy brown and white. There is a very rare deer called a Huemeul and the Puma (which is commoner than you would think but difficult to see). Otherwise pinchi the small armadillo, hares everywhere, and a most beguiling skunk, very small, black with white stripes; far from spraying me one came and took a crust from my hand.

  Birds are wonderful. Condors in the cordillera, a black and white vulture, a beautiful grey harrier (also amazingly tame), and the blacknecked swan which has my prize for the best bird in the world. On the mud flats are flamingoes – these are a kind of orange colour – the Patagonian goose inappropriately called an abutarda, and every kind of duck.

  You would think from the fact that the landscape is so uniform and the occupation (sheep-farming) also, that the people would be correspondingly dull. But I have sung ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ in Welsh in a remote chapel on Christmas Day, have eaten lemon curd tartlets with an old Scot (who has never been to Scotland) but has made his own bagpipes and wears the kilt to dinner. I have stayed with a Swiss ex-diva who married a Swedish trucker who lives in the remotest of a
ll Patagonian valleys, decorating her house with murals of the lake of Geneva. I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy and other members of the Black Jack Gang, I have drunk to the memory of Ludwig of Bavaria with a German whose house and style of life belongs rather to the world of the Brothers Grimm. I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs. I have seen Charlie Milward’s estancia and lodged with the peons drinking maté till 3am. (Maté incidentally is a drink for which I also have a love/hate relationship). I have visited a poet-hermit who lived according to Thoreau and the Georgics. I have listened to the wild outpourings of the Patagonian archaeologist, who claims the existence of a. the Patagonian unicorn b. a protohominid in Tierra del Fuego (Fuego pithicus patensis) 80 cm high.

  There is a fantastic amount of stuff for a book – from the Anarchist (Yes, Bakunin inspired) Rebellion of 1920, to the hunting of the Black Jack Gang, Cassidy etc. the temporary kingdom of Patagonia, the lost city of the Caesars, the travels of Musters, the hunting of Indians etc. Everything I need.

  TIME is going rather quicker than I hoped. One is inclined to get stuck. I am aiming now to the Jamiesons at Puerto Deseado, then the Frazers (son of the man who raped Monica’s mother) at St Julien, then Rio Gallegos which is apparently little England, then I may if poss, hire a car and do the touristy glacier of Lago Argentino, then back to Rio Gallegos and to the Bridges396 in Tierra del F. Then to Punta Arenas where I have contacts and then hopefully up to Puerto Montt by boat; thence back into Argentina ending up in B.A. for a short spell. How long this will take I honestly don’t know, but I do think that Peru in April rather than March – or at the earliest March 18-20. Maybe sooner.

  Can you please check for me if either N.Y. Pub Lib or Harvard have copies of a journal (from about 1931 – the ’60’s) called ‘Argentina Austral’. It is going to be v. imp for me and I must not go from Argentina if I can’t get hold of copies elsewhere.

  Dying of tiredness. Have just walked 150 odd miles. Am another 150 from the nearest lettuce and at least 89 from the nearest canned vegetable. It will take many years to recover from roast lamb.

  xxxxxx B

  Will cable address Rio Gallegos.

  To Tegai Roberts397

  Punta Arenas | Chile | 10 February 1975

  I am sorry that I have to press on from Esquel south, but I expect to return in early March. In the meantime I must thank you and everyone for my welcome in Gaiman. Off to Tierra del Fuego in the afternoon. Bruce Chatwin.

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Hotel Cabo de Hornos | Punta Arenas | Chile | 10 February 1975

  Dear E.

  I came here more or less because the aeroplane to Tierra del Fuego was so erratic that it proved impossible to get from Argentine Patagonia to Argentine Tierra del Fuego. Punta Arenas, the little I have seen of it, is a town utterly to my taste. Rather like Victoria, British Columbia in atmosphere, with a catholic rather than a protestant bias. The houses of the English, mansions in the style of Sunningdale lie up the hill, the palaces of the Braun-Menendez family, Jewish/Spanish millionaires with cypresses and monkey-puzzles that are lashed by a perpetual hurricane. These houses were imported piece by piece from France and still look as though they have been miraculously dislodged from the Bois de Boulogne. I dined with the Brauns last night among their palms, their Cordoba leather, their aseptic marble goddesses, their bronzes of fishermen, their Louis-the Hotel-Quinze suites, their painting (of two geese with disjointed necks) by Picasso’s father, their marquetry floors their billiard table, the bird-like French patter of their black dressed ladies and the assumed upper-class accents of their men.

  Captain Milward’s house, which I mistook for the Anglican church, is a towered crenellated building with overtones of Edgbaston, Birmingham, now turned into a claustrophobic Chilean middle-class home. In the garden there was an octagonal summerhouse and crazy paving paths bordered with London Pride, with Sweet Williams and Canterbury Bells in the borders.

  I am going on to the island [Tierra del Fuego] this afternoon by the air taxi, a 10 minute hop and will be incommunicado till I get here again on March 1st or 2nd. What I have been able to do is to make plans.

  The boat to Puerto Montt leaves here on 12th March and arrives after steaming up the Canales Fueginos on the 16th. I want 3-4 days in Chile, to go to Chiloe and the region around Valdivia and then will re-enter Argentina by Bariloche where I want 5 more days in the province of Neuquen, going thence by train to Viedma (Carmen Los Patagones) on the east coast 1 day, then Bahia Blanca 1 day; then to Buenos Aires for about a week where I must do quite a lot of homework in Amando Braun-Menendez’s library. I had the idea of going by bus from B.A. to Juyuy the Northern Province then into Antofagasta, and thence by bus to Lima up the Pacific highway, air freighting my bags ahead. But this may not be possible. I suggest then that April 7th is our date in Lima, all being well, revolutions permitting etc. we should stay a month. How does this suit? If it is all right, cable here, and write to Monica Barnett (husband is John) because she is going to book us into a nice English pensione by the sea, which I can assure you is infinitely to be preferred to the Sheraton or any of the other big hotels with their glass panelled doors cracked with bullet holes. Ask too about the camper and get yourself an International Driving Licence. Just in case mine will not do. I had to have special permission in Argentina, but I imagine there will be no problem.

  Met a woman in a remote estancia in the cordillera who worked for the Milwards. Said they were dreadful. He used to pray to God that she would not be deceitful and put her on a bread and water diet for a week for breaking a bottle of brandy. She was 14 at the time

  xxxx B

  P.S. Please tell Jorge Ramon [Zavaleta] that I might want him to put me up in B.A. for a bit – or arrange it – and also to receive a parcel if I air freight it from Bariloche to B.A.

  Am also asking Francis Wyndham to contact you if there is anything vital re the Guggenheims.

  My rucksack is taking [on] the most beautiful patina.

  B

  To John Kasmin

  Cueva del Milodon | Ultima Esperanza | Chile | 10 February 1975

  This is the cave where my great uncle Charlie Milward the Sailor dug up the remains of the Mylodon, or Giant Sloth, perfectly preserved in saltpetre. Have been sleeping everywhere from the open pampas, to peons huts in the rain forest, to (last night) a Jewish millionairess’s residence (c.1900) that looked as if it had been translated bodily from the Bois de Boulogne to this, the most southerly city in the world. Much love to all XX B

  To Elizabeth Chatwin

  Punta Arenas | Chile | [1 March 1975]

  Dear E,

  Notepaper of the British Consulate cut off to avoid offending la Reina Isabel!

  Now re Peru.

  I may be able to get though quicker in BA than I had hoped. So what I suggest is the following. For you and Gertrude to fly to Lima on/or around the 1st April (no later) and stay in the pension on the beach that Monica knows, see Dum Tweedie398 (whom I can personally be without) and the dreaded Mrs Porras,399 visit the museums (which are wonderful) Gold Museum, National Museum, Herrera Museum, visit perhaps Pachacamac great Inca site on the coast – in other words finish with Lima which I have done and I will turn up any time in that week not later than the 7th so that, in this way, we have wasted no time – because you, bless you, will have made all the superlatively organised arrangements that our expedition requires. I suggest we then go up the Andean highway onto the tableland and loop around Lake Titicaca via Cuzco, Macchu Picchu coming back through Arequipa.

  Important points to remember.

  1. Try and get hold of some decent maps in the U.S. because you can bet we’ll get none in Peru.

  2. Bring pair of binoculars, for watching condors (A pair hovered above my head 15ft up in Tierra del Fuego. Incredible. Like a bombing raid.)

  3. 1 pair of jeans please button-up 32 waist 34 leg. Mine were mangled without apology together with all my other clothes
by a woman who did not know how to operate a washing machine. The hotel even tried to charge me for rags!

  4. My canvas sided boots. Also really sensible light boot/shoes for you both. Wouldn’t mind a good thick woollen sweater. Light warm/wind proof gear. Remember it is 14,000 ft.

  5. Some form of camp cooking equipment.

  6. A new battery for my exposure meter to fit the small Leica CL; it is like a small pill ½ in diam.

  7. If the camper is not going to work out: this you will have to check on the phone with Monica. I suggest we have an emergency tent; because I gather it will be much more comfortable than the hotels. Gertrude should invest in a big double-size sleeping bag that zips down the side + air mattress.400

  8. Read Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru for a start. Also bring with you if you can some sensible but not sensational accounts of Peruvian Archaeology. See if you can find the dope on the Nazca Desert Drawings, because if all works out well we will go to interview Maria Reiche,401 octogenarian Austrian? mystic-archaeologist-recluse for the Sunday Times and then charter a plane (at S.T. expense) and get them photographed from the air.